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"Our game made €4 million," says Rise of Industry's creator. "Three years later, I was broke"
(www.gamesindustry.biz)
this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2025
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No, listen to those people. They're right. Fuck microtransactions. Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.
Also the distributor cut is fucking obscene and needs to be sharply reduced. Steam takes an entire third of your revenue, clean off the top, for the privilege of participating in their monopoly.
I don't like microtransactions, but can you come up with a source of revenue for a game that allows for constant updates that include new features, mechanics, artwork, audio, etc. that isn't MXT or ads?
The people that will be angry about MXT are the same that would be angry their game hasn't seen any major updates in 5-10 years, like their initial investment somehow supports unlimited development. It's just not feasible.
Subscriptions. Y'know - like a service?
Otherwise you have to sell new products to make new money. You can make a sequel, or a no-kidding expansion, instead of charging ten actual dollars to let your character wear a hat that's already on your god-damn hard drive.
Or... you can make another game. This era dragging out games for ten years is a bizarre blip that's only maximizing their investment in antipattern suck-zones with instant access to your wallet.
Zero respect for 'people who rightly despise this also secretly crave it.' Cram that garbage.
None of this is about what I like. Charging money in games is a scam. Games make you value arbitrary nonsense - that is what makes them games. There is no intrinsic economic value to putting balls through hoops or clicking on heads. The exchange rate between enchanted scimitars and real-life hamburgers is nonexistent. It's a category error.
This abusive business model is half the industry, by revenue. It's in every genre, on every platform, at every price point. If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else. Only legislation will fix this.
I'd argue subscription is seen as very similar to micro transactions, although I can see that one is capped and other is not, so maybe subscription is less predatory
Charging repeatedly for local software or... using your car battery... is an intolerable abuse. But MMOs are plainly a real service, with simple ongoing costs, and new content you access by playing the damn game.
And even MMOs are pulling this shit. WoW wanted $90 for a magic horse that's also an auction house. The entire base game costs less than that one fucking object inside the game. This is fundamentally different, and obviously worse, and it has infected ev-er-y-thing.
State subventions
not super familiar with your idiolect. what do you mean by MXT? i tried looking it up, but nothing i found made much sense in this context.
MTX = microtransactions
Sorry, accidentally swapped the letters. Answered by brb
I feel like there's a difference between cosmetic microtransactions, game-balance altering ones, and the predatory ones most gamers including me dislike. The ones where you only have 10 energy for actions and every action depletes your energy, so you wait 10 hours or PAY 10 IN GEMS, DON'T HAVE ENOUGH GEMS? BUY 55 FOR $2.99! Which are acquired quickly as you learn the game and then you get a very slow dripfeed of them once you have completed all tutorial/onboarding tasks, and which you are forced to spend in the tutorial. Or the lootbox gambling ones. I'm all for cosmetics to support the dev, but take a dim view of the game-balance altering ones and outright predatory ones.
Although I do wonder how much whatever-dollar-horse-armor opened the floodgates to this.
It's all the same abuse. You will be made to want something that costs nothing to provide - as often as possible, for as much as they can take.
Your support for devs was buying the game.
Horse armor is fine, compared to this. You downloaded content you didn't have. It wasn't paying to unlock something already on the disc. No in-game merchant asked for your credit card. Horse armor is the point of reference everybody recognizes, and it is fundamentally better than any form of this industry-swallowing manipulation.
Nobody was ever going to blow a thousand dollars a month on horse armor. But now - that behavior is the only reason some games exist.