I love the NBA 2K games, but they peaked around 2014, when you could realistically play the career mode without spending another 100 bucks to juice your player or, barring that, play two seasons worth of games.
I don’t mind paid dlc to an extent. People who work on making new expansions and maps and modes to extend the life of a loved game need to get paid too. Loot mechanics can cheese me off a bit- it’s one thing to have to grind a challenge 1000 tikes to get a special item- but having the only realistic or only actual way to get something be to gamble real money isn’t even a challenge or a reward. It’s literally just gambling. What’s more- these things don’t port forward to newer releases or even re released of a game. You end up with a system where you can’t keep playing or go back and play old games once the server goes down because those mechanics are integral to achieving a fulfilling or complete play experience.
So beyond being predatory it devalues the ownership of the game. It takes away the core of gaming at home and creates an arcade “pay to play” experience- an experience that many console and PC gamers either didn’t appreciate or couldn’t afford. By the time you’re done paying for a game you may have sunk hundreds of dollars or more- only for the next one to come out. And that hurts games because game developers know this. GTAV is amazing- and GTA online is an awesome feat. But it’s also held back GTA 6 and new adventures because not only is the old game still profitable for very little added cost over initial development- but players with thousands of dollars invested in being the baddest in the land and knowing all the ins and outs and streets and mechanics as though they lived there- wouldn’t be happy If overnight they went back to being noobs-
and after doing this a couple tiles most would stop seeing the point in investing so much money in a world they knew from experience would disappear in a few years. Instead of the profits being invested into making more games that advance the art- they go to bloating the salaries and bonuses, not of the creative minds behind the scenes, but of management and those who work on marketing and tweaking the formulas that target players and optimize the profitability of pay to play mechanics. Sports games were already a bit of a cash grab- graphics improve but the rules of the games themselves stay the same. You change some player rosters and maybe add some play mechanics to spice it up and make things feel different- then you grab money for a new madden every year from a huge and basically guaranteed consumer base. Sport game buyers but sport games. If it’s the sport they like, it can get all the bad reviews as long as it’s the only option for their sport-
or it’s got at least better reviews than the others. They just want to pretend they are playing or watching a sports game. Give them that and they’ll give you money. No need to freaking rob them. They get that enough in the sports fandom.
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