None of that is "built into capitalism". Corporate structure, financing, and banking is arbitrarily determined entirely by law and is only vaguely related to a free market.

Sure there's a lot of things that the people in power can do to change the law. They will not because the current corporate structure benefits them.

But you're talking about the games industry here. Entertainment. It's not a necessity. Just don't consoom bro. If people do want to throw their money away on pixels to make some corpo executive fatter, that's their prerogative. Why contain it?

Not buying their shit? Seriously that's all it takes, not buying it because if people showed any self restraint:

Loot boxes wouldn't exist or at least you couldn't buy them with real money

DLC would be as expansive as Fallout NV DLC or extremely low cost cosmetics

Saying that if everyone had some self restraint, feminists ,communism, environmentalists, satanists etc wouldn't exist and I wouldn't be trying to work out which mountain is best to live on and watch the nuclear fireworks...

They only continue because people are weak to peer pressure and 'need' to buy it to fit in, nothing will change so long as the base gives in so easily.

End usury basically. Problem solved.

A good start would be the elimination of government interference. "Too big to fail" and monopolies are pretty much entirely maintained through government interference in one way or another, from bailouts to pricing out competition though regulations.

It's why the medical industry, specifically pharma, is such a fucking insidious shitshow of unchecked evil, and it's primarily through the regulations surrounding patents. Insulin is fucking easy to make. People have done it safely in their fucking garage, that's how easy it is. But it's ridiculously over-priced and the only places it's "cheaper" is with subsidies (meaning it's still the same price, just that the government (AKA tax payers) pays most of the bill).

You wanna stop the "infinite growth"? Allow the companies to fail, and the competition to succeed.

"capitalism" is a marxist slur.

It's not built into capitalism at all. What you're describing is the result of two movements. The first was Bernays and the application of psychology to sales. Before Bernays, companies built a product to last, and marketed it as a quality product that would give you good service for the price. (Believe it or not, clothes until the mid-teens and Roaring Twenties were sold with text-only ads like bulk dry goods.) After Bernays, everything was sex and popularity. You had to wear the newest clothes, and drive the newest car, and smoke the popular cigarettes, and use the "in" washing detergent.

The other was from Bernays' disciples a generation later: the coupling of quantity to success to replace quality. Since you could no longer market your good or service on the basis of it being better than your competition (and in a lot of states, you legally cannot comment on rival's quality), you just had to be bigger than they were, and quality be damned. Take any good from 1920 to about 1960 or so that still exists, and look how it marketed itself then versus now. Gatorade, Coke, Chevy trucks, McDonald's food, anything is now marketed as "America's favorite" or "most popular" or "X out of Y people buy this product".

I would not say price goes up is inbuilt in capitalism, inflation, greed and lack of competition ensures that the greed can run rampant.

A start in the right direction as society to counteract this would be to get of the Keynesian economics.

Remove corporate protections from law. Allow the board and shareholders to be prosecuted for their crimes and watch the giant corps crumble.

We don't live in anything resembling free market capitalism. We live in a corporate oligarchy, close to the original definition of fascism - a merger of state and corporate power.

The federal government needs to be removed and reset. It's unsolvably corrupt. No simple anti-cprruption measures like "one topic per bill" will EVER make it to the floor - they get at most a handful of congress to support them, even though the majority of both bases would support them. That's proof enough of fatal corruption.

There is absolutely nothing about capitalism that says there must be "infinite growth".

The idea that capitalism must have infinite growth is based on the denominator of the value of a company equation of: D/(r-g) where g is equal to dividend growth. g can be 0 in the equation and the equation works.

Stocks for example do not need to grow in value. If stocks merely pay a dividend and have no capital appreciation, that can work. Investors will still earn an expected return on their capital.

r exists because of the risk of earning D. It's not free D. There's a chance the company fails. That's why r exists.

Imagine this. A company says if you give them $100 they will give you a $15 dividend every year. That's a 15% return on your equity or an r of 15%. They didn't say your dividend was going to grow. And nothing about it requires it to grow. You're fine with $15/yr with your $100 investment.

Capitalism does not require infinite growth. Not at all.

you have retards defending OW2 because "teh devs need money to make content faster" lol.

There is a legal obligation for number to go up. Until that changes, blaming "muh greed" is a fucking distraction.

Have you ever looked at your paycheck and said "That's enough, I don't want a raise, I've got plenty"? No? Then you aren't any different than them, you are powerless compared to them to enact your own desires.

Also, considering all you do is post bad bait posts like this like we are your livejournal, maybe you should stop trying to have big thoughts about society and instead start thinking about how to not let your Mom dictate your life.

Everything hits a balance. So long as there are people who want to spend money on bullshit, bullshit will be boought and bullshit will be priced higher and higher until people no longer want to buy that bullshit. if a company breaks this and raises their prices willy-nilly, they are either a monopoly, are price fixing with other companies, are colluding with government institutions to mandate their product, or are very stupid because no one will buy their product.

Applying this logic to Mortal Kombat 1, the company has decided that there are enough people willing to pay for characters and DLC to justify the price. If the company is competent, the price they landed on will be the one that gives them the most profit because it strikes the perfect balance between the number of people who buy it and the amount of money each person pays. if the price is any higher, they lose customers and lose money. if the price is any lower, there aren't enough extra people who would buy the product and so they lose money.

if the price feels high as a consumer, it's probably because they know you will pay. This can often happen with old and beloved franchises because competition can be hard to come by, as a sizable chunk of the audience doesn't just want the genre of the game or the theme of the game, but the intellectual property itself. however, as we've seen with star wars, if a company plays their hands too heavily they will destroy the franchise. the road to this destruction can be very profitable, again as seen with Star Wars, but it will destroy a consistent money printer.

You are working from fundamentally communist foundations and assumptions by asking this question in the way you did.

Take a few step back and understand the assumptions being made. Your conclusions won’t make sense in reality if your prior assumptions are based on faulty premises

Are we in a capitalist system, and if so to why degree. And what even if ‘capitalism’. Are other capitalist systems experiencing the same? Have communist or feudal or other systems experienced the same?…

Dont buy shit you're not interested in, retard.

A roommate of mine once won a state championship in highschool by investing in Playboy, toilet paper, and Pens. These were stocks that paid off well, but didn't rise or shrink that much. What we see a lot of is people wanting to see rise and sell before it drops. That's basically gambling.

If you really want to get I to financial problems it's risky vs reward. Videogames were basically money laundering for decades because no one thought it would be worth enough to actually invest in. We have no real way to invest in the next big tech except through laundering fronts and porn.

There's a great book by the director of Troma films, who talked directly about getting financing. It's one of the only times I have seen someone actually talk about it. Stuff like Hollywood and videogames refuse. So, I think that's an answer, if a bit toxic and cannibalistic.

sounds like commie talk

You could kill all humans beyond a certain number, then execute a human at random whenever a new one is born, unless someone died in the interim. That would solve it. That would be communist than capitalist, though.

Otherwise, number of humans goes up -> Demand for resources goes up. This is true in capitalism, but is equally if not MORE true in communism, since communism is a command economy by consequence of its nature, meaning supply is likely to not increase organically to offset the organic increase in demand.

The only way to offset inflation, which seems to be your main gripe, is to have your currency be a resource with a finite amount, say gold-by-weight, or bitcoins, or standardized uranium rods. So long as more currency can be invented from thin air, inflation will... well... inflate, alongside it. Inflation will still occur due to the population issue above, but it will be much slower.

"Infinite Growth" is not even a problem, it's a utopian pipedream that happens if you literally do everything right, but it can't actually occur. As a business increases in sheer size, it becomes less stable, less efficient, and les responsive to price feedback. The only reason that large companies even exist is the result of government interference to directly protect them, so that they can be used as dependent entities to control the economy. Otherwise, they'd collapse.

As for what you're pointing out here with DLC, this isn't the result of greed, it's the result of desperation.

Fundamentally, the AAA gaming market is totally unsustainable at this point. Making games at the cost of millions of dollars for over a decade is a horrifically unprofitable investment. These are monetization strategies because the upfront sale price of the games (and their first month of purchases after release) aren't even close to paying for the cost of the game; and gamers themselves are terribly resistant to seeing a price for almost any game past $69.99. As a result the upfront price to the consumer hasn't really moved moved in 2 decades. And since inflation has risen dramatically in the past 2 decades, the value of those dollars has gone down. They have even outpaced the natural deflationary pressure of technological development.

As a result, the Triple-A gaming companies are trying to figure out how to make games at the same initial price point that they previously made, while trying to differentiate themselves from an Indie Scene that has effectively started making Single-A games for a $20 price point. But, the game companies are so bloated and inefficient that there really isn't a way for them to cut their production costs without cutting Triple-A consumer expectations.

A good example was when I was watching a Markiplier video on Fort Solis. Fort Solis is, effectively, a suspense & psychological horror walking simulator. Markiplier has been playing indie horror games for years, and almost all are very low budget, and he almost had a breakdown from the fact that Fort Solis was a proper AAA game which put excruciating detail into the environment... despite the fact that it was poorly optimized.

Now yes, it is impressive that there were visual artists that put months of work into designing specific levels you basically see once and pass by, and probably spent at least a full working week trying to get the lighting to reflect in the right way on a puddle of water. However, the diminishing returns to this effort are extreme.

At the same time, consooomers who aren't used to playing games under $45 are physically repulsed by lower graphical standards. I've met real people in real life who see the original Halo CE footage and say, "It's physically unplayable." While dated, it's certainly not that bad; but there's no question that a certain segment of gamers would take a moderating of graphical standards to what is relevant as a personal attack.

So, they're caught in a bind. They groomed consoomers into thinking that the obsessive graphical fidelity of walking simulators is normal, though it is totally unsustainable from a cost perspective. They can't raise upfront prices for video games without people freaking out, especially parents. So, as the value of the income they make goes down, and the cost and difficulty of their expense goes up; the only remaining strategy to keep money rolling in is through psychological addiction, and parasitizing whales to spend all of their money on one game.

It won't work, by the way. It's unsustainable and a lot of people are going to lose their jobs as we are going to see the biggest gaming crash since The Death Of The Arcade in the upcoming recession; which is less than 5 years away (probably more like 6 months if you ask me). And yeah, EA is not getting a bailout. Blackrock yes, but EA, no.

burning down value for instant return is the opposite of infinite growth. its short term parasitism.

Long video on the general topic, go to the 0:56:00 timestamp for a brief on why our economy is so spend happy. Basically, monetary inflation psychologically conditions average working-class worker to consume goods before their dollar depreciates in value. A naturally deflationary economy would result in more savings and a less wasteful culture.

https://odysee.com/@Luke:7/the-economy-is-fake,-the-jobs-are-fake,:e

The more self-reliant you are, the less opportunity there is to sell you something. The more automated your self-reliance is, the more time you have to follow your passion. The answer to your question is the advancement of technology and its democratization. As tools advance, more people are able to create products that rival what a company can make. This increases the competition which leads to an arm race for quality/price. At some point, hypothetically, the barrier to entry is so low that everyone becomes a creator for himself, thus removing the need to buy from anyone else. This principle is applicable to most industries. Greed won't stop but no one will care.

Its due to fiat currency always being debased.

Become the change you want to see in the world and derive humble satisfaction from the fact that you no longer contribute to the problem.

If that means only buying 10 video games per console generation or replaying Elwynn Forest for the 100th time on a 100th new classic WoW server then so be it.

What your asking for is an impossibility. There can't be a "zero growth" society. I don't mean to be rude but think through what they might look like the consequences of that hypothetical economy.

Money is the root of all evil. Always has been, and always will be. If there’s a dollar to be made, some crook will try to steal it.