Quoting: x_wingDepending on the game, normally in-game/in-platform currency cannot be converted back to real world money. IMO, that's what they are fighting here. A valid discussion would be on why they don't do something against the many bots in Steam that allows the operation of external sites that do convert in-platform items into real world money.

Wouldn't it then be easier to demand that games allow you to refund your in-game currency, instead of trying to do some weird manoeuvre where you first have to convert real money into a cryptobro Monopoly money and then you can take your Monopoly tokens and cash them out at a wildly different rate back to human currency? The in-game currency you can always peg to the user's currency, after all.

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Quoting: superboybotCrypto-based transactions are more complicated. I think that games that allow both buying and selling crypto-assets will descend into Coinbase with pretty graphics. However, simply using crypto as a transactional currency to purchase in-game items should be allowed. The only counterpoint I can think of is that regular people do not understand crypto enough to treat it responsibly. I believe there is some truth to that, but I can see this becoming less and less of a factor in the next year or two.

This is just in-game currency with more steps.

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Quoting: shawnsterp

Quoting: BielFPs

QuoteAn apparent planned competitor to Steam named "Vapor"

An apparent planned competitor to Steam named "Steam" lol

I'm guessing those plans went up in smoke.

The future of Vapor appears quite foggy at best.

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I like this version of downloadable content.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEPRight, baseless... except being based on probably hundreds (by now) of examples from games, series, movies, entertainment industry itself, etc. from the last two decades proving it right.
With no example (to my knowledge) proving it wrong.

The problem is that your standard is so arbitrary and undefined that you can declare any flaw in any piece of media as having been caused by a political agenda. At the same time you can also reject any counter-examples by claiming that some arbitrary level of political-ness wasn't met by that work or its creator. So I am not exactly surprised that you have a vast multitude of examples about how politics are ruining entertainment and no examples to the contrary.

In the last two decades games have only gotten more interesting and not less. And the boring games and movies aren't seemingly the ones with a strong message, they are the ones that are watered down for the sake of mass market appeal. Which funnily enough seems like the most probable outcome when you put people in charge that are the perfect examples of the types of writers you value: ones that totally separate themselves from their works and have no personal political motivations of their own, at least as far as what ends up on the screen.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEPOne of those leads to the other, it is unavoidable.
If your focus is on pushing some agenda, your focus is not on doing good writing/worldbuilding/etc. and that will always show.

I am skeptical of the strong link you assert between political motivation and poor writing.

And if your focus is on pushing some agenda, your focus should be on doing good writing because if you have an agenda to push, it is in your interests to sell that agenda well. If a piece of media fails to do so then it's poorly written, and I don't see what value is gained by insisting that the writing would have been better had the writer been less politically engaged. That isn't even criticism, it's just baseless speculation without substance. It isn't constructive and nothing can be learned from it.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEPInstead, the point is that developers should keep their personal opinions and views where they belong (various discussion platforms exist for that purpose) and not taint an entertainment product in order to try and shove their views down the audience's throat via (usually very thinly veiled) pandering, preaching and self-insertions.
Stuff like that is insidious and disgusting.

This is extremely arbitrary and unhelpful. If the issue is "personal opinions", does that mean that you cannot create an game that deals with issues you have opinions on? These kinds of standards would have prevented the writing of works like Star Trek and 1984, where the writers had strong personal opinions that inspired their works. Bad, Orwell, bad!

I see two possibilities for what "don't put politics in video games" actually means. Either it means that your problem isn't actually politics, but rather than the quality of the writing which you perceive as preachy or pandering. In this case your problem isn't actually with the politics but poor writing and thus you should really be complaining about poor writing rather than politics.

The more "insidious and disgusting" possibility I see is that this complaint is raised by people when they encounter something that dissents from their norms. Status quo politics aren't political at all, but if it's something I don't like then it's political and if it's political then it has an agenda and if it has an agenda it is a threat. In this case the "don't put politics in video games" is but an attempt to shut down dissenting viewpoints because they are scary. A modern military shooter which glorifies a US invasion on a foreign country is totally apolitical, but a game having a trans character in it is a vicious attack against society that must be stopped before it leads to total chaos and anarchy.

Either way, I don't think the slogan really serves a purpose because clearly even you agree that there are games that deal with politics well. So, perhaps people should be more specific in what they are actually thinking.

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Quoting: wvstolzing

Quoting: SamsaiI sure wonder what games the "don't put politics in video games" crowd plays. Pong?

Dunno, Pong has a left side and a right side.

Hmm... Maybe Magnavox Odyssey, but without any of the overlays?

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I sure wonder what games the "don't put politics in video games" crowd plays. Pong?

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QuoteDefendants have sought to exploit a potential market that belongs exclusively to Take-Two.

Market which belongs exclusively to one party is called a monopoly, so I guess this means that Take-Two needs to pay antitrust fines or be broken up. :P

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