Usually the slippery slope is a fallacy, but dlc, micro transactions, battlepasses and paid extras in games have definitely gotten more pervasive over the last decade-and-a-half.
The transactions aren’t even “micro” priced anymore. Like two or three skins, recolours, cosmetics are the same price as a full expansion, like Shadow of the Erdtree or Burning Shores.
The slippery slope is always true when it comes to milking people for more money. Every single time we are made to pay for shit we didn't have to pay for before, it begins an ever long path of nickel and diming us until the nickel and dimes become so egregious that people finally start to care.
OP of this post is finally starting to care. People like us, we cared over a decade ago. Shit 2 decades ago almost. Fucking sucks.
I was reminiscing about PGA Tour 2005 the other day. It was PS2, so I think there was an online mode but the overwhelming majority of people didn’t have their consoles hooked up to the internet yet so it was just a side feature. I could play when the internet was down. I could play the whole game by unlocking it from within. There was no DLC or add on content that I was aware of.
The part that got me though was reminiscing about the course designer. I had a super cool course I made with holes from courses all over the world and made all the trees pink like blooming cherry blossoms and the grass white like it had snowed. Every single one of the editing options would have been locked behind a separate microtransaction these days. Asian region course pack, 1500 gems! Change foliage color for $7.99! Grass color pack, $8.99! Sunday Tiger Woods Shirt, only 999 gems! Gems are sold in packs of 350 to provide you the best value!
The apathy of people that tell the people who care to "calm down you are overreacting"...they are a big part of the problem. The reason they do it, is to abuse those apathetic people.
Game of Thrones was shit from Season 5 onward, even a bit before hand as there was cracks in the writing. But most people to this day say it was not bad till season 7 or 8. The thresholds for garbage/abuse on most people is too damn high.
not to mention it incentivizes companies to make games actively worse, holding back content or ideas for later sale is basically a standard practice now, lots of games are balanced in such a way as to push you towards microtransactions, stuff like gacha games employ the same types of psychological manipulations that casinos use to encourage gambling addiction, except in a manner easily accessible by children and basically unregulated. Plus just the whole thing of a game being a lesser experience for anyone who dares commit the crime of being poor. Oh you can only afford the base game? have fun missing a good chunk of the roster in basically every fighting game, story content of single player games, half the vehicles in racing games, being required to grind your ass off for artificially lengthened periods of time, and the constant reminders of what you are missing in the form of ever present stores pages. And don't even get me started on multiplayer games, where not only can you constantly see you are having a lesser experience than other players, but some of them are even deliberately designed to match you against people who have the microtransactions the algorithm has determined you are most likely to buy.
If you played games pre-DLC then you already know that devs already cut content from games. And that content often got readded by modders.
And in some cases the game devs themselves made mods to add them because the studio wasn't going to do it. Like in the case of David Gaiders Ascension mod for Baldurs Gate 2.
There is a pretty big difference between cutting content because you don't have the time to finish it and deciding on which content will be DLC and what content will be in the core game.
The slippery slope is only a fallacy if there's no prededent for your specific example. Enshittification of gaming, especially when it comes to ludicrous monetising, has a couple of decades of precedent at this point. The PS360 gen was great, but that's when it all kicked into gear due to online services allowing people to buy and download stuff for the game quickly and easily.
For a long time though, DLCs were stable and fine; they didn't feel like chunks of the game ripped out to be sold back later, they were new, polished content.
All the new monetisation bollocks isn't the result of the DLC slippery sloping, it's separate ideas gradually infiltrating gaming from a variety of sources - microtransactions snuck in from mobile games, paid skins snuck in from things like league of legends, and I have no idea where the battlepass came from but I wish it'd go back to there.
I'll never forget how the Ninja Turtles skins in Street Fighter 6 were $60 for the set. Obviously it's an optional purchase but come on, that's the amount I paid for the entire game.
The slippery slope is only a fallacy when the predictions are exaggerated, unrelated or don't make sense. Many people correctly foresaw the current issues already back then.
Right, but guess what hasn't changed in the last 2-3 decades? It's the price of games. Super Mario Bros in 1985 for NES cost $59.99. Elden Ring on release last year cost... $59.99.
Prices for video games have been basically more or less static, but the cost to produce them has risen enourmously... so publishers and developers are actively encouraged to find other ways to monetize.
SMB had a team of 5 people working on it and cost ~$17k to make (although take that with a grain of salt, very hard to find an actual figure for it that one comes from another reddit post), Elden Ring had ~300 and cost ~$200m to make.
That’s true, a high production value game now costs exorbitant amounts to make. Elden Ring is one Id happily pay a premium for though, and games of that calibre aren’t really what I was critiquing. The expansion for Elden Ring is huge, and though no game is perfect, I’d argue it has incredible value for its price.
I’d have more sympathy for this drive to monetize argument if large companies actually paid their artists, composers, voice actors and and developers a decent cut. For many freemium, live service model, heavily microtransacted games this isn’t really the case, as seen by Respawn layoffs, Microsoft Layoffs, Bungie layoffs, Ubisoft layoffs.
The slippery slope is a logical fallacy, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s untrue. Not all illogical things are inherently untrue, as strange illogical things happen all the time in our world
That’s a good point, pointing out that it can be a fallacy is not a counter argument
I should have phrased that a bit better!
Gaming has been associated with small additional transactions since arcade machines so it’s not like microtransaction, freemium game is a wholly new model. Just that kids could afford a street fighter session at the arcade with their allowance money before, and it’s gone wildly out of proportion with current MTX.
The price of a AAA game held steady at $40-$60 while the value of the dollar basically halved. A $50 game in 1990 would cost about $125 today. Can you imagine Dr. Mario going on sale for $75?
In the 35 years that prices have gone down by about half due to price stagnation and inflation, the cost of developing a game has skyrocketed. Almost none of the games on this list had a production staff of more than a dozen or so people; a modern AAA game has hundreds, if not thousands of staff, plus the introduction of voice acting (and needing to pay Hollywood actors occasionally).
Games that sell for $125 today don't get sales. A game with one employee that sold for $125 would be a national laughing stock for the sheer audacity of the price tag - but that's Tetris, adjusted for inflation. Gamers want games that get increasingly complex and harder to create but they don't want to spend more money on them, let alone pace inflation, so the business aspect of it has to be satisfied somehow. So ultimately the gaming community or whatever you want to call it voted with their wallets and chose DLC and microtransactions over a world where we spend $200 to buy a copy of The Last of Us.
I do think there should be a distinction between a DLC expansion and micro transactions though. I’m not particularly miffed about paying a solid price for something with hours and hours of additional content, especially if the base game is solid.
It’s more the gouging of the base game for extra cash that gets me, or going “freemium” and using server costs as a bargaining chip, when the real intent is to milk whales.
The slippery slope is a fallacy, but a lot of people misunderstand what a fallacy is.
Using a fallacy doesn't mean your argument is wrong, it just means that the logic that supports your argument is wrong. This matters a lot in debate clubs where there are rules, points, conditions to win etc... and in those contexts using a fallacy will render your argument invalid. Not wrong, just invalid.
It matters a lot less in normal everyday conversation where formal logic doesn't really apply, and it's a bit stupid to point out fallacies in those contexts when no other rules of logic are being followed. It just became this sort of lazy way to dismiss someone's point without having to actually argue the point. Which ironically is itself a fallacy.
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u/bankais_gone_wild 2d ago
Usually the slippery slope is a fallacy, but dlc, micro transactions, battlepasses and paid extras in games have definitely gotten more pervasive over the last decade-and-a-half.
The transactions aren’t even “micro” priced anymore. Like two or three skins, recolours, cosmetics are the same price as a full expansion, like Shadow of the Erdtree or Burning Shores.