this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
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From the comments here I can see we learned nothing from Horse Armour.
Lots was learned. They learned they can continue to move the goalposts simply forever it seems.
Wait for the rage over this particular round to die down. Release a game with similar but slightly dialed back bullshit. Tell everyone how much better you are than them.
Repeat until people pay $99 for the right to rent the game for $10 a month plus pay to win MTX.
Sure DD2 is a corpse, but a new game will come growing from its corpse.
Soon the poors won't be able to play games anyway as that will be forbidden by their owners
This is the nice thing about indy devs. Many of them don't pull this shit and it is likely a large reason indy games have increasingly grown in popularity. AAA game is basically synonymous with microtranscations at this point.
I'm gonna paste a comment I left the other day pertaining to this:
I'm pretty sure the mtx for dragons dogma are all 1 time dlc bought on the steam page just like the horse Armour.
Such as? Are you saying you could pay a small amount for something in a game before this? Sure, it's possible.
Ok, and? As in it's a small amount (micro) purchase for a thing?
I'm not sure exactly what hill you're dying on here. That there was a game somewhere that had buyable things for small amounts of money before Oblivion? Sure, there may have been. And?
Double dragon 3. You had to put coins into the arcade machine to literally buy items from an in-game store...
Also, second life came out before Oblivion.
Do you have any links for that? I love to read up on it, had never heard about it before today.
I thought it was going to be hard to find, since this was an arcade game from my childhood... But here's one article from Neogaf.
If you Google "Double dragon 3 arcade insert coins", there are reddit articles, forums talking about this, and even the Wikipedia article talks about this being one of the first commercial games to have in-game micro transactions.
"The U.S. version also features item shops where players could use additional credits to purchase in-game items such as weapons, a
dditional moves and new playable characters in one of the earliest forms of microtransactions in a video game, although this system would end up being removed in the later-released Japanese version..."
Also, not defending Bethesda's practice, but Horse armor also wasn't their first microtransaction for oblivion....
They also had themes and stuff on the Xbox store, and literally told people that these types of things were going to be released.
To be fair - I didn't buy oblivion, a friend of mine had it for Xbox, and I went and sailed the kazaa seas and downloaded the base game + all the DLCs without having to pay micro$oft's ransom. Only pointing out that we knew well before horse armor that gamers will open their wallets for this.
Follow up to my last comment. That link is just user comments discussion about the arcade game, and not an actual publication article that describes the in-game store.
We have to just assume that person posting that comment is knowledgeable and factual, and not astroturfing, etc.
And that the Wikipedia article discussing it is in fact wrong as well...
Sorry, there isn't a lot of contemporaneous discussion referencing microtransactions on an arcade game that came out in the mid-90s... Back then, we paid up and complained about it to your friends or the person who had their coin on the table.
Basically, the gist is during game play, at specific breaks, you could have the opportunity to buy things like characters, combat abilities, infinit resources, etc.
Here you can even watch someone play the game. Miracle of the internet age, you can just open up a browser, type in "double dragon 3 arcade gameplay" and watch someone play the game and live the experience of being 10 years old in the 90s vicariously through someone else.
Or you could even download the PC port, or play it in emulation on your device of choice so you can truly see if those nasty first-hand accounts are telling the truth and you don't have to question whether those people posting were knowledgeable, astroturfing, etc.
So I'm ~ probably older than you, and I've been in arcades since they were first a thing, and remember putting the quarters on the game console to the reserve the next game very well.
That video you're showing me is gameplay, but what I wanted to see is the specific microtransaction stuff, the purchasing stuff in the in-game arcade shop with real quarters.
That's what I was hoping to see, because I don't remember ever seeing any of that when I was in those arcades back then. Basically, make me a believer, because right now I'm kind of doubtful.
And I know it's not your specific job to convince me, I'm just hoping someone could show me actual proof of the store specifically, is all. I wasn't able to find it on my own, and I looked.
Thanks.
Honestly, I was just looking for a link so I can read up on it, not challenging you about it.
I actually tried Googling your comment sentence but it just gave me the game and nothing about this feature you were talking about.
I'm going to go take a look at that article you linked for me. Appreciate it.
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/10147126
https://lemmy.world/comment/8707129
Here's a couple replies to my earlier comment that bring up games from before and early in the mainstream console days (pre-Xbox/PlayStation).
I'm sure there are plenty of other examples as well.
Ok, I still don't understand the 'hill you're dying on here.' I don't think anyone truly believed that Oblivion was the First Video Game Ever (TM) with Microtransactions in it, I'm not sure that was the point, I'm fairly certain the point was how ludicrous it was to force people to pay for Horse Armour in their First Person game. It set off a series of discussions about whether or not this should be the way forward, people acquiesced, and it became standard.
Thus: "From the comments here I can see we learned nothing from Horse Armour."
Because people are still defending predatory practices in the industry with 'yeah but you can just grind to get...' or 'but you don't have to...'
It wasn't even a mechanic, though. ~~The armor literally did nothing, it was a cosmetic.~~
No it was armour. Technically it just buffed your horse’s HP rather than being true armour, but it did something.
There was also a new vendor who sold it and a little quest to enable it.
Ah, you're right I guess I was misremembering
And it was all of $2.50 if I remember correctly.
Agreed, it’s really not what people think of when they really think of microtransactions. Horse armour was really just mediocre & overpriced DLC.