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
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