Gaming and personal responsibility or flogging a dead horse's skeleton.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHszeYz5Mi0

Gaming has stopped being a pasttime for teenagers a long time ago. What average teenager can lay down $100 for a game and another $25 to upwards of $75 for it's DLC? It has been calculated that if Maxis keeps it's current schedule up for The Sims 4 and if the game has the same 5 year support cycle, people who collect the game fully will have paid close to $1500. The target-audience for games is thus logically the 30something with disposable income. Surveys support this, albeit it narrowly. The staunch gamer is the one that can't support their hobby.

The question remains why someone is hell-bend on getting everything that's being put out for a game over picking and choosing? No game ever became easier with a new skin for one's favorite gun. No matter how hard people scream 'nickle and diming!', the pure fact remains that one can enjoy any game without DLC. 'Do I want it?' is the question that one should ask themself, not 'Do I need it?'. The former is personal responsibility, the latter is laying the blame by the seller. It's my firm belief and opinion that 'need' does not enter the picture anywhere in gaming as a whole. If one worries about one's finances when it comes to gaming, it is for me a clear indicator that one probably has financial responsibilities that requires more attention than going up in arms over game-DLC.

That also applies to micro-transactions in a game. In the video, Jim Sterling removes his own platform by stating that the MTs are optional, but then proceeds to accuse the people using them as the one's responsible for it. He then attempts to prove that the MTs aren't optional at all by arguing that if MTs aren't used, the player is forced to use them anyway to avoid the grind. Another argument brought up is that one has already paid for the game and therefore shouldn't have to pay more.

Again there's that blaming the seller for selling, while the whole landscape in gaming is that it is a seller's market. The revenue Bethesda made with Fallout Shelter, a free mobile game that really doesn't require anything from the gamer than playing it, is astronomical and ballooned even more in the first two weeks of it becoming available on Android powered mobile devices. The revenue rivals the rake of Bethesda's triple A efforts. Interestingly, Jim Sterling proceeds to state that Bethesda did it right with Fallout Shelter, overlooking that a very wide group of gamers threw an insane amount of money at a publisher where it isn't needed at all. Basically, an african region could've been saved with the money that was spend buying lunchboxes.

Gamers created the industry, the industry didn't create the gamer. Oftenly, I have agitated against placing studios, publisher or singular faces within the industry on pedastals. They're not celebrities, they're not doing Nobel-prize worthy endeavors. They're selling you crap that you don't need. They exist to fuel your self-gratification and the price on that is whatever you're willing to pay.

Yes, MTs are optional. The choice to make use of them is one's own and having the choice isn't bad. If one thinks that dropping $5 (fictional amount) extra every now and then is defendable, then that one is right to do so. There's no morality here. What shouldn't happen, not for a moment, is making the one that does a villain.

What should happen, more than anything else, is making sure that MTs stay an optional choice first and foremost.