Activision's Manipulative Microtransaction Patent

Damn.  They really want to bleed their audiences dry. 

Ashley, no.  I haven't seen an Rooster Teeth ads when I surf the web.  I have been excepting them since most of internet traffic is to roosterteeth.com

I feel like Mica should have had some colour swatches at the end there, from morally grey to black.  "How shady is it?"

But for real, it feels like game developers really want to start shifting the risk they take making any game these days onto the players, like they want us to gamble on lootboxes so games aren't so much of a gamble for them.  I guess it makes sense that they want some kind of stability, but it still massively sucks, and I'm worried it's just going to make games suck.  I know you don't have to buy any lootboxes or items or anything, but I don't want my gaming experience from now on to be like walking into a shop and having the staff coming up, saying 'are you alright today?', and constantly bugging you trying to get you to buy stuff.

Hella shady.  I've been trying to remain open minded about all of this but if this is what game developers are resorting to then I can no longer in good conscience pay full price for the game initially.  They're already making billions off of full priced games and now they're going to make even more billions on the backend as well?  I'm sorry but bleeding your customer base dry like that is bullshit.  

And since some games are geared towards children what kind of values will future generations have when they grow up in that type of environment?  What are we teaching our children here?  Nothing good I can tell you that!

The Activision patent is interesting as a Steam game called BrainOut seems like it might already be using these for matchmaking... to the point of completely breaking games - particularly for those (few maybe?) of us who don't do microtransactions... I'd be happy enough for Activision to sue the makers of BrainOut if they have done it but I don't honestly know how you'd ever know without seeing the code itself and that's not going to happen without a very long, drawn-out legal battle.

huh... yeah, that's pretty vile. My bet on the next big thing is matchmaking with artificially increased wait times, along side limited-use "fast-passes" being sold to get the extra-paying players back to the norm. 

Oh, and that's after you pay your internet provider for your monthly "premium gaming experience" fee once they kill off net neutrality. We're living in the future everyone! First they said it would be a utopia, then they said it would a dystopia, now it's looking like... whatever the heck this is. The fuuuutuuuuure...

Shady AF!