Check out the deliciously insidious first monetized choice in this freemium game

Ah, but will knowing jujitsu actually ever really help you again in the story? You can’t front snap kick an iceberg.

Agreed, but is there anything more true to the spirit of our brand of capitalism than paying to not get fucked over? I can’t wait until she has to go to hospital once they make it to New York. Oh. Wait.

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The perfect example is “The Notebook”. Anyone who buys a house, fixes it up for years, never develops a real relationship because of his obsession with a woman… And then she throws her relationship away because he’s so in love with her.

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Yeah, eeeesh. Best case scenario: pay or you get to see that character being mildly brutalized in various ways over the course of the game; i.e. pay (constantly) to have agency/power in the narrative.

I will always, always go for games with up-front costs rather than in-game currency. Even if I’m fairly sure I’m not likely to spend as much via in-game currency, I just don’t want to go down that rabbit hole - I don’t know where it’ll end up, and paying for each choice in the game feels extremely icky. But games like that are designed such that you end up potentially paying enormous amounts, such that a small number of players not just make up for all the non-payers, but - the hope is - generate more revenue than if all players had paid for the game up front to begin with.

As terrible as the practice is, I have a certain amount of sympathy for game developers who do this - the race-to-the-bottom pricing on mobile games (and to a lesser but still just as destructive degree with indie PC games, etc.) has left this as the only sustainable approach to game development. Trying to actually sell games leaves developers in a financial hole more often than not.

It’s a problem created by consumers, but of course normalizing it in game reviews doesn’t really help.

If it did, they wouldn’t be able to get you to pay up again. Though 'd like to see something along the lines of “Jujitsu flip the first mate to get a place at the captain’s table…”

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Yeah, it makes for a “romantic” story, but in real life women don’t want men to have consuming obsessions with them because that’s how real women end up dead.

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