Games

Every sentence in that comment is a distinct kind of wrong. I'd be impressed if it wasn't just depressing.

In reverse order: games are products. They have utility-value, for you, a human person. Even if you think they suck. A bad pizza is still a pizza, and a perishable good which can be manufactured and sold, as a textbook example of commerce.

Veblen goods like Gucci products are priced primarily for sign-value, where the cost is high to show off how much you can afford. But they still function. A Gucci purse only has the same utility as any other purse, but both purses are obviously products.

Exclusionary bullshit like paid skins are nothing but sign-value. You pay money to say you paid money. That is a scam. You are goaded into desiring some empty peacocking nonsense versus everyone else, where the only practical mechanism is to throw money at the people who let you say you have a skin. It's not a product - you already have the content, on your hard drive. You must, to see other people using it. It's not a service - can only see other people using it because you're already on the server. It's a completely made-up money sink.

That bullshit is becoming the entire industry.

Scams like this are so lucrative, companies can give games away, just to sucker in more peacocking chumps.

Exploitation like this takes unlimited quantities of money from an arbitrary number of people, for the same fucking game they already paid full price to play. No kidding every company's shoving that into every game. The actual part where you play the game is just bait on that hook. The high-level goal of every company doing this becomes addiction to keep you from leaving, frustration to keep you forking over thousands of dollars, and just enough socialization to make you feel superior to the idiots who only forked over hundreds of dollars.

The only consistent argument for this infection is 'but it makes money, so it must be ethical.'