Potentially unpopular opinion: It's largely players' fault for buying into these ridiculous monetization schemes.
Execs care about one thing: Money. If doing this shitty stuff generates more money, they'll do it. If it doesn't, they won't. Sure, they could choose to do what's best for the gamer out of the goodness of their hearts, but they won't, that's not even in question. They're in it for money, they don't care about anything else.
As such, when gamers buy into predatory monetization, they're telling the execs, "This works! Do more of this!". If we as gamers just never touched the stuff, it would go away very fast. It's our fault.
It's not even the average gamer that generate the profits for these things. It's fucking Battlepass Georg who goes into debt buying bullshit digital items.
I used to work for a company that ran a free-to-play online game with predatory microtransactions; I can absolutely confirm this. More than 90% of their revenue was generated from less than 5% of the userbase. It was honestly pretty disgusting. Most players spent <$25 over their entire career, but a small number of people spent thousands.
I can kind of let it slide with free-to-play games; they do need to make revenue somewhere, but when it's a buy-to-play game that still pulls this BS, that's crossing a line.
I believe this isn't so much an unpopular opinion, but just factually wrong. Like you could read or commission scientific studies showing that a group of average people will react to certain stimuli. Video games are all about those stimuli. And also it's a small percentage of players. It's also about protecting kids and teenagers. So while it is profitable to do this, sometimes society shouldn't allow it.
You could also make the same argument for fraudulent crimes. They weren't always criminal but were made criminal and are now accepted as being criminal. You could say "It's our fault for falling for this!".
We all remember when Blizzard was amazing and could do no wrong. Good times.
Blizzard was pretty amazing before they were acquired.
i've never bought into battle passes.
This is actual footage of traditional Blizzard executives.
Traditional blizzerd execs? The ones who released expansion packs for games like warcraft & starcraft with an entire second games worth of content for reasonable prices?
Robert “Bobby” Kotick, who engineered a merger between Activision and Vivendi Games during the late 2000s, which led to the creation of Activision Blizzard in 2008 and him being named the company's inaugural CEO. That guy cultivated a terrible workplace environment where women were taken advantage. He even tried to hide it and cover it up.
So sure the ones who lead the development of your happy fun times.
