Comment by thrance
6 days ago
> Factually incorrect.
How. You only gave anecdotal evidence of some instances where enough complaining got consumers a little concession. Meanwhile, DLCs, microtransactions and lootboxes went from "totally inacceptable" to "absolutely bog standard" in a few years. Do you deny that at each step of this process, many people called to "vote with your wallet"? Do you deny that it failed miserably and that the game industry keeps getting away with more and more, in spite of it?
> 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.
Literally straw-manning my point. I should have emphasized "isolated". To me calls to "vote with your wallet" are akin to a single worker demanding a raise or better working conditions. Without a union, they're out of luck. On the other hand, a collective effort to change the law like "Stop Killing Games", now we're talking.
> You only gave anecdotal evidence of some instances where enough complaining got consumers a little concession
You're using "anecdotal" incorrectly. Your statement was ""voting with your wallet" will never work." and I provided a counterexample, meaning that your statement is factually incorrect, so you're just wrong. It's also incorrect to call it a "concession" - the players got everything they asked for - there was no compromise. There are also far more counterexamples if you cared to search the internet for a few minutes - the Skyrim paid mods incident, the League of Legends free lootbox removal, and The Crew 2 and Motorfest not having offline modes as just three more.
> Meanwhile, DLCs
Been around for decades, not just "a few years"...
> microtransactions and lootboxes went from "totally inacceptable" to "absolutely bog standard" in a few years
Yes, and? Not enough people cared to actually do anything about it. The fact is, that when people care enough, and actually put their money where their mouth is, companies either listen (as above) or go out of business (as a number of studios are today).
It's quite simple to see that when people don't buy a studio's games, the studio either changes things or goes out of business. The reason that companies get away with these practices is because people either (1) morally compromise enough to buy games with mechanisms that they don't approve of, (2) they literally just don't care, or (3) aren't even aware of the issues. The call to "vote with your wallet" is meant to encourage the compromisers to stop compromising and the apathetic to realize that they have to take action for change to happen.
If your claim is that when people make values-based purchases it doesn't affect the market or fix issues - that's just factually wrong. If your complaint is that people don't care enough to make values-based purchases - that's exactly what the call to action of "vote with your wallet" is meant to help.
> Literally straw-manning my point. I should have emphasized "isolated".
I assumed you weren't talking about isolated individuals because that's completely irrelevant to this discussion. The poster's call to action of "vote with your wallet" on a site with tens/hundreds of thousands of visitors is literally a call to collective action, so any references to isolated action is just not relevant or logically coherent.
And, because you got that part wrong, this isn't really relevant, but...
> To me calls to "vote with your wallet" are akin to a single worker demanding a raise or better working conditions
This is also completely incorrect. If an individual worker demands something from their employers, they can just get fired. The power is in the hands of the employer. In the case of games, the power imbalance is heavily skewed towards the purchasers - if you decide not to purchase a game, the studio loses on revenue, and you lose some tiny increment of entertainment. Comparing someone having to play a different game, with someone getting fired, is crazy. Those situations are categorically different.
> On the other hand, a collective effort to change the law like "Stop Killing Games", now we're talking.
Telling people to "vote with their wallets" is a collective effort, and it works. That doesn't mean you can't complement it with regulation, but anyone familiar with the legislative system knows how incredibly difficult it is to wield regulation and how much you should try to solve problems through other methods first.