Extra Credits still doesn't understand their own industry.

These thoughts are in reply to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Uha5c7hJdA

(0:37) that's a inaccurate assumption on the part of the industry, but sure, since that's what everyone is told, lets roll with it.

(0:45) It was only made $60 when the Xbox 360 launched, when graphics hit the highest they needed to be for games to have access to all the horsepower they could need to reasonably do anything they pleased without turning the console in question to slag. by Inflation alone games would be ~$75 today, despite $60 already being a steep asking price, especially for a digital game.

(1:32) by successful you mean lucrative, season passes alone typically bring the total cost of a game to $100 or more but loot boxes lock very small pieces of content behind what's essentially a dice roll with no upper limit on the amount you can spend, and no guarantee that the purchasee will ever see the item they actually want even after spending upwards of $1,000 on the same box and often time Whales will spend like that. it's like playing the Cyclone at a Ticket Arcade but instead of tickets it dispenses random guff you may or may not want.

(2:20) you mean assigning items high value with an extremely low chance of dropping from a $2 a shot loot box, thus communicating their greed in the most overt way possible by abusing our desire for satisfaction is for our benefit? My gosh I never thought about it that way!

(2:38) Warframe, Blacklight Retribution and other high-quality free to play games are a case and point of why that's a blatant falsehood, but please, do go on.

(2:51) The Vast, VAST majority of the games releasing with lootboxes are also "supplementing" their income with nearly the entirety of the list you provided at 1:23 barring the subscription model, the final total cost for a complete game with all content ignoring lootboxes and subscriptions is already far and above $150, it's not affordable, you are just buying the base "Shell Game" for that $60 price tag.

(3:04) The part you fail to highlight here is that you are talking about free to play games, often ones with a minimum development budget produced by a development staff small enough they could all work out of the average 2 bedroom house. Their cost to profit ratio is even higher than the AAA games that are the crux of the matter we are talking about here.

(3:40) Hey! You finally stopped to point out it's not all sunshine and roses, just a shame you did everything you could to downplay the scale of the abuse. I've only seen 3, technically 4 released games not completely abuse the loot box system for profit and a competitive edge to the purchasee, Counter-Strike:Global Offensive, Overwatch, and it's clone Paladins (the 4th being the now defunct GitS:SAC FAO, shutdown due to community backlash unrelated to it's loot box system). This manipulative abuse is otherwise universal among games containing loot boxes, free to play or no. It was a nice touch making the psychologist that says it's not gambling look like a school psychologist, people we're trained at a young age to trust unquestionably with our psychological troubles. :-)

(5:50) Oh but it DOES! My best friend's father had a gambling problem from a very young age, he stopped gambling at casinos thanks to help from his wife and a gambling help hotline and according to his wife, almost immediately started buying stacks of booster boxes of Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh cards, when I first met him he already had a garage full of thousands of dollars in JUST the yu-gi-oh cards, hundreds of sets of the Egyptian God Card trio in both of their formats, an entire binder full of completed Exodia sets, multiple binders of entire Holofoil cardpack series sets and more. I KNOW for a fact those things are just as addictive as gambling, and any legitimate study is going to find people with addictive personalities can and often will become addicted to card packs.

(7:27) It is rather funny you show a Madden NFL game while talking about good monetization when the game's entire multi-player premise (along with it's other sports cousins') is centered around abusing the same psychological tactics used in fantasy team betting games, which actually are known to trigger gambling addictions, just with the player paying up-front for a random chance at their team members rather than building a team upfront and betting after the fact on their successes or failures. (arguably LESS abusive than the games' model)

(8:13) If that was keeping the price down for the rest of us, games would be free for the base game and the rest would still be there.

(8:40) Loose revenue, as in not gain the revenue they could have by not being as in-your-face obvious about their abject greed.


( I give full permission to anyone interested to steal these thoughts for their own video and monetize them without and guarantee of quality or profit. use other people's thoughts responsibly. )