When a game is "Free" then "YOU" are the product

lol once in a while these sorts of posts will pop up from time to time.

POE never really is a pure f2p game.

stash tabs especially the newer dedicated tabs are all p2w.

they give you a huge level of advantage over non paying customers.

no needing to deal with organizing your inventory is an advantage.

easily setting up items for trade is and advantage

being able to ctrl click items into the appropriate tab is a huge advantage.

Funniest thing is, that even games that you have to pay up front, still have huge p2w like... d4, you have extra days for race if you pay 20€ more.

That's not P2W, these don't give any combat advantage and last I checked PvP didn't drop rewards anyway ?
That's p2qol, which is fair in an otherwise 'free' game.

"

Halugar wrote:

[...]
And, once there is no PvP were non-paying customers could be abused by paying customers (aka, they are content) your are not any product.
[...]

PoE1 technically does have PvP (except in Ruthless for some reason ??), but seems like it wasn't featured in any kind of event in a while ?

"

[...]
DLC's with 10 hours of content by 40 bucks (say "vessel of d4bad"), console "game pass" and so on.
[...]

Come on, the D4 expansion hasn't even been released yet !

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Halugar wrote:

[...]
And the money spent grants you permanent improvement of your account (tabs, skins, effects), and at same time is fair play trade (you cannot buy "content", keys etc)
[...]

No sure what you mean by "content", but IMHO a more traditional system like (mutually exclusive?) expansion packs where you can continue to play your character 'forever', would be more fair than these temporary challenge leagues.
(I'm still annoyed that while I can continue to play my character in Standard league, its build is now broken, because it was relying on the Aflliction ascendancy... I was hoping to finish the campaign with that one :/)

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1453R wrote:

[...]
fuck loot boxes, even GGG's "Ethical(c)" loot boxes.
[...]

I'm not sure what even are "loot boxes", but what makes them 'ethical' here ?

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

100%. It's gambling for weebs. And I have never gone beyond my means with any sort of gambling. Hell I feel weird putting 20 bucks into a poker machine, which are *really* common in Australia. We have a huge gambling problem here, and it's baked into almost every layer of our society.
[...]

Oh, is this why Easygo (company owning online casinos and Kick) that seeming got huge, fast, is Australian ?

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DarthSki44 wrote:

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1453R wrote:

I mean, let's be fair now Forever. Grinding Gear's still doing way better than literally anything MiHoYo puts out. Murica-born Freemium games ain't got smack on the sheer life-ruining predation of Gacha.

GGG isn't American, and it's owned by Tencent.

All of the popular MH games are killing it right now. Genshin still plugging along, HSR is a monster, and ZZZ just had 50+ Million register.

*I actually really like HSR on PS5. Play it often.

Yeah, it used to be New Zealander, until the founders' stake and board chairs became a minority in 2018.
I doubt that Tencent can get any particularly precious personal information from PoE players (except I guess for other F2P games ?), especially compared to Discord they also own !

Also, should we really set the bar to the worst that exists out there ?

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

[...]
Mtxes aren't the product either. Support packs and GGGold bundles are the product. Aesthetic mtxes are just a different sort of support badge.

Gameplay-affecting mtxes are a GGGold tax.
[...]

What gameplay-affecting mtxes does PoE1 have !? (Do you mean stash tabs ?)

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1453R wrote:

[...]
It is characterized by attempts to make the bar to entry as low as possible to entice as wide a playerbase as is feasible into playing the game.
[...]

lol

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1453R wrote:

[...]
That is really the core difference between freemium and 'free' - in a freemium scheme you-the-player are still the end customer. In a 'free' scheme, you are not.
[...]

Well, there's also actually free software out there, no personal information-sucking telemetry involved !

OP: Any concrete examples of such threads ?

Yes to both of your queries to me.

Gameplay affecting mtxes: stash tabs, character slots, guild member slots, arguably some of the visual effects that make certain gameplay elements easier to discern in a game where the action can be infamous for being difficult to discern (the mouse cursors being a fairly obvious example). These are all not strictly aesthetic.

And while stash tabs make up a tiny amount of the mtx shop, they constitute a huge percentage of the overall purchases with GGGold. Of course they do.

I'm sure this has been broached already but misusing this quote isn't intelligent and doesn't get the original point of it across in the slightest. There is a significant difference between the farming of background information on users by illicit frog boiling vs giving access to your game then offering to sell extras for people who want additional QoL, coolness factor or features.

The only meta data that GGG are going to be able to farm off free users is that DDBigschlong1980 is the first to reach the mudflats.

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Nomancs wrote:

Funniest thing is, that even games that you have to pay up front, still have huge p2w like... d4, you have extra days for race if you pay 20€ more.

I love to hear more about this very informed comment.

Please elaborate.

"

Foreverhappychan wrote:

Yes to both of your queries to me.

Gameplay affecting mtxes: stash tabs, character slots, guild member slots, arguably some of the visual effects that make certain gameplay elements easier to discern in a game where the action can be infamous for being difficult to discern (the mouse cursors being a fairly obvious example). These are all not strictly aesthetic.

And while stash tabs make up a tiny amount of the mtx shop, they constitute a huge percentage of the overall purchases with GGGold. Of course they do.

Exactly why I wrote that MTX is the product (to which you disagreed)

"

superbomb1967 wrote:

"

Nomancs wrote:

Funniest thing is, that even games that you have to pay up front, still have huge p2w like... d4, you have extra days for race if you pay 20€ more.

I love to hear more about this very informed comment.

Please elaborate.

Here you go champ:
https://diablo4.blizzard.com/

"

Nomancs wrote:

"

superbomb1967 wrote:

"

Nomancs wrote:

Funniest thing is, that even games that you have to pay up front, still have huge p2w like... d4, you have extra days for race if you pay 20€ more.

I love to hear more about this very informed comment.

Please elaborate.

Here you go champ:
https://diablo4.blizzard.com/

There is no early access with the expansion purchase. All you had to do was read what you linked lol.

"

DarthSki44 wrote:

There is no early access with the expansion purchase. All you had to do was read what you linked lol.

Lol, they don't have race to 100 anymore either, don't know why you decided it is about dlc and not about d4...