Comment by jonhohle
3 days ago
Blizzard runs several popular games where you need to buy their currency before you can buy anything. I don’t know if it’s the case anymore, but Microsoft used to require Xbox Gold to purchase games. Usually this requires locking more up than the purchaser intended to spend.
AFAIK in most games or storefronts with a real-money exchange pipeline, the resulting units are simply not gift-able. Being unable to exchange value with other users makes it qualitatively different.
In other words, you spend regular money for company-points, but thereafter you can only spend the company points on things that cannot be transferred. While there is certainly a cynical aspect to locking up customer funds, it makes it a lot easier to handle things like fluctuating currency exchange rates, and simplifies refunds within the points-store.
OTOH even as someone who played a popular online Blizzard game for years (and realistically spent a decent amount of money on it), maybe it's not the worst thing in the world if this sort of think becomes considered more "scam" than "legitimate business model". There's almost never a direct 1:1 ratio between the real money you convert into the currency and the price of the thing you want to get (which isn't that surprising, as it would probably be pointless to ask someone to put in $20 to convert to widgets only to immediately ask for all of their widgets for the item they want rather than ask for the $20 directly), which means you either buy more than you intended or hold onto it in the hopes that you can put it towards something else you want later. What percentage of people who have ever bought one of these currencies do you think don't currently still hold some due to having leftover from their most recent purchase? What percentage of people have bought some and later stopped playing the game managed to spend all of them before they stopped? All of those people have basically been taken advantage of IMO (probably knowingly, but that's hardly an excuse when there's a power imbalance). Even if the relative injustice is small compared to other things in the world, it would still probably be better for business models like that not to exist.
(edit: in retrospect "OTOH" was a poor choice of words since this isn't really a different point than the parent comment is making)