I’m incredibly disappointed in anyone who accepts microtransactions or preorder content at a games launch; just because it is considered “the norm” or because the market has discovered ways to exploit and abuse peoples mental health for marginal gain, doesn’t mean I will ever accept it, or see it as anything other than reprehensible.
The games character creator is incredibly low quality, and has a lot of frustrating issues, so the fact that the only decent visual aspect of it, the armour and equipment, is deliberately utilized for psychologically and ethically abusive profit pushing, reads to me that Fatshark doesn’t respect the people who bought their game for full price.
I have never, seen a reasonable argument to justify why content that is feature complete and fully implemented on launch day, should be partitioned off into preorders, special editions and microtransactions.
I think Vermintide 2’s microtransactions are incredibly overpriced, and unenticing due to how uncanny-valley and broken looking the character models appear, but at the absolute minimum, it was released over two years after the games release, alongside free cosmetics and new game updates. And the recent “giveaway” of cosmetics is nice, even if it utilizes FOMO and the value is only derived from the artificially huge prices for ugly hats.
Darktide, as it is, already severely lacks in content compared to Vermintide 2 at launch, including cosmetics.
Knowingly selling people an incomplete product, and intentionally price hiking for the “luxury” of receiving the full experience is something that deserves public shame, always, and I wont stray away from it no matter how normalized immoral practices are in the unregulated industry.
I am absolutely certain that they are staggering out the release of content that was finished way before launch to utilize the industry wide FOMO system.
It’s amazing that people had to fight tooth and nail to try and prevent literal gambling in games for kids, and companies still managed to discover systems that somehow feel even more exploitative.
Not forgetting that companies were desperately pushing unregulated but effectively illegal stock-trading and data harvesting via NFT’s as far as humanly possible before the backlash become too extreme, and considering the manipulation Fatshark is utilizing in this game, I can’t believe they would have been beyond that either.
A common tactic is to push the immoral envelope extremely far, and cultivate false-press “back pedaling” to the originally planned system. Even if Fatshark “removes” the planned FOMO mechanics or scales back the intellectually manipulative false currency, we are still left with a tonne of content cut out from the release of the game, leaving full price buyers without meaningful visual progression.
Cosmetics are absolutely a fundamental part of the experience of many games, especially multiplayer games, and for anyone who denies this, and ignores the fact that millions are spent on market research and data collection/abuse, in order to strategize patented mechanics to deliberately lengthen grind and create intentional frustration, manipulate matchmaking to put you in lobbies of paid players, and automatically adjust acquisition numbers based on how likely you are to spend money; I have no idea what is going on inside your head.
We know what the player lobby is for.
I actually encountered a piece of dialogue in the game, where the player characters complain about how expensive the prices are at the cosmetics merchant, which is either bafflingly delusional and self-adulating, or a bitter piece of resentment from the writers at the studio.