I suppose I can see your point. And really, paying for the transitory experience of playing 20 hours' worth of WoW or StarCraft or whatever isn't really all that different, conceptually-speaking, from paying $9.50 for the transitory experience of sitting in a darkened movie theater and watching someone else tell you a story on a big screen, or spending $15.99 for the transitory experience of buying a bunch of glued-together pages with words on them and sitting down and reading it through from front to back one time. At the end of the day, you're paying for the experience, interactive or not.
Where I can't quite figure out why people would bother, is with these games where you pay for "upgrades" or "experience" or "gear", or whatever. I mean, paying a PREMIUM, over and above the base subscription fee, for that. I mean, presumably, that sort of thing shortcuts the alleged pleasure of being able to collect that stuff for yourself, and so you're basically paying, not to EXPERIENCE somenthing, but to be able to AVOID the experience, right? That so totally does not seem worth it, to me.
It's just a matter of being able to access more content without having to go through the slag of getting the gear the hard way. One of the reasons I stopped playing WoW is because it got to the point where, in order to see more content, I needed better equipment. In order to get better equipment, I had to go through specific dungeons, and defeat specific bosses who would have a say, 20% chance of dropping the piece of equipment I was looking for. If they didn't drop it, then I had to do the entire dungeon over again. And most of the time these dungeons required 5 people to go through, so it wasn't just like I could do it myself over and over again. I'm not saying I would have bought the gear, had I had the option, but this is a case where I can see someone paying for the privilege of not having to run the same dungeon over and over and over again in hopes of getting the gear they need, so they can go ahead and reach the new content they're trying to see. And honestly, I think that 20% is high.
The other reason people will pay for "premium" gear is that often MMORPGs have a player-vs-player (PVP) component to them. So in this case they can pay for better gear, which allows them to exert their superiority over the other players who didn't pay for the "premium" gear.
Blizzard is a great example of a company that doesn't specifically monetize digital goods. They do it to keep the playing field level. I feel like companies in the US are still experimenting with how to monetize stuff like this (the avatar store, etc) and most people, like we see here are adverse paying for this.
Compare that to Korea. Digital goods in games there is much more social acceptable.
Where I can't quite figure out why people would bother, is with these games where you pay for "upgrades" or "experience" or "gear", or whatever. I mean, paying a PREMIUM, over and above the base subscription fee, for that. I mean, presumably, that sort of thing shortcuts the alleged pleasure of being able to collect that stuff for yourself, and so you're basically paying, not to EXPERIENCE somenthing, but to be able to AVOID the experience, right? That so totally does not seem worth it, to me.
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The other reason people will pay for "premium" gear is that often MMORPGs have a player-vs-player (PVP) component to them. So in this case they can pay for better gear, which allows them to exert their superiority over the other players who didn't pay for the "premium" gear.
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Compare that to Korea. Digital goods in games there is much more social acceptable.
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