KManX89 said:
It was all because of the paid horse armor in Oblivion. And the funny thing is, we tried to warn them what would happen if we took this lying down and the corpo bootlickers downplayed it and told us “don’t like it, don’t buy it”. As much backlash as Bethesda rightfully got for it, there was a big enough group of people who not only accepted it, but bought the horse armor. And so the very thing we warned them would happen did happen. All the DLC and microtransaction bullshit we’ve been getting for the past 20 years is because of the paid horse armor. I’ll always point to this very moment in time whenever people give me that “slippery slope is a logical fallacy” song and dance against shady microtransactions. |
Without the Oblivion horse armor a different game would have tried to sell microtransactions (either cosmetic stuff or additional maps/mini-levels/characters).
Publishers would have tried that years before, but in older consoles online connections and online stores weren't ready yet, so they had to settle to sell additional stuff as bigger expansion packs on discs (or sell "special editions" of popular games on discs/modules; f.e. Need for Speed 1 S.E., Sonic & Knuckles).
The 7th console gen brought a new distribution method and online stores... of course all the publishers were very interested in selling mini-expansions for a small price. It is very naive to think that this additional source of revenue would have died if the Oblivion horse armor would have failed.
Back in the days where computer games were distributed on floppy discs, "mini expansions" were already a thing, f.e.
- Test Drive 2 Car Discs
- Wing Commander / Strike Commander mission discs
- additional golf courses to golf games
