That is a common approach by the PRC in pretty much everything, consume every limited resource as fast as possible before others can consume them, space orbits included.
Yes they are not on the same level, Thailand used to be far ahead but has stagnated and Vietnam has caught up, Cambodia is so far behind you cannot imagine it will ever catch up with its neighboring countries. They still use dollars as currency because the local currency is so unstable
You can point the fingers everywhere, you can also say the French were at fault because of the core of the Khmer Rouge group were scholarship students who were sent to France to study socialism, came back with that education and used to to establish the Khmer Rouge.
It's not exactly true, Pol Pot went to France on a scholarship to become an electrical engineer. When he came back to Cambodia, he worked as a literature teacher.
The ideological content of the Khmer Rouge is very poor overall, and is a mix between nationalism and communism aiming to "clean" the nation from western influences. Which is kind of ironic given Pol Pot's background.
As a Thai person I want to clarify its not Thai people doing this, it's Chinese people who have setup scam call centers near the golden triangle (where law enforcement is non-existent, it is a drug trafficking area) who are running the show, and they exclusively target only Chinese people.
What he meant is that company's MO is buying IPs of successful franchises that are dear to many gamers, release 1-2 crappy games on that IP that is filled to the brim with microtransactions which is not well received by the customers (but makes them money), resulting in the death of that franchise. Rinse and repeat for whatever IPs still remain to be bought.
It creates money, but contributes 0 or negative value for the actual gaming industry, unlike other companies like FromSoft that consistently hits the ball out of the park, pushing the envelope on new franchises and new gaming genres. THAT, is creating value.
>which is not well received by the customers (but makes them money),
stated preference vs revealed preference, or alternately, the people commenting about games on HN or reddit aren't reflective of the average EA customer.
That a heroin addict's "stated preference" is to quit does not mean they secretly want to be a drug addict when their "revealed preference" for something deeply addictive comes around.
That argument might work against f2p lootbox games, but that does not explain the "release 1-2 crappy games on that IP that is filled to the brim with microtransactions" phenomena that's described in the GP. Nobody is like "wow this game doesn't have lootboxes? I guess I'm not going to buy it". If someone is buying such a game, to a first approximation they're buying for the gameplay, not because they're addicted to gambling and are buying it to get their fix.
The point is when microtransactions are involved, the gameplay and overall quality of the game suffers, because they are no longer the priority, the microtransactions become the priority. Decisions will be made by the game developers to increase the spending on microtransactions with less regard to the effect on gameplay, and from the studio perspective, this is fine as long as its profitable. In the short term this could be true (despite bad reviews these games tend to still be profitable), but in the long run this is rarely true as they end up milking the loyal fanbase for as much money as possible with the mtx, until there is no one left to milk and hence the IP dies.
This approach doesn't look to add value to the existing IPs, it looks to drain as much money as it can out of whats left of the IP, before shelving it completely (and then coming up with remakes of the old games after 10 years etc.)
