https://www.inverse.com/gaming/baldurs-gate-3-lawsuit-larian-studios-tiktok
Viral rumors of a lawsuit against 'Baldur's Gate 3' claim the game is just too darn good. But what's actually going on? We dig into the facts.
You know what, it's just a clickbait article but I do want a change in the industry. I want us to go back to before MTX and Battlepasses, and loot boxes.
I'll go back in time and stop mobile games from happening and corrupting the industry as a whole.
MTX wasn't an invention of mobile games.
All the way back in 2010 the EA CEO of the era thought about charging players for reloading in Battlefield (at critical moments at that, to increase the chance of purchase), Bethesda had horse armor, Double Dragon 3 required extra coins for more powerups.
Nobody ruined or corrupted the gaming industry other than the gamers. In other entertainment sectors usually when a company starts making poor quality products the customer goes elsewhere. But never the gamers. Best selling games are still GTA V, CoD whatever, Diablo 4 and Pokémon; you hear people being unhappy with these series time and time again but it's basically filler conversation. We hear about how ridiculously broken the game is and the absurd monetization and after getting it all off their chest people ultimately leave to grab their copy of the thing they just trashed.
And unless the game goes viral like Undertale, Hollow Knight or Stardew Valley you never hear about indie games. Even though they are one hundred times more varied, poloshed, fun and made by people who care; most channels would rather keep talking about the AAA shit. Indie channels don't get nearly as much following, even though even at it's best AAA gaming weren't that creative or varied.
There is nothing wrong with mobile games, especially at this point even the ones the people would refer to as some of the worst are not any worse than AAA games at monetization. The only problem is one of curation, good mobile games get made like Questlord but get lost under the mountain overmonetized generic trash. If Android had it's own storefronts like Steam and GOG for the dedicated gamers things could've been different, but as far as I know nothing of the sort has been done yet.
I'm playing indie games and having a blast, just recently finished Prodeus for example.
While I can agree that those things were integral to how our industry became what it is it seems weird that you'd defend mobile games so hard. For every GTA V there was a Farmquest, with timesavers that no one batted an eye at. So while yes, horse armor DLC was a big factor in people's acceptance to our current day standard; mobile games were very much the catalyst.
Because mobile games are an entirely different beast.
Mobile gamers either don't know better or simply can't access to anything else. Gaming hardware is expensive, even budget gear is unaffordable to many people. So them accepting predatory monetization is excusable (not all of whom do by the way, there is a market for traditional games on mobile).
No such excuse applies to hardcore gamers. They had something great and it was apparent what overmonetization would do to it, and yet they supported the aforementioned monetization anyway. They even came up with excuses like "it's fine, they are just cosmetics".
Oh well, at least indies are great and require highend gaming setups.