So your proof someone was tricked/scammed/defrauded is that they spent more money on something than you would?

They key point you seem intent on avoiding is that you have not shown a single example of someone actually being tricked/scammed/defrauded. Someone buying a thing that is arbitrarily priced well outside of it’s practical value or actual cost is not a scam, it’s literally the definition of a luxury good. Is every person who buys a diamond getting scammed, in your mind? What about those $1000 shoes people buy as an “investment”? Were they scammed in your imagination?

First, to set the record straight: look up the definition of scam

If the definition of scam is defrauding someone, I changed nothing about your word choice.

I’m not fixated on the word choice. You just changed it to trick but haven’t in any way proven that game companies are “tricking” or “defrauding” anyone. You’re just making an empty claim. Explain how spending money on a character skin is a trick. Or buying DLC isn’t getting you what you paid for. As far as I can tell you haven’t even established that anything they are doing is even “dishonest” which I think is a much much lower bar. You literally have not a god damned thing to back up your pov.

Your examples included expansions that they charged money for. And a game where if one person bought everything in the game, it would be some hundreds of thousands of dollars. Those aren’t tricks. Nobody is making anyone buy a house worth of bits. Nobody is making anyone pay for an expansion they don’t want to pay for (well, other than children forcing their parents). These are all optional transactions that adults enter into of their own volition. You can say you think it’s scummy they charge so much, but it’s not a trick.

So you agree it’s not fraud?

Let’s go with a simple approach: is anyone giving money for something where they don’t fully understand what they are getting in return. That is, they don’t know they are getting a decoration or unlocking a character or whatever?

It’s not exactly a scam, though, is it. Are the game companies committing fraud?

That’s what you want to fix? Companies trying new monetization strats?

The correct way is njinx because enginex is a dumb spelling and is too much like twitter