Comment by thrance
6 days ago
Look where decades of "voting with our wallets" led us. How some people can still utter that sentence unironically is beyond me at this point.
6 days ago
Look where decades of "voting with our wallets" led us. How some people can still utter that sentence unironically is beyond me at this point.
Your claim that there has been "decades of voting with our wallets" is laughable. Nobody I know who plays games decides to buy them or not based on ideological reasons - they just buy the things that are popular or that their friends play. There's extremely little engagement on these issues.
But it's true. Most people pay for what's being currently promoted. So "voting with wallet" doesn't really work, because you will be outvoted by majority of people who don't know what they're getting into. That's why gacha games and other lootbox-heavy ones are most profitable. This is where "vote with your wallet" brought us.
You're confused about the meaning of "voting with your wallet".
> But it's true.
It's not - you're talking about something else entirely. When @umvi says "vote with your wallet" they mean buy things whose values you support. You, and GP @thrance, are not describing that - you're describing people buying things on autopilot without respect to values - the exact opposite. So, no, we haven't had decades of "unsuccessful voting with your wallet" because consumers have been mentally checked out for decades.
> So "voting with wallet" doesn't really work, because you will be outvoted by majority of people who don't know what they're getting into
That's literally how normal democracy works - if the majority of the populace is uninformed, then they'll vote in an uninformed way, and the solution is for them to get informed and start doing research and making conscious decisions. That's what @umvi means when they say "vote with your wallet." - active participation instead of passive existence.
You're confusing the lack of active participation with the presence of it.
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Voting with your wallet does work, possibly others don't share in your tastes.
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You proved my point: "voting with your wallet" will never work. DLCs, microtransactions, lootboxes... They all got normalized alarmingly quickly, despite numerous calls to "vote with your wallets" every single times. We need regulations, isolated individuals have no power against a system built to extract the most out of them.
> You proved my point: "voting with your wallet" will never work. DLCs, microtransactions, lootboxes... They all got normalized alarmingly quickly, despite numerous calls to "vote with your wallets" every single times.
Factually incorrect. There are numerous instances of consumers complaining, leaving bad reviews on Steam, refunding games, or stopping buying games because of their values, and the studios/producers actually changed the thing. Helldivers 2's mandatory PSN account is one of the most recent instances of that happening.
Factually, consumers will band together to take collective action, and when they do, there are positive effects. The problem is apathy, not lack of power.
> We need regulations, isolated individuals have no power against a system built to extract the most out of them
This is literally self-contradictory. If individuals can't "vote with their wallets" to achieve change (which, as I described above, empirically does happen), then individuals in a democracy also can't vote to enact their will on the system - and those regulators are appointed by those elected representatives.
Make up your mind - does voting work, or does it not?
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