Your claim that there has been "decades of voting with our wallets" is laughable. Nobody I know who plays games decides to buy them or not based on ideological reasons - they just buy the things that are popular or that their friends play. There's extremely little engagement on these issues.
But it's true. Most people pay for what's being currently promoted. So "voting with wallet" doesn't really work, because you will be outvoted by majority of people who don't know what they're getting into. That's why gacha games and other lootbox-heavy ones are most profitable. This is where "vote with your wallet" brought us.
You're confused about the meaning of "voting with your wallet".
> But it's true.
It's not - you're talking about something else entirely. When @umvi says "vote with your wallet" they mean buy things whose values you support. You, and GP @thrance, are not describing that - you're describing people buying things on autopilot without respect to values - the exact opposite. So, no, we haven't had decades of "unsuccessful voting with your wallet" because consumers have been mentally checked out for decades.
> So "voting with wallet" doesn't really work, because you will be outvoted by majority of people who don't know what they're getting into
That's literally how normal democracy works - if the majority of the populace is uninformed, then they'll vote in an uninformed way, and the solution is for them to get informed and start doing research and making conscious decisions. That's what @umvi means when they say "vote with your wallet." - active participation instead of passive existence.
You're confusing the lack of active participation with the presence of it.
>You're confused about the meaning of "voting with your wallet".
>You're confusing the lack of active participation with the presence of it.
Probably.
>you're describing people buying things on autopilot without respect to values
That is probably where I am confused - I'm not sure that people "do not respect the values". It's either that they have values, but those values are imposed, or it's what you describe, that people just don't think deeply about it. And from my personal experience I really can't tell. But when I read the web, everyone apparently figured it out, and do indeed consciously decide.
Then why do you call it "vote with your wallet" and not "buy stuff you like"? If you don't intend for your purchase to weigh in on anything, why do you call it "voting"?
If that's truly what you mean by "vote with your wallet", then yeah, we're on the same page. I almost only play solo games, most of them indie.
The problem with democracy: people on average have average intelligence and you don't solve difficult problems with average intelligence. That being said, it's still better than anything else we've tried.
Right - I'm also hand-waving a bit here and lumping democratic republics in with "true democracies" for the sake of simplicity, but you're absolutely correct.
It would be fair, but when you go online, everyone (and I mean everyone) shares their distaste for modern gaming industry and its practices. Yet, those practices still bring the most money to this day. So does it mean that people go against their principles? Or is it just another "vocal minority" situation?
There's some evidence that it's a vocal minority. Taking a game made by a terrible company that has a lot of dark patterns, Call of Duty Black Ops 6 has sold at least 491 thousand units (https://steamdb.info/app/1938090/charts/) (certainly far higher, but apparently they haven't published the sales figures, so this is the best lower bound that we get), yet you see far fewer than that number of Reddit posts and comments and upvotes, or upvotes on YouTube videos about these terrible practices.
I suspect that the majority of those who play games would rather these mechanics not exist, but don't feel strongly enough about it to boycott those games. I don't have evidence for this beyond my interactions with personal friends and their "mild apathetic unhappiness" for lack of a better term.
There's also definitely a number of people that are willing to accept some compromise to either play a very well-made game, or one that their friends are playing. I hate Epic Games and its practices, for instance, but I'm willing to play Fortnite with friends if they ask me, and I justify that by telling myself that I'm never going to buy anything with their premium currency.
You proved my point: "voting with your wallet" will never work. DLCs, microtransactions, lootboxes... They all got normalized alarmingly quickly, despite numerous calls to "vote with your wallets" every single times. We need regulations, isolated individuals have no power against a system built to extract the most out of them.
> You proved my point: "voting with your wallet" will never work. DLCs, microtransactions, lootboxes... They all got normalized alarmingly quickly, despite numerous calls to "vote with your wallets" every single times.
Factually incorrect. There are numerous instances of consumers complaining, leaving bad reviews on Steam, refunding games, or stopping buying games because of their values, and the studios/producers actually changed the thing. Helldivers 2's mandatory PSN account is one of the most recent instances of that happening.
Factually, consumers will band together to take collective action, and when they do, there are positive effects. The problem is apathy, not lack of power.
> We need regulations, isolated individuals have no power against a system built to extract the most out of them
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.
Make up your mind - does voting work, or does it not?
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.
