Came to mind because Mortal Kombat 1 is one of the greediest fighting games I’ve ever seen, with the recent announcement of a $12 Halloween fatality plus all characters + DLC adding up to $118, so I’m assuming it’s because Warner Bros/Netherrealm Studios just wants more bonus money, so I’m genuinely curious how that whole thought process came to be, and if there’s any way for society as a whole to counteract that, or is it simply built into capitalism and we’re stuck with this forever.
Edit: I didn’t buy MK1, just know people who did because I go to tournaments
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?
Alternatively: we demand interference and regulation in plenty of predatory markets in order to protect ignorant and vulnerable consumers. I would argue that psychologically priming children and gambling addicts to exchange large sums of real money in exchange for alternative currencies and virtual property - both of which have been engineered to cynically manipulate spending behavior - is the sort of marketplace that absolutely cries out for regulation. We outlaw plenty of products and services, and I think these video game “products and services” deserve way more consideration for heavy regulation (up to and including prevention).
Personally I think the industry is infested with leftoids enough as it is, without giving government parasites the ability to dictate what indie and small studios are allowed to do.
Besides, the supposed problem youth so concerned with can be solved by simply banning the Chinese from owning stock in local companies.
A problem created by regulation? More regulation to solve it. More federal power, more, always more. No, you've fallen for the trap.
Strip the system of corporate protections instead - let people sue these companies to address grievances, remove protections that keep them from being destroyed over consumer property rights cases.
The stock market is a rigged joke. It should be burned to the ground with the fake and gay credit based debt economy we've had forced on us.
Your mistake is assuming the government actually fixes problems instead of creating more. The entire nature of the stock market is enabled by the weight of the fed.
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.
Better advice. Don't buy games as fundamentally broken as Fallout NV as well. So that companies stop thinking its acceptable to let gamers and mods fix their shit for them. If you need to use console commands to keep a game functional, then its a major issue.
Unpopular opinion because NV is everyone's special exception baby, but its mass popularity has only given companies the wrong takeaway. Because they didn't see "oh we should improve our writing!" they just saw you'll accept broken slop as long as it has a couple of unrelated good elements underneath.
Same with "buying cosmetics." You're accepting paying literal fucking money for color schemes and jpgs. That should never have been the case, and the fact that people mentally divorce "the bad MTX from the totally okay 100+ costumes designed to milk me" is what allows things like the Diablo 4 Battle Pass to come to fruition, as well as most of the other DLC cancer.
The argument that its okay for them to charge for cosmetics came around because, ironically, people fell to peer pressure to soften their stance to not have to miss out on the newest FOMO because otherwise their stance would cost them not being able to. Because as Horse Armor showed, there was a time when literally everyone had a problem with even "low cost" cosmetics. But people let the Overton slide so that they could consume product, and now they have their Trained NPC phrases like "buy power" to justify companies selling them unlockables.
Let's be honest, they were NEVER going to take the lessons that SHOULD'VE been learnt from that game. Remember the bonus fiasco where they denied it because yhe reviewer score didn't hit a certain percentage? They were never of the best intentions in the first place. Not to mention the ridiculous turn around time to make it, surprised it was as functional as it was on release..
Only way to make them listen is deny them your patronage as a customer, just look at the budweiser and Target boycotts to see how quick they cave when they can't rely on the base to always buy their crap. We're seeing that slightly with increased consumer burnout because it's all bland with the same writing from that woke Canadian studio. It'll be ironic that it takes literal commies to teach normies how to utilise their customer privilege of refusing to buy trash.
Exactly, and that was my point. But people will sing the praises of NV endlessly, meaning not only did they give their patronage but they are assuring generation after generation does too.
I was pointing out that we've already failed at that by even saying "ackshually NV was very good (if you ignore everything wrong with it)" or even "cosmetic DLCs are fine." Its succumbing to decades of peer pressure to normalize things that were unacceptable to us before, such as literally broken games we have to fix ourselves and selling us our own unlocks.
There is a lot more wrong with the industry than just the Wokes. They are certainly the biggest and most deserving of focus problem, but there are a lot of other ones to keep focused on too. Even in games we love.
Was there screeching at negative reviewers for "robbing people's bonuses" or something?
Bethesda made Fallout 3, which introduced FPS to the franchise and the "insert headshot here" VATS mechanic.
They then threw it to Obsidian Entertainment, who were veterans of RPG Development.
There was a division of labor in the contract. Bethesda would do testing and QA and submit bug reports to Obsidian for fixes.
Part of the contract was that Obsidian would receive a substantial bonus if New Vegas received a certain aggregated review score. I think it was 80%, but you can check.
The game was well received by critics, but they docked a few points for the massive number of bugs, which were unquestionably Bethesda's fault due to shitty testing and QA.
When hit up for the bonus, Bethesda laughed in Obsidian's face.
That's the funniest shit I've ever seen.
It's like asking a raging forest fire to be head of the fire department.
"Did you just put a helmet onto the side of that burning tree?"
"DON'T SPEAK ABOUT THE CHIEF THAT WAY!"
End usury basically. Problem solved.
Yeah you basically just have to fix the banking system and debt, and most economic problems get solved in the long run. The problem is the people with a stranglehold on that will never let it go, and they know how valuable it is.
Isn’t usury just interest? I’ve never quite understood why the concept of interest is bad, I wish it didn’t exist, sure, but idk why it’s so “evil”.
Usury is when a lender demands more property in return than the loan itself. A house loan is not usury, because if you default on the loan you only lose the house, which is what the loan bought you. Usury is when you default on the loan and the lender demands the house and your car.
Usury is when companies engage in complicated financial schemes to take ownership of property without paying for it. This is what happened with Bethesda and Zenimax, for example. Most "intellectual property" is usurious, because a man can't sign away his labor forever, even willingly. That is slavery. If a company lends you money, and then starves out your business on purpose, and then takes your company when you default, that is usury.
There is a way. Corporate ethical principles stemming from Christianity, it existed in the past, but it declined and fell off in favor of businessmen adopting Consequentialism over time, which is basically a postmodern ideology in all but name. (Its basically "ends justify the means").
Its even taught about in classes like business law (well, more of how it declined, as consequentialism rose instead) and even leftist textbooks and liberal professors had to admit the decline of ethical standards that accompanied it.
You want ethical formalism to make a comeback. Basically, a system like that is "wrong is wrong, no matter what", rather than this bullshit slippery slope of "If we can justify how it helps win a good result, its okay".
Basically, you need good people to control the institutions of academia, the media, and parent the children to hold to absolute moral standards again.
Back when I was in a business college in undergrad and had to take some classes for my major (which wasn't business-focused, but the major was still in the college and adjacent to a major that was), there was a required business leadership/psychology class where the professor basically posited a well-known question to the class.
Its basically a well-known variation of the "runaway train" question. If you could push a button which would drop 1 guy in front of the tracks (assume he's fat enough to stop the train), in order to save 5 people who wouldn't be able to get away in time, would you do so?
And the majority of the class raised their hands. I did not.
The followup question was instead "what if there was no button, and you had to push the guy unto the track instead", and the majority of the class did not raise their hands anymore. I obviously stayed consistent.
The second part of the question was the "trap". What they were doing was the same, but the illusion of bullshit allowed themselves to lie and pretend like they weren't essentially murdering someone in the process until they're forced to come closer to the ugly truth than they otherwise would be.
The professor didn't denigrate them for it (but he should have), he was just doing it to illustrate the 2 major schools of thought, but it shows how slippery the slope is for things like morality when you don't rely on absolutes. You get a bunch of inconsistent retards who are fine with lying to themselves until they are forced to face the consequences of what they are actually doing (which most never will, ironically enough).
Basically, you don't want people like that, or shit like that being taught.
If you have the ability to save five people and chose not to, isn't that still murder?
Your Christian moral framing doesn't work here beacause Christianity will just teaches you to jump on the track yourself. I don't think self-sacrifice is a fundamental rule in business.
No, its not.
You don't know what murder is.
Christianity doesn't tell you to pointlessly die for no reason for that matter. Its made clear in the question that the single guy in question is large enough to stop the train, but its usually stated that you are not able to stop the train on your own (and if you are, that would change the question drastically)
It also doesn't say anything about self-sacrifice, if its not a valid option, its not relevant to the question.
There are plenty of situations where you sacrificing your own self won't make a difference.
What you are doing is hilariously obvious here. You are looking for a hole in my argument (even a slight one) to justify moral relativism and ambiguity.
Try learning something about Christianity before commenting on what it tells you to do or not do, you come across as that one atheist meme where you think you understand it from an outside perspective and it believes that you can make Christians your doormat.
Not looking for holes just that I never like the train dilemma because its stupid and always required some moronic details to make it more complicated than it is. The answer is always to sacrifice one person to save five because that how we as a species survive. The old must be must be sacrificed to protect the young, the strong for the vulnerable (remember woman and children first?).
I'm sorry if I came across like some cringe atheist but I just don't think this is a good scenario to ask for some Christian perspective. Either option you choose, there will still be blood on your hand and I knew enough Christians in my life that would jump on the track to save as much people as they can even if it would cost their life.
So ask your business professor to came up with better moral dilemmas.
Life, and the value of it, isn't just a numbers game. The same goes for one's actions. By taking action to sacrifice someone else's life without their consent, you are essentially playing God.
I recommend watching Fate/Zero, the main character basically has your viewpoint and is forced to come to certain realizations.
Would you be fine with being sacrificed for a "greater good" by someone else without having a choice in the matter?
Does the men have a choice as they get drafted and forced to fight for their country? Does the men have a choice as they have to do hazardous jobs to keep their city functional? Does the men have a choice as they have to go to the woods and hunt for their family?
Men made sacrifices for the “greater good” all the time, the greater good of our family, of our society. It doesn’t matter if you’re not fine with it, you will do it since no one else would. Consent is nonsensical talk because men never have a choice to begin with.
So my answer is if that “greater good” is my family, yes I would because it is my duty as a husband and a father. If that “greater good” is this society, hell no.
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.
This. The 70,000 page tax code is exhibit A of how regulatory capture allows bullshit like amazon paying zero taxes and destroying small businesses.
Government enables corporate fuckery.
"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".
Yeah, that’s trash, I really don’t like that you can’t, but I also somewhat understand the logic of embellishment
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.
All I can do is save up money to move out, which I am and have been doing, I just don’t have nearly enough at the moment.
Plus I’m nowhere near as experienced in life as most of the people who use the site are, so all I really have are questions so that I can become more informed in the first place.
Edit: The only posts that I can see as bait are the posts that I did asking about loli and shota porn because the other thread at those times were clogged as hell and the questions I wanted to ask deserved to be main posts imo
Imagine if you could make a game and sell fake content to losers for $12 each, you'd be out of the house in no time.
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.
So, the hard question is will Blackrock get a Electronic Arts Department xD
Wokeism means they already do. But it also means that Blackrock gets to sacrifice a pawn when then queen is threatened.
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.
Read your books, bro. "The LOVE of money is the root of all evil" is the full quote. Money itself is but a tool. A dangerous one if ill-handled, for sure, but it's still just a tool.
Greed is an evolutionary adaptation which predates money.