Here are some relatively cheap games to give kids that aren’t fortnite or roblox and dont run on some subscription/internal monetary currency:
- Risk of Rain 2
- Minecraft (Java)
- Tunic
- Stardew Valley
- A Hat in Time
- Baba is You
- Fate (Wildtangent)
- Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga (Not the Skywalker Saga)
- Chip’s Challenge 1 and 2
- Shovel Night (Treasure Trove)
Boozilla@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Evil genius marketing, working as it always does. The kids don’t know any better, so they are being exploited and conditioned to think the horrible new normal is just the way things have to be. And most parents are too tired and busy to find better alternatives.
Jiggle_Physics@lemmy.world 11 months ago
It’s simple, the games that appeal the most to kids require some form of subscription. If those games didn’t, then they wouldn’t want ones with subscriptions.
Orbituary@lemmy.world 11 months ago
The games that appeal most to kids play upon their dopamine response and generate addictive patterns.
Nacktmull@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Did it never occur to you that this might not be just coincidence?
Astaroth@lemm.ee 11 months ago
How you worded this makes it seem like “if those games didn’t” refers to requiring subscriptions.
I would suggest editing it to “If those games didn’t appeal to kids” or similar; if what you meant was that kids just plays what appeals to them, and those games “just happens” to be subscription games.
stopthatgirl7@kbin.social 11 months ago
I was talking just today with some coworkers about how having subscriptions instant of owning is what is normal to kids now - not just games, but things like Netflix and Spotify. So this doesn’t surprise me, but does depress me. Technofeudalism is the new normal.
lolcatnip@reddthat.com 11 months ago
In my teen years I spent a large fraction of my disposable income on music. A Spotify subscription is a vastly better value than buying whatever I could scrounge from a used CD store. Back then it was common for me to read about some semi-obscure recording and just have to wonder what it sounded like, because I had no hope of finding it in a store, and a special order was way out of my budget. Now I can listen to damn near anything that’s ever been published for less than I spent as a teenager.
A lot of subscription services suck and are just a way to milk customers, but streaming audio and video are not in that category.
Boozilla@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I keep hoping–perhaps naively so–for a major backlash against this. Sometimes consumers have power, and sometimes they don’t. But maybe we’ll all get fed up with this bullshit and start just dropping any and all unnecessary subscriptions from our lives. The big problem is when a brand becomes synonymous with a product (like fucking Adobe and ProTools, for two examples).
GrammatonCleric@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I’m an adult and I play a few different games like this.