Video games are getting too expensive and its killing gaming – Reader’s Feature

metro.co.uk:

A reader is dismayed at the cost of The Last Of Us Part 1 and Diablo Immortal and worries what it means for the future of gaming.

My dad, and probably yours too – it’s a common sentiment, always used to say that nothing in life is free. That was true in his day and it’s doubly true in the internet age, when so many things pretend to be free but secretly rely on taking your personal information as payment, or your time as you watch ads or become frustrated into spending real money to hurry things along.

The obvious example of this phenomenon at the moment is Diablo Immortal, a game which is by all accounts quite good in term of gameplay, but which has been ruined by its microtransactions. According to reports you can easily spend over £5,000 on in-game items and not get anything worthwhile out of it.

The whole game has been designed to wring the maximum amount of money out of the small percentage of players willing to pay thousands for in-game items (the so-called whales). The game’s been downloaded over 10 million times but if it follows the pattern of other ‘free’ to play games there’s probably only a few thousand that are spending these massive amounts of money.

You may think that this means it’s not a problem, since it only affects a small percentage of players, but that’s not the issue at all. The problem is that the whole game has been designed around tempting these whales. Blizzard doesn’t care about 95% of the players, it cares about the 5% that actually bring in the money.

So you’ve got a game that’s not designed as a game at all. It’s not designed to entertain, in the traditional sense, it’s designed to tempt you into spending money on it, and that is same with the majority of other big name mobile games.

It’s a