Microtransaction hell intensifies as Mercedes turns improved automotive acceleration right into a subscription
On: November 24, 2022
Mercedes is taking over the hellish techniques pioneered right here within the videogames business by providing house owners of their Mercedes-EQ electrical car line the “alternative” to pay an enormous yearly price with a view to make their automotive go from 0 to 60MPH sooner. You will get this on both the EQS or EQE automobiles, where it’s going to present one thing like a 0.8 to 1.0 second improve within the acceleration from 0 to 60.
As reported by The Drive, Mercedes is asking $1,200 a yr to “Speed up extra powerfully: improve the torque and most output of your Mercedes-EQ.”
To be clear, that is unacceptable and absurd within the excessive. It is one thing I might count on out of a parody of company greed. That is charging for a software program update that extra optimally tweaks the automotive’s torque by fine-tuning the electrical motor. It isn’t some costly, expansive cloud-computing service that wants second to second calculations delivered to the car. It is artificially limiting the ability of a machine somebody paid for except they pay a subscription.
Mercedes’ money seize comes after controversy earlier this yr when BMW needed individuals to pay to make use of the heated seats of their automobiles. A bodily function of their automotive. A bit of easy bodily tools. Folks responded to this by pirating their heated seats.
Each of those are madness-inducing, and I hope that these sociopathic “improvements” do not make their means again to PC gaming. Think about how excited Nvidia or AMD can be to promote you a service that makes your graphics card “go sooner”? How thrilled would Intel be to run a subscription that “unlocks two cores!!” in your CPU? Wait, this sort of already occurs?
