The spongebob game wasnt so bad. It had like a login bonus but it didnt seem to be too bad But once we got into the lego star wars game the f2p bullshit started. And oh god. This game clearly designed for kids had all the f2p bullshit. Login bonuses. Gridnyness. Multiple in game currencies. The daily/weekly ect missions. The unlockables
But god the racing game was even worse. 100000 things to unlock and basically nothing is by default basically. Sooooooooooo absurdly grindy. And most harrowing of all… i swear to god… 5 seperate in game currencies.
I want to reach out and scream to him “games werent always like this maaaaan”
One of Fortnite’s most insidious cultural influences is that other kids are just about expected to bully “defaults” for not wasting enough money on that hypermonetized piece of trash.
Valve TF2 allowing users to buy hats circa 2008 -------> 2024 and children have gambling addictions that their parents and teachers have little to no resources to cure.
If there’s one thing you can rightfully slam China for is allowing G@mer gacha into their country I would have purged that entire industry and jailed its ringleaders as child predators.
It was an insidious crawling march of normalizing horrible monetization practices and it’s gotten to the point that younger people just accept it because they haven’t ever known a different way.
I also blame Overwatch, that was around first and people made fun of players with default skins there too.
I’ve always hated Overwatch, mostly because it was so cynically designed from the start to press every button in
possible about the le sexy waifu archetypes that would get sucked in and keep paying for it.But it’s D I V E R S E in its selection of waifus! Please don’t ask why the cowboy character’s name is now different.
Some of them are so incredibly painfully Blizzard-generic from the start that they feel like parodies of previous Blizzard slop. “Widowmaker” comes to mind especially.
Im ngl I have lots of problems with Overwatch but charachter design has never been one.
That’s fine. That was a personal taste rant there, entirely subjective.
It doesn’t help that I found previous Blizzard waifu characters grating… especially what they did with Kerrigan over time.
Yeah agreed that the waifuification of Kerrigan sucks.
I feel like more people should get made fun of for blizzards idea that shooting lazers at women make them sexy and evil.
I guess I have to give them credit for having non-white characters who mostly aren’t teenagers or early 20s, but most of the women still have the same
body type (and I definitely remember Mei being called fat for not fitting that mold exactly, just g*mer things).and I definitely remember Mei being called fat for not fitting that mold exactly
I’ll believe it, and that’s fucked up. It’s part of that “HIRE GAMERS”
that was that mad that Aloy looked like an actual redheaded human being that lives in a post-apocalyptic society that doesn’t have easy access to Hollywood tier makeup.Mei’s my favorite actually.
Im less put off by body type’s fitting that certain mold than you are really. And the one that does the most to me, Mercy, is my least favorite design lol. And then you got charachter like the body builder one and uh… the tall and lanky one (forgot names) that arent even waifus in the traditional sense.
what did the cowboy character used to be called in Overwatch??
McCree, after Blizzard lead designer Jesse McCree. Then some bad stuff came out.
I never got into Overwatch because it just looked like Team Fortress 2 with even more micro transactions. And TF2 is my love/hate game.
Who needs new waifus/husbandos when we already had Heavy?
Exactly!
In early league of legends I feel there was the opposite culture, where you would get clowned on for using a skin especially if you performed badly
where you would get clowned on for using a skin especially if you performed badly
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzItS5BmUNw
Mechwarrior Online had some solidarity against the “gold Mechs” that were being peddled for hundreds of dollars each; they’d get teamkilled so consistently that it was extremely rare to see one at all after a while.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Kid showed me some of his Fornite skins I think he got them all F2P though
- I hope those skins are accepted and aren’t bullying targets.
He’s got Magneto! They better not be bullying him he has Magneto!
infinite may-as-well-walk-away-from-arcade-booth airborne combo intensifies
I chipped in with some friends to get my buddy’s kid a gameboy knockoff thingy that has roms of thousands of old games from like nes to ps2 on it. We did it specifically so the kid could have screen time without f2p and mtx skinner box stuff.
Yeah. I wish i had been around more for that (he’s 8 now and last i saw him he was 4) and also had means to gift him stuff. His mom at least doesnt get him micros.
That sounds great compared to the official Nintendo overpriced retro console that had laughably few games and rammed in Ice Climbers because you will take Ice Climbers and you will LIKE IT
You should reach out to him and introduce him to emulation and older games. The benefit is that you can obtain a lot of roms at one time and the system requirements are very low. If you get an HDMI adapter and a controller you can deprogram him out of freemium games.
I’m planning to donate my current laptop to my younger cousins as a “SteamOS-like” machine and a HDMI adapter when they’re old enough and load it with a bunch of games running at 1080p under Vulkan. I could introduce them to pokemon romhacks and shit.
Someone needs to make a prepackaged Linux iso with like, every remotely popular rom and pc game through ps1 era pre set up. It would only be 100 GB or something.
There are already ISOs like that running Batocera out there if you look around.
Never heard of it, thank you
You wouldn’t have to do that, a torrent tracker would work just as well. There is a “gamer box” Linux iso and it’s called bazzite.gg which you can install on your steam deck which can go up to Nintendo Switch games if its optimized enough.
Are there any where you can get ROMs through the package manager? That would be cool af
If you use a pure package manager like Nix or Guix you can set up a flake/channel that hosts roms via direct download, then you can use a redump site like https://myrient.erista.me/ as a source and then set up a build farm/substitute server that can be wired to transfer roms via tor.
Lotsa possibilities.
I’ve done that with old laptops. Loaded it up with minecraft and some other kid appropriate games so they’d have fun games that are “safe” from a super-exploitative skinner box perspective.
He’s 8 and i dont get a lot of time with him because we dont live close, and i also dont have a lot of knowledge about that stuff myself. (I can emulate via pc, but he doesnt have one literally at all. Just an Apple tv and a switch).
He does have switch online so i could maybe at least introduce him to old Nintedo games via that? I just saw the last of him ill see this visit but maybe ill try that next time i visit or if he visits me. Could do a lot if he visits me by emulating via pc and with my large steam library.
Switch Online would at least be a good entry point to emulation. If there’s any possibility at all of like used lenovo thinkpads/their workstation desktops with like a 6th or 7th generation (or higher) chip in them you could (I and many others here would gladly assist too) load it up with a curated retro-romset and you could set up a steam family library to share all your titles with him
Im already in a steam family (and they dont allow multiple right?) So im tied up there but the rest seems possible.
You’re probably aware but its’s up to 6 people and you can set child accounts to prevent access to certain games. Just wanted to share that information in case it was guiding any future decision
Yeah its not my family its my girlfriend’s.
I think back to Charles Entertainment Cheese’s children’s casino when we talk about this kinda thing. It was only better back in the day because they didn’t have the infrastructure to make it worse.
bars
Honestly at this point it’s better to just buy them a PS4 and some old school kid games and remasters then have them accept this as a normal part of recreation. Like my weird paranoid theory is that all this f2p shit targeted at the young is to create a sense of acceptance towards extractive capital infesting every aspect of their daily lives, intentionally or not.
Yeah as I said elsewhere in the thread I wish I had the means to get him some better quality games that dont have this bullshit or at least only minimally do. So far the best solution that ive come up with thats realistic is showing him the old school stuff he can access on Switch online. But he’ll probably still just do that with me and keep doing Fornite on his own lol.
They ruined Lego Star Wars?
Wall.
anyway yeah the fucking YouTube games as well - pure attention grabbing cancer. I remember back in the day there were YouTube malware ads where you had to swat or shoot a fly or something, and that was considered unacceptable. Those no longer exist. Instead we have built in Angry Birds.
The console/PC Lego Star Wars is still pretty normal, it’s only on phones that you get the crazy predatory stuff (usually)
I’m gonna teach my kids to pirate games
I will say in defense of this (but only a tiny bit) that for some people collecting things and unlocking things can be fun, and these types of games have a nearly infinite amount of things to collect and unlock. So in some ways getting all the bonus this and currency that and hoarding it like a dragon can be fun for some people.
I think it’s bad for kids to be exposed to it like that though. Definitely treatifying their developing brains to such a level can’t be healthy
Oh yeah. I love completionist stuff in games. But the degree these games take it too and for games for kids
Don’t conflate collectathons with skinner boxes. These aren’t designed so you can just gather things to your heart’s content, they are designed to keep you playing (including by limiting what you can do on a given day) and to pressure you into paying money by making the free returns from playing unrewarding and frustrating. Usually the reason for all the currencies is to obfuscate exchange rates, so at least a few of them can only be obtained with real money, and none of the currencies are meant to merely be collected like a high score.
The problem is you can pay to unlock them or to accelerate your progress, which cheapens any achievement of doing it via grind anyway. Everyone will just assume you bought everything
More of a problem in multiplayer games where there’s a “keeping up with the joneses” effect pressuring kids to keep up with 40 year old dudes who just buy everything. That leaves a kid with 3 options: drop their entire allowance to keep up, grind with no life, or accept falling behind.
All 3 of these options suck
Back in my day we had 1 coin, and nobody knew how to “spend it”.
spoiler
Eventually we found out 100 coins redeemed for a 1x1up, nowhere was this explained in the tutorial level.
One of the earliest examples of contemporary hypermonetized
hell I can think of was a Smurf 
phone game that expected kids to collect berries… and collecting berries instantly charged their parents’ phone account. Some kids racked up thousands of dollars of debt doing that.5 seperate in game currencies.
I think the current king of contemporary hypermonetized
grift is Diablo Immoral (it’s too fun to call it that so I keep deliberately writing it that way) because it has even more currencies than that. Do you people not have phones? 
Star Citizen may be an even more disgusting grift but it has less reach and is more about hollowing out the bank accounts of a specific niche of reactionary boomer and boomer-adjacent gamedads.
I have no idea how Diablo Immortal and IV are so popular. Immortal was instantly pegged as being a pay to win knockoff of another game. Diablo IV is like $75 and had day 1 DLC. I’m still pissed over Blizzard gaslighting everyone over Diablo III PVP. My guess is it’s the same group who still play Call of Duty or buy EA products.
Then there’s all the awful sexual harassment stuff which is reason to boycott by itself.
Diablo Immoral has sunk cost fallacy built right in because of all its layered pressure tactics to keep people logging in and paying, including the pretense that you don’t HAVE to pay, but if you don’t, you’re going to have to wait months to years to get that same paid progress and be seen as a liability to everyone else when they plunk in their premium tokens for instances when grouping up.
Then there’s all the awful sexual harassment stuff which is reason to boycott by itself.
That would have been reason enough for me to stay away. “Separate art from artist” is especially hollow when the actual artists have already been exploited, underpaid, and likely fired and what’s left is the persistent sex pest bro culture.
Oh yeah and Bobby Kotick was a frequent flyer to a certain island.
Kids deserve better games
I’m 100% serious they also deserve their own safe places online and a bunch of other stuff they’ve lost thanks to the vice grip of big tech.
(controversial opinion) This is why I’m a fan of things like gamepass because it offers a different option for publishers to sell their game other than f2p, even though there’s still games on gamepass that have f2p microtransaction bullshit in them.
The game industry is so bad with this shit and desperately needs a big change. Hearing devs say that using things like gamepass allows them to design without f2p microtransactions made me hopeful, but I think a majority of games on the service have some kind of mtx or expansion that they’re selling still
There’s monetization on Apple Arcade? I thought the whole point was that most of the games were “plus” versions of mobile games just without the microtransactions. I wouldn’t be surprised if companies were double dipping though, and doubly unsurprised if Apple was fine with that.
Turns out these are just like “repurposed” f2p games or something? Like they were originally f2p but they just haphazardly took the micros out so youre just left with grindy disasters lol
