| Emerithe Cantanine | Tuesday, May 16, 2023 - 02:28 am 
Maybe to a small extent. It is annoying that we have to keep a subscription going in order to keep our accounts from being deleted. However, as long as you have a job, the subscription amount is pretty negligible. Take my situation for example. I have 5 enterprises and 8 countries. On top of the effective membership rate of $4/month, I have to pay $15 worth of gold coins each month to keep my 5 enterprises. So, it costs me around $20/month to play the game.
When I think back to when I played Eve Online, that game could be said to have had predatory monetization. At the time the monthly fee was $15/month. It was a lot easier to play if you had multiple accounts, so crank the monthly rate up to $45/month. Oh, you don't want to spend 100 to 200 hours mining to earn money to do the really fun parts of the game? Buy plex ($20) with your credit card and get rid of that mining barge forever.
Back to SimCountry, the game probably does have predatory parts to it. Thinking about my own situation, it is annoying that I can only have 750 corps in each enterprise, so I am forced to have 5 enterprises when I would prefer to only have 2 or 3. But it doesn't bother me because the extra money I'm forced to pay each month is trivial. It only comes out to an extra $9/month.
SimCountry also doesn't send out marketing emails. I have never received an email saying I could buy x booster for 10% off or that x booster would really make the game more fun for me. The game doesn't really pressure me to buy anything. It'll tell me I don't have enough gold coins for a country, but it doesn't try to persuade me at all that the country would be a good thing to buy. |
