"I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."

I remember laughing at people buying horse armor when Oblivion came out, and now I'm glued to the screen watching streamers drop $300 on gacha game pulls

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I remember laughing at people buying horse armour. Now I'm just sad at the state of everything.

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At least it's not your money. Hopefully.

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Microsoft didn’t own Bethesda back then, am I missing something?

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DLC was originally released for Xbox 360, so Microsoft might have some influence here, though I wouldn't underestimate the greediness of Bethesda.

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Microsoft was massive back then too and interacted with a lot of various studios. They notoriously forced Valve to charge money for their free Left 4 Dead dlc because they thought it would set a bad precedent.

So I wouldn’t be surprised if some Microsoft employee inspired the horse armor dlc.

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- ZeniMax was doing dumb shit long before Microsoft. Bethesda has had a clueless culture for more than a decade. 2019’s disastrous performance across almost all verticals not only showed how clueless both BGS and ZeniMax were, it also paved the way for the Microsoft acquisition so Altman could get his bag. Todd Howard and Pete Hines let their original successes go to their heads and forgot the market changes.
  
  4
- Left 4 Dead dlc
  
  L4D2?
  
  1
You aren't but I think OP might be

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Perhaps that person stayed with Bethesda long enough to be an M$ employee?

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Maybe it's supposed to be the catalyst to Bethesda's downfall, allowing M$ to buy it on the cheap?

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I believe, there was some special overlay on the XBOX to allow buying it directly ingame. Maybe Microsoft was involved there?

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I remember getting Rock Band songs for $1.99. The old ones even went down to $0.99 for a few years.

Now, they're about $3.50 and they've stopped releasing new ones.

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For those who don't know:

"Horse armor is not bad. I think horse armor is fine. The price point, at the time, was the issue. We felt, it's probably worth this," he said. "I won't say who at Microsoft said, 'Well, that's less than we sell a theme for; a wallpaper is more than that. You should charge this; you can always lower it.' We were like, 'Okay!'"

Also it's weird to me that Bethesda gets crap for their DLC's. Oblivion's horse armor was bad, but it wasn't the worst or the first. Heck, Morrowind had expansions. MapleStory is pretty widely cited as the earliest form of micros transactions. And most of Bethesda's DLC's have been great- all 3 of Skyrim's were ton of content relatively cheap.

I guess that's the price of popularity?

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Expansions are really not the same as "micro transactions" (now very much macro transactions). Expansions were typically content filled and had a fair price point, regardless if they shipped boxed on a CD or were packed into a digital download. Now we pay the price for a full sized expansion for a single cosmetic in some games.

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Skyrim has plenty more than 3 DLC. Or do you mean to tell me anniversary edition and special edition are the same? Is Creation Club something you never heard of? I'm jealous

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- Well... Yes pretty much. I don't count Creation Club items because they weren't made by Bethesda.
  
  I don't turn them on. As far as I know you can find free alternatives for most of what is in the creation club- you're just paying for to support the independent creators, the convenience, and I suppose the service of Bethesda filtering out some of the worst chaff of the mod scene.
  
  Similarly, I don't count the other big fixes and upgrades in the Special Edition or Anniversary edition as DLC. Bethesda was rolling out patches for the original game before then, and visual upgrades are more in line with what I would call mods/remaster/remake than DLC.
  
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Picard, my friend. I don’t know history well enough to know if MSFT was involved or not based on our colleagues comments below but I most certainly agree that the horse armor was a reckoning, and dawn of a depressingly fraught new era.

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