this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
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I get what you're saying, but it does also create incentives to develop for whales.
Like, okay. Take Fallout 76. They -- unlike with previous games in the series -- do not have large, commercial DLC packages that come out. Rather, they have small, free, seasonal releases of content. Howard has committed Bethesda not to doing any commercial DLC for the game.
I was happy with that "large commercial DLC" model, and purchased them. But, okay, as it stands, I get a game that someone else is mostly paying for, right?
They sell a "premium" subscription for $12/mo, which provides some relatively-minor benefits.
And they sell various cosmetic items that people can place in their camp that one could hypothetically spend a pretty much unlimited amount on.
My problem is that financially, this constrains them to have basically no incentive to do anything other than develop new cosmetic items and sell to people who really want to buy them. And in the past, Bethesda has made some excellent large, commercial expansions for games in the series, like Far Harbor for Fallout 4.
This isn't to argue in favor of or against the law in China, but to point out that the "someone else will pay for the game" model has some problems with it -- if you aren't paying anything, and someone else's wallet is covering all the costs, it means that the game developer is entirely-incentivized to do development to appeal to whoever is paying for the thing, not you.
This doesn't necessarily apply to multiplayer games though: the free-to-play part of the playerbase is there to pad the numbers and ensure queues are short (if it's a match based game), cities are lively (if it's a MMORPG), etc.
If the developer can't appeal to those too, then you're left with a ghost town of a game that can't appeal to the whales either.
Also, the "whales" are by and large not unharmed rich people - it's mostly poor people who are at risk for gambling addiction, such as many with adhd, depression, etc. The people who are targeted successfully by this model usually suffer for it.