Occams Razor. Perhaps instead of coming up with a "it's not selling because...SJW" theory, perhaps instead it's because of:
1. EA's DLC/Loot box policies 2. Game mechanics not all that fun. 3. Basically the same game released yearly. 4. Instead of buying BF5, people are playing Fortnite, Overwatch, PUBG, Paladins, etc etc.
After all, Fortnite, Overwatch, Paladins, PUBG, and many other single player games (like big open-world RPG's) have playable female heroes.
Mountain....molehill. It's marketing. Is having a playable female character that big of a deal to you?
Lets try a little excercise, shall we.
Suppose we live in an alternate universe and it's say the 80's. YOu go buy yourself Legend of Zelda, but the hero is Zelda, and she has to rescue Link from Ganon.
Or you're playing Super Peach Sisters and you have to rescue a plumber from Bowser.
Or you're playing Double DRagon and you have to rescue your captured boyfriend from the Black Warrior gang.
Or you're playing a JRPG and the main character is a sword wielding badass woman, while the love interest is a white robe wearing pacifist healer with a staff who gets killed by the villain.
or you're playing a shooter where the main character is a woman whose husband is killed in the first 10 minutes so she goes on a roaring rampage of revenge.
or you're playing a fighting game, where all the women are covered up, but the men are all wearing speedos and there's minigames where you can pose them, take pictures of them and make them play beach volleyball.
Now wouldn't you be complaining about the lack of male heroes?
Oh boy, it's like you're really upset when reality intrudes on your view of the world.
Reality? There is no such thing as "Cultural Marxism" there is no conspiracy. All there is, is a bunch of cranks and crackpots full of butthurt whining because they're expected to be nice to minorities.
Give you bonus points if you can name the person from both places who implemented the same views and policies.
I don't comment on Canadian politics, perhaps YOU should stay out of US political discussions.
Besides, unless they talk about government owning the means of production and councils of workers running factoris, they aren't real "collectivists", not by Marx's standards. I'm fairly sure Trudeau isn't a collectivists....except maybe to selfish neckbeard asshats going on about how taxation is theft or something.
Can you tell me how many black females with amputations and prosthesis were fighting in WWII on the front lines? Cause that's the message EA was trying to push with BFV.
Can you tell me how many soldiers respawned when killed? Because that's the message EA HAS been pushing with Battlefied since the beginning.
Did you ever think that the message they're sending is a simple "oh hey, if you want to play a woman, you can, it's a game and not 100 percent realistic and that's okay."
If gender diversity was even remotely an issue then no one would've bought AC:O either, yet they did, in droves.
You're forgetting one thing. AC O is basically an open world RPG. That market has been used to having gender options in games for LONG time.
BF5 is the " yearly-released brown manly shooter of the dudebro gamers" I'd wager that BF buyers skew younger and more how we might say "edgelordish" They might not be as used to the option.
To an RPG guy being able to play as Kassandra or the female Lone Wanderer is no big deal. To some goateed youtuber edgelord who only plays Madden and the yearl Brown-shooter-Duty-Calls-of-the Honor-of-the-Battfield-of-War Shooty Sergeant XTREEM"...well seeing female options where there weren't any might trigger is overgrown-testosteroney-adolescent-snowflakeness.
Mashiki is an alt-right/MRA/anti-SJW/anti-collectivist type who goes on and on about liberal conspiracies at univiersities and constantly quotes Canadian right wing professors also complaining about same.
He sees himself and others like him to be under "attack" by collectivists/SJW's and other boogeymen.
Putting female avatars to play in a game is an "agenda"?
It's an unrealistic game! It's never been historically accurate. Does having women in the game bother you that much? If you don't want to play a woman, don't. But wouldn't it be nice to have female avatars for those who DO?
SJWs don't game. Pandering to them is retarded at best.
Hmmph, there are some of the alt-right/libertarian/gamergater/randroid/MRA crowd on Slashdot that would consider me a SJW.
I've probably been gaming before you were born. I have played Arcade pong in it's arcade form. Battlezone, Asteroids, Pac Man, Space Invaders, yeah those too. Home games from the Atari VCS to the PS4.
I don't know what kind of kool-aid you're drinking to think SJW's don't game.
because that's just the go-to responses from progressives that aren't gamers.
"who" says they aren't gamers? Are you sure?
Well if someone is pissing around in their hobby, aren't involved, and are ruining it.
"who's" hobby? Video gaming belongs to a certain demographic? Who says? Are you sure about that? Because it doesn't belong to your demographic, it belongs to everyone.
Dude BF games have never been realistic. For the usual gamergater/neckbeard/incel/MRA/libertarian/alt-right men complaining about the choice of female avatars...is just plain dumb. Some guy above was complaining about "cyborg women" when in BF games there have been men with cybernetics BEFORE there were any female avatars.
Oh look, a left wing communist that thinks they know everything with the smoking remains of a 100 million dead around their ankles.
You think I'm a communist? Prove it. You'll find I've never said a positive thing about Stalin or Mao. And that I've never said the state should own the means of production...which is one of the things that define communism.
Red-baiting is a dusty old notorious bullshitting tactic used almost exclusively by the right-wing. It consists of making a false and/or groundless accusation that some person is a communist or fellow traveler, often with the aim of discrediting them or destroying their reputation. Essentially, everything that certain people dislike is to be considered Communist plots. As such, red-baiting is a form of guilt by association, a fallacy which Stalin himself used to justify some of his crimes.
And also:
"Cultural Marxism" (both uppercase) is a common snarl word used to paint anyone with progressive tendencies as a secret Communist. The term alludes to a conspiracy theory in which sinister left-wingers have infiltrated media, academia, and science and are engaged in a decades-long plot to undermine Western culture. Some variants of the conspiracy allege that basically all of modern social liberalism is, in fact, a Communist front group.
Oh, you haven't been paying attention to the world as Sony has now become more censorious then Nintendo?
Not all those fanservice games involving under-age girls need to leave Japan.
So I, along with millions of gamers, suddenly, one day, had a problem with female PC's, and romancing the same gender.
Pretty much. How am I to think otherwise considering you used "woke" as a pejorative? What else is the problem?
Do you need me to draw you a diagram so you can understand why Dishonored 2 failed, and the new Wolfenstien game, and BFV?
They failed? Why do you think they failed? "Who" says they failed?" And might the "who" have an agenda? Considering the metacritic scores they did quite well. All 3 had higher than average review scores.
Give you a hint, that your basic understanding of gaming is less then the 13 year old telling you he's going to fuck your mom.
oh really? Prove it. I've been gaming longer than much of Slashdot has been alive. I've played games as varied as Pong, Gauntlet, Metroid, Chrono Trigger, Diablo (and Diablo 3), Nethack (on Linux, including both the PS2 and PS3 as well as Linux on X86), Fallout 3, Minecraft (On Linux, PS3, Vita and PS4), Star Trek Online (Linux and PS4), Fortnite and so on.
I've seen your posts over the years and your views on many issues are right in line with the usual neckbearded alt-right-libertarian screeds. You may not think you're one, but if you walk and talk like a alt-right-libertarian neckbeard, don't be surprised when people think you're one.
Haven't seen an anti-collectivist yet, who doesn't think they're the next best thing to John Galt.
I am Andrew Ryan, and I'm here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? "No," says the man in Washington, "it belongs to the poor." "No," says the man in the Vatican, "it belongs to God." "No," says the man in Moscow, "it belongs to everyone." I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... Rapture. A city where the artist would not fear the censor; where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality; where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.
That's basically you, and Andrew Ryan...is an expy of Ayn Rand.
So you're going in on the anti-sjw malarkey again? You know what, alt-right anti-SJW types like you complain more about shit than actual supposed "SJW's" do. YOU are the fragile snowflake who gets butthurt when a game has a playable female character or allows characters to romance NPC's of the same gender.
And they're doing fine, considering Fortnite is a game with many many different heroes of different ethnicities.
In the Save the World mode, there is even MORE resource collecting and looting. Not just trees, but stone, metal, cars, coal, containers from boxes to mailboxes to cupboards. If it exists in STW, you can either loot it, or break it with the pickaxe, or both, to craft weapons and traps from schematics.
Isn't PUBG the reason Fortnite is enjoying this level of success?
Sort of, but not really.
Fortnite is a Battle Royale game that: 1. Passes the "Mom test" with it's Pixar aesthetics and lack of blood 2. Is T Rated 3. Is F2P 4. Was available on more platforms than PUBG was, most importantly, the PS4. 5. Performs better and isn't as much of a buggy mess as PUBG is.
AND it has the original PVE Save The World mode for those who prefer PVE to PVP.
Fortnite released originally as a tower defense / hero defense game. It was garbage and Dead on Arrival.
While it is not as popular as Fortnite: Battle Royale amongst the masses, considering the complexity of game mechanics, Fortnite: Save The World isn't doing too bad itself and has been getting updates and new content since the beginning. I only play "STW" myself and have been playing since September of 2017. It is much improved from what it was then
Ranger Beetlejess says "It's like herding cats...and blowing up cats."
You probably remember the trope of "Nintendo Hard" from the 1980's and 90's?
Yeah, I remember Nintendo Hard. I also know not to look at the past with rose colored glasses and know that the "Nintendo Hard" was often "Fake Difficulty" with "Trial and Error Gameplay" designed to increase how long it took to beat the very short games.
The early arcade inspired games like SMB, Ghouls & Ghosts, Ninja Gaiden, Castlevania, especially were very short. NES Castlevania is just 6 levels! NES Metroid can be beat in a couple of hours.
In fact, games like Ninja Gaiden were basically Arcade Games without quarters, that's why they were designed the way they were. Such design does not suit the home market.
At least I can download Fortnight. 5 hour download? Really? And What's This Feature? It's downloading at 20% the speed of the internet I'm paying for.
You got a new PS4 and tried to download games/updates from PSN on Christmas...which is the WORST day to do so because of how many OTHER people are doing the same thing. PSN download server bandwidth is finite.
Every year, the various gaming websites do articles like "parents, you might want to open up the PS4 box and prepare it before christmas"
Now generally, it's a bit better later on, say after 8pm, but if you have a big 50GB game to download it's going to take a while. I heartily recommend at least 50Mb/s download if you're going to do a lot of big digital games, or MMO's/MMOish games.
Also if you're downloading AND a physical game is installing at the same time, the hard drive only has so much bandwidth.
Fortnite shouldn't take too long to download unless you've got a slow connection. Total size for the thing now is about 16GB total. In comparison Final Fantasy XV is 92GB, Elder Scrolls Online is 87GB.
Cosmetics for Battle Royale. They can be purchased with the premium currency called V-bucks. Which is short for Vindertech-bucks, but most BR players don't know about Dr. Vinderman/Vindertech. That's part of the Save The World storyline.
In Save the World, V-bucks are used to purchase various kinds of Loot Llama's, which can provide new heroes, Survivors, Defenders, Weapon & Trap Schematics, Crafting materials and so forth. V-bucks can also be earned in Save the World, so there's a subgroup of young players who only play STW for the vbuck missions. In general they are disruptive horrible players led astray by youtubers who don't know jack about the mechanics of STW.
It does NOT have snap-to-aim on controllers, at least not in Save The World. As far as I can tell it doesn't have it in Battle Royale either on PS4. Note that the PS4 version has keyboard+mouse support. It might have it on Android version of Battle Royale mode though.
Why yes, I remember Second Life, I last logged in on the 24th. It is still around and still is profitable for Linden Lab.
You think Valve has a thing with hats? SL has hats...more of them, and everything else and the kitchen sink. Really, you want a kitchen sink for your house, more choices than you can shake a stick at sold by SL users themselves.
Clothing for avatars Hair for avatars Improved body parts, heads, eyes, bodies. "Makeup" for those enhanced heads. Animation sets for avatars Vehicles of every sort, realistic, fantasy, you name it. Buildings, pieces of buildings, plants, rocks, landscaping and decorative items of every sort. Want a covered bridge? Yes. Want an old tractor to put near a barn? Yes. Holy Hand Grenades, Swallows, Coconut trees.
And a web based marketplace plus in-world stores to sell it all in.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyways, the misandrist cult is on a march through the institutions
What misandrist cult? Persecution complex much?
and video games are targeted because they just *know* that that's were men get all their badness from.
Really? Persecution complex much?
I've a phd related to this drivel.
I doubt that.
Occams Razor. Perhaps instead of coming up with a "it's not selling because...SJW" theory, perhaps instead it's because of:
1. EA's DLC/Loot box policies
2. Game mechanics not all that fun.
3. Basically the same game released yearly.
4. Instead of buying BF5, people are playing Fortnite, Overwatch, PUBG, Paladins, etc etc.
After all, Fortnite, Overwatch, Paladins, PUBG, and many other single player games (like big open-world RPG's) have playable female heroes.
Mountain....molehill. It's marketing. Is having a playable female character that big of a deal to you?
Lets try a little excercise, shall we.
Suppose we live in an alternate universe and it's say the 80's. YOu go buy yourself Legend of Zelda, but the hero is Zelda, and she has to rescue Link from Ganon.
Or you're playing Super Peach Sisters and you have to rescue a plumber from Bowser.
Or you're playing Double DRagon and you have to rescue your captured boyfriend from the Black Warrior gang.
Or you're playing a JRPG and the main character is a sword wielding badass woman, while the love interest is a white robe wearing pacifist healer with a staff who gets killed by the villain.
or you're playing a shooter where the main character is a woman whose husband is killed in the first 10 minutes so she goes on a roaring rampage of revenge.
or you're playing a fighting game, where all the women are covered up, but the men are all wearing speedos and there's minigames where you can pose them, take pictures of them and make them play beach volleyball.
Now wouldn't you be complaining about the lack of male heroes?
Oh boy, it's like you're really upset when reality intrudes on your view of the world.
Reality? There is no such thing as "Cultural Marxism" there is no conspiracy. All there is, is a bunch of cranks and crackpots full of butthurt whining because they're expected to be nice to minorities.
Give you bonus points if you can name the person from both places who implemented the same views and policies.
I don't comment on Canadian politics, perhaps YOU should stay out of US political discussions.
Besides, unless they talk about government owning the means of production and councils of workers running factoris, they aren't real "collectivists", not by Marx's standards. I'm fairly sure Trudeau isn't a collectivists....except maybe to selfish neckbeard asshats going on about how taxation is theft or something.
Can you tell me how many black females with amputations and prosthesis were fighting in WWII on the front lines? Cause that's the message EA was trying to push with BFV.
Can you tell me how many soldiers respawned when killed? Because that's the message EA HAS been pushing with Battlefied since the beginning.
Did you ever think that the message they're sending is a simple "oh hey, if you want to play a woman, you can, it's a game and not 100 percent realistic and that's okay."
No big anti-male conspiracy theories needed.
If gender diversity was even remotely an issue then no one would've bought AC:O either, yet they did, in droves.
You're forgetting one thing. AC O is basically an open world RPG. That market has been used to having gender options in games for LONG time.
BF5 is the " yearly-released brown manly shooter of the dudebro gamers" I'd wager that BF buyers skew younger and more how we might say "edgelordish" They might not be as used to the option.
To an RPG guy being able to play as Kassandra or the female Lone Wanderer is no big deal. To some goateed youtuber edgelord who only plays Madden and the yearl Brown-shooter-Duty-Calls-of-the Honor-of-the-Battfield-of-War Shooty Sergeant XTREEM"...well seeing female options where there weren't any might trigger is overgrown-testosteroney-adolescent-snowflakeness.
Mashiki is an alt-right/MRA/anti-SJW/anti-collectivist type who goes on and on about liberal conspiracies at univiersities and constantly quotes Canadian right wing professors also complaining about same.
He sees himself and others like him to be under "attack" by collectivists/SJW's and other boogeymen.
Putting female avatars to play in a game is an "agenda"?
It's an unrealistic game! It's never been historically accurate. Does having women in the game bother you that much? If you don't want to play a woman, don't. But wouldn't it be nice to have female avatars for those who DO?
SJWs don't game. Pandering to them is retarded at best.
Hmmph, there are some of the alt-right/libertarian/gamergater/randroid/MRA crowd on Slashdot that would consider me a SJW.
I've probably been gaming before you were born. I have played Arcade pong in it's arcade form. Battlezone, Asteroids, Pac Man, Space Invaders, yeah those too. Home games from the Atari VCS to the PS4.
I don't know what kind of kool-aid you're drinking to think SJW's don't game.
because that's just the go-to responses from progressives that aren't gamers.
"who" says they aren't gamers? Are you sure?
Well if someone is pissing around in their hobby, aren't involved, and are ruining it.
"who's" hobby? Video gaming belongs to a certain demographic? Who says? Are you sure about that? Because it doesn't belong to your demographic, it belongs to everyone.
Dude BF games have never been realistic. For the usual gamergater/neckbeard/incel/MRA/libertarian/alt-right men complaining about the choice of female avatars...is just plain dumb. Some guy above was complaining about "cyborg women" when in BF games there have been men with cybernetics BEFORE there were any female avatars.
So don't give me any shit about "realism".
And yes, you are imagining your victimhood.
Oh look, a left wing communist that thinks they know everything with the smoking remains of a 100 million dead around their ankles.
You think I'm a communist? Prove it. You'll find I've never said a positive thing about Stalin or Mao. And that I've never said the state should own the means of production...which is one of the things that define communism.
I really can't believe you engage in constant Red baiting in 2018? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Red-baiting is a dusty old notorious bullshitting tactic used almost exclusively by the right-wing. It consists of making a false and/or groundless accusation that some person is a communist or fellow traveler, often with the aim of discrediting them or destroying their reputation. Essentially, everything that certain people dislike is to be considered Communist plots. As such, red-baiting is a form of guilt by association, a fallacy which Stalin himself used to justify some of his crimes.
And also:
"Cultural Marxism" (both uppercase) is a common snarl word used to paint anyone with progressive tendencies as a secret Communist. The term alludes to a conspiracy theory in which sinister left-wingers have infiltrated media, academia, and science and are engaged in a decades-long plot to undermine Western culture. Some variants of the conspiracy allege that basically all of modern social liberalism is, in fact, a Communist front group.
Oh, you haven't been paying attention to the world as Sony has now become more censorious then Nintendo?
Not all those fanservice games involving under-age girls need to leave Japan.
So I, along with millions of gamers, suddenly, one day, had a problem with female PC's, and romancing the same gender.
Pretty much. How am I to think otherwise considering you used "woke" as a pejorative? What else is the problem?
Do you need me to draw you a diagram so you can understand why Dishonored 2 failed, and the new Wolfenstien game, and BFV?
They failed? Why do you think they failed? "Who" says they failed?" And might the "who" have an agenda? Considering the metacritic scores they did quite well. All 3 had higher than average review scores.
Give you a hint, that your basic understanding of gaming is less then the 13 year old telling you he's going to fuck your mom.
oh really? Prove it. I've been gaming longer than much of Slashdot has been alive. I've played games as varied as Pong, Gauntlet, Metroid, Chrono Trigger, Diablo (and Diablo 3), Nethack (on Linux, including both the PS2 and PS3 as well as Linux on X86), Fallout 3, Minecraft (On Linux, PS3, Vita and PS4), Star Trek Online (Linux and PS4), Fortnite and so on.
I've seen your posts over the years and your views on many issues are right in line with the usual neckbearded alt-right-libertarian screeds. You may not think you're one, but if you walk and talk like a alt-right-libertarian neckbeard, don't be surprised when people think you're one.
Haven't seen an anti-collectivist yet, who doesn't think they're the next best thing to John Galt.
I am Andrew Ryan, and I'm here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? "No," says the man in Washington, "it belongs to the poor." "No," says the man in the Vatican, "it belongs to God." "No," says the man in Moscow, "it belongs to everyone." I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... Rapture. A city where the artist would not fear the censor; where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality; where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.
That's basically you, and Andrew Ryan...is an expy of Ayn Rand.
So you're going in on the anti-sjw malarkey again? You know what, alt-right anti-SJW types like you complain more about shit than actual supposed "SJW's" do. YOU are the fragile snowflake who gets butthurt when a game has a playable female character or allows characters to romance NPC's of the same gender.
And they're doing fine, considering Fortnite is a game with many many different heroes of different ethnicities.
In the Save the World mode, there is even MORE resource collecting and looting. Not just trees, but stone, metal, cars, coal, containers from boxes to mailboxes to cupboards. If it exists in STW, you can either loot it, or break it with the pickaxe, or both, to craft weapons and traps from schematics.
Isn't PUBG the reason Fortnite is enjoying this level of success?
Sort of, but not really.
Fortnite is a Battle Royale game that:
1. Passes the "Mom test" with it's Pixar aesthetics and lack of blood
2. Is T Rated
3. Is F2P
4. Was available on more platforms than PUBG was, most importantly, the PS4.
5. Performs better and isn't as much of a buggy mess as PUBG is.
AND it has the original PVE Save The World mode for those who prefer PVE to PVP.
Fortnite released originally as a tower defense / hero defense game. It was garbage and Dead on Arrival.
While it is not as popular as Fortnite: Battle Royale amongst the masses, considering the complexity of game mechanics, Fortnite: Save The World isn't doing too bad itself and has been getting updates and new content since the beginning. I only play "STW" myself and have been playing since September of 2017. It is much improved from what it was then
Ranger Beetlejess says "It's like herding cats...and blowing up cats."
Today's games look nice but play like a 5 year old designed them.
Really? Games like Sunless Sea, Axiom Verge, War Thunder, Elite Dangerous, Divinity Original Sin, Xcom?
Heck, even Fortnite would count, in the Save the World mode. Which is a PVE Team sandbox buildin/tower defense/RPG/MMO-shooter hybrid
I am, because I'm not some lefty
You sound like one of them globalist elites
Really, you're calling Mashiki, who is notoriously one of Slashdots alt-right-libertarian anti-"collectivist" anti-"sjw" randroid's a lefty?
You probably remember the trope of "Nintendo Hard" from the 1980's and 90's?
Yeah, I remember Nintendo Hard. I also know not to look at the past with rose colored glasses and know that the "Nintendo Hard" was often "Fake Difficulty" with "Trial and Error Gameplay" designed to increase how long it took to beat the very short games.
The early arcade inspired games like SMB, Ghouls & Ghosts, Ninja Gaiden, Castlevania, especially were very short. NES Castlevania is just 6 levels! NES Metroid can be beat in a couple of hours.
In fact, games like Ninja Gaiden were basically Arcade Games without quarters, that's why they were designed the way they were. Such design does not suit the home market.
Are you enjoying more "more inclusive hobby?"
Yeah, games respect our time better.
At least I can download Fortnight. 5 hour download? Really? And What's This Feature? It's downloading at 20% the speed of the internet I'm paying for.
You got a new PS4 and tried to download games/updates from PSN on Christmas...which is the WORST day to do so because of how many OTHER people are doing the same thing. PSN download server bandwidth is finite.
Every year, the various gaming websites do articles like "parents, you might want to open up the PS4 box and prepare it before christmas"
https://lifehacker.com/how-to-...
http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2017/1...
Now generally, it's a bit better later on, say after 8pm, but if you have a big 50GB game to download it's going to take a while. I heartily recommend at least 50Mb/s download if you're going to do a lot of big digital games, or MMO's/MMOish games.
Also if you're downloading AND a physical game is installing at the same time, the hard drive only has so much bandwidth.
Fortnite shouldn't take too long to download unless you've got a slow connection. Total size for the thing now is about 16GB total. In comparison Final Fantasy XV is 92GB, Elder Scrolls Online is 87GB.
Cosmetics for Battle Royale. They can be purchased with the premium currency called V-bucks. Which is short for Vindertech-bucks, but most BR players don't know about Dr. Vinderman/Vindertech. That's part of the Save The World storyline.
In Save the World, V-bucks are used to purchase various kinds of Loot Llama's, which can provide new heroes, Survivors, Defenders, Weapon & Trap Schematics, Crafting materials and so forth. V-bucks can also be earned in Save the World, so there's a subgroup of young players who only play STW for the vbuck missions. In general they are disruptive horrible players led astray by youtubers who don't know jack about the mechanics of STW.
and snap-to-aim on controllers.
It does NOT have snap-to-aim on controllers, at least not in Save The World. As far as I can tell it doesn't have it in Battle Royale either on PS4. Note that the PS4 version has keyboard+mouse support. It might have it on Android version of Battle Royale mode though.
Why yes, I remember Second Life, I last logged in on the 24th. It is still around and still is profitable for Linden Lab.
You think Valve has a thing with hats? SL has hats...more of them, and everything else and the kitchen sink. Really, you want a kitchen sink for your house, more choices than you can shake a stick at sold by SL users themselves.
Clothing for avatars
Hair for avatars
Improved body parts, heads, eyes, bodies.
"Makeup" for those enhanced heads.
Animation sets for avatars
Vehicles of every sort, realistic, fantasy, you name it.
Buildings, pieces of buildings, plants, rocks, landscaping and decorative items of every sort. Want a covered bridge? Yes. Want an old tractor to put near a barn? Yes.
Holy Hand Grenades, Swallows, Coconut trees.
And a web based marketplace plus in-world stores to sell it all in.
What? GPG and S/MIME are the standards for e-mail encryption, good e-mail clients support both.