I just checked the DBC Store on live and the LoN prize packs are still available. Maybe they just removed them from the free 500 DBC option. I got about 10 days until I can claim my next one and find out.
A good post overall, but I have to nit-pick this point. Nintendo priced their products in a way that they knew full well that they would lose money on the hardware and make their profit from selling copies of the games along with developer licensing fees. In the 1980s and 1990s the standard distribution model was set up so that a developer was lucky to receive about 20-30% of the gross and the publisher would take the rest. The publisher was responsible for producing the physical copies, marketing, and renting premium shelf space. The most successful games only produced and sold several million copies and profits were relatively modest when compared with what is possible in today's industry. Fast forward to today, where with digital distribution you basically can forget about producing and shipping physical products. A AAA title might require an insane amount of money for the marketing effort, but it costs a company almost nothing to sell an additional 10 million copies of a virtual product. You'll have payment processing fees, return fees, server costs if applicable, additional customer service headcount, but that's about all. Peanuts in the grand scheme of things. That is why AAA games can make far more profit at the same price point (disregarding inflation). Microtransactions are accepted by a large enough minority of players (including a few 'whales') to the point where a game company would be foolish not to include them in some form. If we as consumers want to be rid of them, then we as consumers need to put our money where our collective mouth is and stop making these extra transactions so profitable.
No. When an industry does not want to self regulate a practice that is predatory, then regulation is required to correct the issue. We shouldn't been introducing kids and anyone who has addiction problems to gambling. Just because the law has caught up to the digital times does make it the wright thing to do.
It's easy to distinguish between what is gambling (random rewards from an LON loot pack) and Marketplace items, where you know exactly what you are purchasing. I don't have an issue with the latter, other than instances where publishers are blatantly selling a competitive advantage or where too many development resources are devoted to producing content for the microtransaction shop and ignoring what customers value far more (additional playable content).
While I agree with your points about Nintendo making up for hardware losses in game sales. I think your overstating the current digital sales market, (unless we are talking about mobile gamers, then yes 100% digital). The console game market is still 70-80% Physical distribution so while some cost may have gone down, it’s not like they disappeared. There is also a vastly different budget required to make a AAA game these days. While I can’t get an exact dollar number, Super Mario Bro’s had 5 developers working on it. Super Mario 3D World had 90 developers and when accounting for inflation it cost us $40 less than Super Mario Bros originally did. Super Mario Bros 2: 7.5 million units (1&3 were bundled with the NES so unfair comparison) Super Mario 3D World: 5.5 million units 18x the development cost and way less sales (same is true with the newest Mario if we want to just say the Wii U was a failure). Obviously that’s just applied to Mario, but we can look at it across plenty of titles. Something has to give and that I believe is why we see more DLC, micro transactions, and collector editions than ever before. Especially the blind draw micro transactions, because they make more money for less effort. At the end of the day, when Candy Crust can make billions with way less effort than a AAA studio. I expect the cost of AAA games to go up. I just would rather have higher upfront cost than any blind draw.
