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this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Meh. None of these were born like that. DLC was born because after the game was successful devs thought "cool let's develop some more content and sell that as well".
Early access was born because "shit we literally starve while we develop our game because we have no money, because our game isn't done yet to sell it".
Free to play was born... Well, pretty much like that probably.
But the other two were made greedy after the fact, they're not inherently an evil system. Even free to play can work when only selling cosmetics, where everyone has the same gameplay.
You just have to check and see how the developers of a game behave, how each system is implemented.
Free to play was born... Well, pretty much like that probably.
I'm no gaming historian, but I think F2P was first proved as a concept with the hats in Team Fortress 2.
The TF2 hats definitely proved the profitability of a cosmetic cash shop, but free-to-play or freemium games are older than that. Both RuneScape and MapleStory were early 00s and Turbine were also an early adopter of transitioning their MMOs from subscription based to freemium with both SWTOR and Dungeons and Dragons Online which at least initially massively increased their profit and sort of proved the viability of the model.
TF2 wasn't free to play when they started selling hats, IRC. It went free to play later on.
You're right, they went free-to-play in 2011 so the model was basically already proven at that point. They're a big actor and a notorious example but probably not historically significant in the proliferation of the F2P concept.
Gunbound was the first game I remember having in game items you could buy with currency that you could also purchase for money. IIRC, they had one currency you could earn in game and another you could buy and each item in the shop had a price for each currency.
I remember thinking what kind of a cash cow that was back then (because wow existed when I first played gunbound and gold farmers also existed at that point and I could see that this model was even better because the owners of the game can just generate things as they need to rather than having to farm it in game) before moving on and never acting on that.
Accuracy? In my polandball?
DLC was born expantion packs that could downloaded from early live services on slow internet. But from the very beginning it was touted by the industry as the future, or at least by the industry shills on Gameteailers.com
Expansion packs were really cool back in the day, often would totally change the game! Definitely miss that
I memba downloading patches off Fileplanet and them coming with new maps and game modes for free. Good times.
Stupid Horse armor….
Feels like I’m wearing nothing at all.
You can blame corporate all you want, but in the end it's the fuckers who end up buying this shit that enables it and makes it an industry standard.
Well... kind of. The trick the big companies are running is that these garbage offerings are without alternative. All the good games are doing it. So the “fuckers who end up buying this shit” are people who don't want to make do with second-grade games and bite the bullet.
There were alternatives before this became a standard. F2P MMOs & Horse Armor DLC were what set the tone, and now you can pay AND get micro transactions at the same time. In the end it's still a vote with your wallet situation.
I'm with you, the Corpos will carry on acting like this while the gamers are stuffing their pockets with cash.
This picture is shown at full size on the home feed in wefwef. What happens if you upload a 500x100000 Pixel sized picture, do people need to scroll forever?
70 bucks too
Also with those useless game key things, lootboxes and meatspace "mystery packages" (like those Squishmallow ones) are another version of the last panel.
If you pull a lever and it gives you junk, you might pull it a few times and then move on with life.
If you pull a lever and it gives you something amazing, you will excitedly pull that lever for a while before it loses its novelty and eventually you'll only pull it if you need the amazing thing.
If you pull a lever and it usually gives you junk but occasionally gives you something amazing, that lever will remain fascinating for a much longer time.
That's how gambling in games works, whether it's purchasable loot boxes or random drops from enemies. They mostly give junk, sometimes something that looks kinda cool but is mostly also useless, occasionally something decent, rarely something awesome, and once in a blue moon something legendary that you can tell others about.
Then you make that lever free to pull occasionally or expensive to pull whenever you want. If you get that out there to enough people, you'll find a nice little collection of people who dedicate their resources to pulling that lever as much as possible to "get" a collection of "items" that will give a temporary large burst of dopamine and then occasionally smaller bursts when you are reminded of having it when not everyone else does.
This comic was created by a gamer, sitting on the real pile of trash, consisting of the countless untouched games, bought during sales.
Actually it all began with the stupid idea of a horse wearing Armor...
Everyone laughed at the idea...
Now look were we are now.