US kids want games subscriptions and virtual currency more than games this Christmas
US kids want games subscriptions and virtual currency more than games this Christmas

US kids want games subscriptions and virtual currency more than games this Christmas

Evil genius marketing, working as it always does. The kids don't know any better, so they are being exploited and conditioned to think the horrible new normal is just the way things have to be. And most parents are too tired and busy to find better alternatives.
It's simple, the games that appeal the most to kids require some form of subscription. If those games didn't, then they wouldn't want ones with subscriptions.
The games that appeal most to kids play upon their dopamine response and generate addictive patterns.
How you worded this makes it seem like "if those games didn't" refers to requiring subscriptions.
I would suggest editing it to "If those games didn't appeal to kids" or similar; if what you meant was that kids just plays what appeals to them, and those games "just happens" to be subscription games.
I was talking just today with some coworkers about how having subscriptions instead of owning is what is normal to kids now - not just games, but things like Netflix and Spotify. So this doesn’t surprise me, but does depress me. Technofeudalism is the new normal.
In my teen years I spent a large fraction of my disposable income on music. A Spotify subscription is a vastly better value than buying whatever I could scrounge from a used CD store. Back then it was common for me to read about some semi-obscure recording and just have to wonder what it sounded like, because I had no hope of finding it in a store, and a special order was way out of my budget, especially for something I had no idea if I'd even like. Now I can listen to damn near anything that's ever been published for less than I spent as a teenager. I find new music by listening to personalized recommendations instead of local radio stations. It's just better in every way (except probably for the artists, but music has always been a cutthroat business so who knows).
A lot of subscription services suck and are just a way to milk customers, but streaming audio and video are not in that category.
I keep hoping--perhaps naively so--for a major backlash against this. Sometimes consumers have power, and sometimes they don't. But maybe we'll all get fed up with this bullshit and start just dropping any and all unnecessary subscriptions from our lives. The big problem is when a brand becomes synonymous with a product (like fucking Adobe and ProTools, for two examples).
I'm an adult and I play a few different games like this.