I have been avoiding multiplayer Valve games like Counter-Strike 2 and Team Fortress 2, due to their in-game economies that have created an underage gambling gray market, which Valve has done little about. However, I am on Linux, and the choices for multiplayer shooters are few. Besides, my small boycott is not stopping Counter-Strike 2 from being the most played steam game. Are boycotts really the best solution to stop this epidemic in gaming? How can we best prevent these gambling grey markets and the gaming to gambling addiction pipeline?

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[–] missingno@fedia.io 2 points 1 week ago

I know that I'm one guy, and my purchasing decisions ain't gonna change nothin'. But I still try to vote with my wallet as much as I can in order to feel like I'm doing the right thing. I'm the guy old-fashioned enough to still only buy native Linux games because I don't like the idea of replacing official support with just hoping Proton happens to work, knowing full well that this replacement happened long ago and I am too late to turn back the clock. And I've got a whole list of publishers I will never buy from under any circumstances.

I will never ever ever spend money on gacha, because if I don't know what I'm buying then I'm not buying it. Even putting aside the ethical concerns, that's just a stupid purchase.

But I have a lot of nostalgia for TF2, and I don't know how to reconcile that. They kinda got away with sneaking in gacha before we realized how evil this is. I haven't touched the game in a long time anyway, but if the Heavy Update ever saw the light of day (it won't) or even if they just brought back rd_asteroid (even more not happening), I'd be very tempted and I dunno what I'd do.

There are two gacha games I still play, without spending any money on, while knowing what a hypocrite I am for playing them. Mahjong Soul and Riichi City. They're the two most populated Riichi Mahjong clients - it's either these or Tenhou, but Tenhou isn't in English, hasn't been updated in a long time, paywalls a number of features behind a subscription model, and is steadily losing players to its competitors. If a new client with an ethical business model took off I'd switch in heartbeat, but I can't imagine one would ever take off to a point where I could queue at any time of day and get high-ranking opponents at my level. So I'm kinda stuck with these.