The gaming industry has seen a real revolution in itself in the past 2 decades. With this new year, it also seems that in the past 23 years, the gaming industry has moved on from making games to making cash cows. But with this, there needs to be an adequate study. Regarding the reasons for the entire industry to take an extreme turn. The turn from making fun and enjoyable games, to pay-to-win titles with no real story or fun factor. And this is also why Twitch streamer Asmongold feels that the real reason for all this happening is not the game developers, but are actually fans themselves.

Moreover, the entire history behind these micro-transactional video games. They have nothing more to offer than just limited-time offers on items that are worth nothing in real life. This is also to show how time and time over, several mechanisms came together to make video games, just a shell of their glorious past and make it empty from within.

Asmongold reacts to a popular video on “what went wrong with gaming?”

Josh Strife Hayes, a gamer turned YouTuber, recently made a video on how he thinks the entire gaming industry is going in the wrong direction because of the inclusion of monetization in video games instead of actual content.

Regarding this Asmongold said, “A lot of these systems are designed in a way that they do make the game worse, or not utilizing these systems makes the game worse. That’s like one of the worst things that pay for convenience in games has, is that it makes it to where it is financially lucrative for a developer to make a game inconvenient because now they can sell the shortcut.”

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However, it is also to be noted that this change in the industry didn’t come overnight. It took a proper amount of time and effort by devs to understand the psychology of gamers.

How MapleStory became the backbone of micro-transactions and how later games used it to their advantage?

According to Josh Strife Hayes’ video, MapleStory, a Korean game, was the first ever game to implement micro-transactions for several items on a lottery basis. This affected kids to buy more and more random tickets to get a better gift. Following this, Elder Scrolls Oblivion also added micro-transactions for Horse armor. This made the game even more expensive even after buying the original/base game.

Later, games like Farmville, which was popular back in 2009 and were played mostly by Facebook users. Such games got into the idea of giving limited-time access to players to the game via energy meters. This was also later expanded upon, in games like FIFA ultimate team. It is based on random cards being distributed, giving the sensation of winning, or superiority to gamers. It was only then that games actually took a sudden shift into in-game transactions. This led to them making more money out of small transactions than huge transactions like selling a sequel to a game.