News - Micro-transactions Ruined Warzone 2, Will They Ruin Cod 2024 Too
If not some nft nonsense, I mean they had one guy draw some pictures of Nicki Minaj and Homelander on his iPad, and now they are selling those pictures individually for like 15 bucks a pot. It has 500 different packages and bundles and limited-time exclusive offers, and you think you were on some streaming service or Amazon about to buy all this cool stuff.
But in reality, it's just virtual little pictures of stuff. Granted, some of those little pictures are actual in-game weapon attachments and other useful unlocks that you can use to statistically outperform all the pathetic little normies who didn't cough up the extra 50 bucks or more, but those victories will still be Hollow It's important we understand how microtransactions have hollowed out the Cod experience in the Cod Community because this game will never realize its full potential so long as it's being used primarily as a platform to Hawk nfts on stupid asses, the best example of how microtransactions.
To Twitter, now you had to buy the blue check mark. Ironically, none of the OG blue check marks ever actually saw the blue check mark as some sort of status symbol; it really was just about verification, but because it was used to verify noteworthy people, the [__]] musk stands got it in their heads that having the blue check mark made you somebody when in fact they had it backwards.
You weren't somebody because you had a blue check mark; you got a blue check mark. The blue check mark became something to be ashamed of, so they introduced a feature where you can hide the check mark after you buy it. It's beyond parody; they killed the status symbol they crave by trying to buy it without having earned it, because when you change how the reward is achieved, you change what the reward signifies.
Mus took it even further and bestowed significant in-game advantages for those willing to pay to play; their tweets are automatically boosted in the feed and reply high above the tweets of anyone who didn't pay, so now instead of the old days where the best arguments or wittiest jokes made it to the top of your screen based on how much attention they earned organically, we instead have a system where the highest biders are always on top and it's just bot spam advertisements.
Tech Bros pushing their latest Ponzi schemes, fallacious arguments, and cringeworthy jokes from [__] who can barely spell the results for Twitter, have been devastating; it's lost billions in value and shed huge sadness on its user base. Also, it could sell the social media equivalent of penis enlargement pills to a bunch of insecure morons.
They damaged the quality of the product so they could generate extra revenue, out of a half minority of its user base, and I would argue that's exactly what's happened with Call of Duty. There was a time when a player's unlocks told a story about who they were and what they had accomplished, Gold camo on your Bowie knife.
Mastery emblem: global thermonuclear war title. I remember working with my boy Tommy to get the Thousand emergency airdrops emblem it was fun and imbued the community with a sense of mutual recognition, and the gameplay with added purpose knowing your effort would result in something worth bragging about but the only thing anyone thinks nowadays when they see some skin or crazy unlock no matter how badass it looks is look at this little dwee who got a hold of their parents' credit card and bought the dumbest thing you could ever spend money on by making these playful status symbol something you could forcibly purchase they have robbed them of their playfulness and neutered their status, cuz even if some unlocks are still achieved legitimately.
How will the average Joe really be able to tell which is which? So there's just no reason to really work for the in-game rewards anymore, which is a huge blow to the game's overall replay value. As for in-game skill, how can anyone's combat record or in-game achievements of any kind really be respected when none of us can know for sure who spent how much money on easy access to the most powerful guns and attachments in the game?
So now Cod is pure nihilism. Nothing matters outside of the 150 points popping up on your screen when you kill someone; they damag the quality of the product so they could farm extra revenue out of a small minority of its user base. Now we don't have as clear a look into Cod's player count or revenue as we did with Twitter, so we can't say for sure how bad the damage is, but it's telling that this year the vast majority of Cod's maps were reskins from previous titles and that they had to reuse the War Zone map for both the campaign and zombies.
It certainly feels like a game that was worried it wouldn't turn a profit if it didn't dramatically reduce its production costs, a game trying to skate by on significantly fewer players and smaller profit margins than it once had, but this is about more than Cod's bottom line. You know, the tragedy of what happened to Twitter is that it really was a beautiful tool for mankind.
So many of the world's greatest thinkers, artists, writers, and scientists mixed in with journalists, politicians, and celebrities. All congregated in one chat room, with the rest of us following along like it's prime minister's questions, cheering or jeering every new Zinger that some cashier at Walmart landed on a billionaire.
It had its faults, but I learned so much that it opened the world to me. It was as if we got to witness the Library of Alexandria in real time, and don't get me wrong, it still has a lot of that going on, but you can tell the vibrancy is taking a hit. Part of what made it great was the meritocratic nature of it—that any joeo could deliver a brutal takedown of a president or a prime minister for all the world to see just because the tweet was that well written, that biting, and hilarious—but now it's just another pay-to-play hierarchy.
Your rioting matters less than how much dough you dish out reading through the replies to any major tweet was always a joy; now it's just crypto spam and race science or mean-spirited vitri all delivered with zero literary flare, and how many great intellects and great tweets will never reach an audience because they rejected being strong-armed into an arbitrary microtransaction.
And so I feel the same way about Cod; it's still Cod. 20 years on, I still love seeing those 150 points pop up on the screen, but you can tell the community has been hollowed out. Any article game is about voluntarily overcoming unnecessary obstacles to reach imaginary goals. When you add an extra $50, the price tag on the imaginary goals is $110.
