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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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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.