No, most people don't have access to casinos. Likely they would spend it on other luxury goods like bar visits, clothes they don't need or more games. Its just a way for games to extract more money from the market without providing any more value than before.
The thing with games is that the box price is extremely under what consumers value them, so selling consumers small bits of the game as micro transactions is the way games extract their actual market value. It doesn't deliver more value than before, but the current monetization better represents the value it delivers to consumers.
That’s a good theory, but everyone I know that’s worked with game microtransaction data says the majority of money comes from a few “whales”.
Some whales clearly suffer mental health issues (just from looking at the timing and amount of the transactions). The remainder are almost exclusively money laundering of some sort (usually converting stolen credit cards to game assets that can be sold for real money).
Coding is the hard part if you are bad at coding but good at maths and algorithms. Writing accurate code for solving a hard problem in under 30 minutes requires you to be really good at coding.
Linus Torvalds is evidence that a good PM/IT manager is worth a lot.
There aren't a lot of people that can make or lead a team to make world class products, but the number of marketing mangers who are exceptional enough to have significant impact on your company aren't that many either.
But the introduction of that LFG tool (more specifically the raid finder) also coincides with the start of wow bleeding subscribers, and they haven't recovered since and instead just kept bleeding.
I don't think there is any evidence that there would be less players in wow if they never introduced that feature, on the contrary there are plenty of things pointing in the opposite direction.
But other games that have a Raid Finder are doing well and rapidly increasing their player numbers: Final Fantasy 14 has had the exact same system since the beginning, and it's definitely not hurting their growth. I think that, despite the hate it gets, LFR was far from WoW's main cause of downfall.
That is how people learn how to pass tests instead of learning the material. Passing tests is important in college, but if you want to learn on your own it doesn't matter.
Yes, but I'd argue that the path you took was a very suboptimal path to reach the same understanding since you almost surely didn't reach it. So now you'd have to redo almost everything in order to reach the same goal making it a very huge waste of time. Of course I cannot be sure of that, but I have seen so many people who learned the way you did and they had really poor understanding. In my experience only the people who try to challenge themselves actually gets there.
Passing math classes requires almost no understanding at all btw, even getting good grades in them doesn't.
The main thing people lost here is hope. Before they were angry with Blizzard products but hope remained that the next game, the next expansion or the next patch would fix things. But now hope is lost, the community views this event as the final confirmation that Blizzard is run by really shitty people and their releases will just continue to get worse instead of shaping up.
> For WoW, as an example, it's inarguable that it's the biggest MMO of all time with a super active playerbase, even now.
That isn't clear at all that, right now is very different from a month ago. Final fantasy 14 could possibly be larger and if it isn't will very likely dethrone wow as the biggest mmorpg in the near future.
The crazy shit people believe from corporate media isn't called crazy since so many believe them. And the reason so many believe them is because all corporate media spreads it.
Also I am significantly more afraid of crazy shit that people don't call crazy than crazy shit everyone calls crazy.
Censorship based on how much money different groups spend and gets outraged is not very democratic compared to censorship based on democratic votes. And censorship based on democratic votes is seen as bad, what big corps do now is even worse.
The thing with games is that the box price is extremely under what consumers value them, so selling consumers small bits of the game as micro transactions is the way games extract their actual market value. It doesn't deliver more value than before, but the current monetization better represents the value it delivers to consumers.