Having to hire a real human being to represent a made-up character is an obstacle. “Games without actors” are how game development worked for decades. Even long after voice acting was technically possible, a lot of games did not have any, as a design decision. PS1 Final Fantasy games have oodles of full-motion video - but the characters speak exclusively in text.
The expectation of voiced characters adds immense cost, time, and restraint on any game. That is going to change. There is nothing anyone can do to stop it, and any backlash will be short-lived. This fight is already over.
And for anyone worried about the art of acting - look into “style transfer.” The shape of a voice actor’s throat can become as irrelevant as the shape of a voice actor’s face. When any person can sound like any character, all that matters is the performance.
Fortnite makes four billion dollars a year. That’s not “free.” That’s a wallet siphon. A casino with no cover charge is still a casino. It only exists to take unlimited quantities of your actual money.
All games manipulate you into valuing arbitrary nonsense. That is what makes them games. Directly monetizing that is an abuse of how your brain works. It’s a deliberate confusion of make-believe value and real-world value. And it’s so effective, these companies don’t even need to sell the game to make billions of dollars… but they can also charge seventy goddamn dollars up-front and gouge you in-game. And people still fucking buy it. Perfectly normal adults will drop a thousand dollars on one game in one month and insist they weren’t scammed. As if the funny hats they got were worth twenty times the entire rest of the game.
Any form of charging real-world money inside a video game is just lootboxes with more steps. It’s all the same shit and it all needs to go. It’s in every genre, on every platform, at every price point. Boycotts don’t work, it’s so profitable. We will never shop our way out of it. It is the dominant strategy.
If we allow this continue there will be nothing else.
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