Whenever someone is complaining about the state of video games, a common mantra is always "vote with your wallet", ie if you want good video games to get made, only buy those games you think are worthy of your wallet, and the market will correct itself. But the emergence of microtransactions, lootboxes etc as an extremely profitable business strategy and so on seems to have thrown this out of the window.

So you spent $60 on a game you feel is a really quality product made with love, but for your 1 purchase literally hundreds or thousands of people spend even more money on microtransactions in games like Fortnite, Apex Legends or various phone games. These type of games are basically designed as addictive gambling schemes to get kids to spend vast amounts of money on their parents credit cards. In the East the same thing is happening with "gacha" games. From the point of view of supply and demand, publishers and developers are going to look at the billions being made by games like Fortnite and conclude that this type of game is the future.

"Vote with your wallet" implies a kind of equality in prices, but with microtransactions every game can now be turned into an almost unlimited source of revenue, 1 person is generally only going to buy the same game once, while someone can spend hundreds or thousands of dollars in 1 title with microtransactions. If it continues, almost all of gaming will end up being dominated by microtransactions in future decades.

It was relevant?

I don't pay more than $20 for any single game. I don't pay micro-transactions, and i've spent less than $10 on games in the last 3 years.

I'm voting with my wallet.

People need to realize, digital goods are fleeting. Fornight, if you spend $1000 on items, and the server shuts down... where is your $1000 in goods? It's poof!

At least with CD's, DVD's or games you can play offline, you can still play those on your own time. Online? Makes no sense to me.

Of course it is - and it always was.

That's because most people who say "vote with your wallet" (by which they mean nothing else than "spend no money on product X") forget a simple fact: that other people also vote with their wallets (by spending money).

And the developers/publishers are - for some strange reason - more inclined to care for the people who vote with their wallet by buying their products...than they care for the people who are not buying their products.

Especially since the first group (=the spenders) is usually the bigger one.

I vote with your wallet all the time.

Mobile games follow Sturgeons Law:90% of anything is crap.

The vast majority of modern gamers will happily buy any crap game, especially if it has an AAA label and/or big publisher's name slapped onto it, either/both of which, 99% of the time, account for the worst of the worst games.

So indeed telling people to "vote with your wallet" is an irrelevant waste of time. A few dissenters on the internet will have no impact whatsoever on the behavior of the vast majority who will continue to buy garbage en masse.

A similar principle is seen in how the comments of a few very loud voices on the internet who make a lot of noise about how Epic Games Store(EGS) is hated & desperate & failing & causing people not to use it via its aggressive marketing tactics, and causing devs on its platform to lose money via Epic exclusives...all of those premises have have no basis in reality at all, and in fact, the reality of EGS' 85 million users, which it had acquired after only 5 months of operation, and games like the new Metro one making record profits, strongly refutes all those premises.

But one would never realize the falsity of loud internet voices if one were to take commonly-said internet comments at face value as if they accurately reflect reality.

So I guess the takeaway lesson here is: the often-spoken words of internet commenters (that goes for anywhere, not just on GOG) are not anywhere near so representative of reality as they would have people believe.

Please stop spreading misinformation. Those 85 million users are not from within 5 months. The vast majority are players from Fortnite. The majority are console gamers. This is all info readily available from Epic's news interviews from Epic themselves.

It's hard for sensible people to vote with their wallets when millions of sheep pay and beg for the privilege to spend more money on things that just used to be part of games. Game companies create extremely grindy games and then let you pay to not play it (ie skip the content). It's a shame that so many sheep will line up at the teet of Activision or EA and beg for the taste and readily pay more for dribbles of content. It disgusts me that that's where we are. Companies who make record billions and lay off staff, who pay 0 in taxes (and even get hundreds of millions in rebates from those taxes) and want to milk every last penny from their paying audience. I'm becoming a jaded gamer because there aren't many big budget games that aren't recurrently monetized and which I can pay for it and just enjoy playing. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I don't want to give up over $100 for the complete* experience (well, almost.. It includes the FIRST season pass and some of the DLC) of a game. The games market is a total cesspool right now and I'm less and less inclined to support it.

Everybody is voting with it's wallet, but if you have huge backlog, than you do not have to buy more games instantly...

When people buy stuff they are indeed voting with their wallets, but like in every voting situation, there are people who think the others vote wrong.

Your Thread Title implies that some people buy the right things and others ....not.
If i value some kind of content which isn't your cup of tea: am i really on the wrong side?
Who is in charge to judge this?
Tastes are different...and this is deeply human.

Most kids and parents i know do not think about this at all. For them its just important to have a good time.
For some of them, Fortnite is quality. I think there is nothing wrong with that.

I treasure free choice. Go ahead, buy some skins for apex. Thats ok for me. Because it does not impact my life at all.

Quality of games would not be better, if EA, Ubisoft or Blizzard are out of Business.
Music would not be better, if apple, spotify etc. are closing.
If there is some company that have visions that i appreciate, i will happily pay them. And i am absolutely positive, that there will ever be some stuff that matches my preferences...regardless what millions of others are playing right now.

So in conclusion i do not believe in voting with wallet.

Not only is it relevant, it's the only thing that's relevant. It's thanks to people voting with their wallets we still have GOG.

I always vote with my wallet. Requires lots of patience and a healthy pinch of determination, but i am always up for it...

Diablo missing Expansion and soundtrack? No, thank you.

Warcraft 2 being locked in Battlenet edition, missing original version and soundtrack? No, thank you.

Old policies and principles being axed? Wallet trimmed and axed, in retrospect.