Let's not kid ourselves: Despite what the ads may show, these toys are primarily aimed at and bought by manchildren like Jim and Moviebob. Also, no shit marketing isn't a new concept. That's all the more reason why Jim talking about it is utterly pointless; maybe next JQ he can let us know about the moisture properties of water.
We all know this shit exists and is manipulative, but it's still not some nefarious Machiavellian scheme. Fortunately kids come with these things called parents (or they used to, anyway) who hold the purse strings, and if adults aren't capable of controlling their spending on plastic shite that's their own fault.
And if I'm going to listen to anyone rant about the perils of capitalism, it's not gonna be the morbidly-obese pill addict surrounded by piles of consoomer trash; a lifestyle that could only possibly exist in the capitalist hellscape Jim constantly bitches about.
I can't argue your manchild argument since I have no sales data or any of that stuff. What I will say is that is a GROSS assumption. That is like saying only manchildren play pokemon. No, pokemon is very much an all ages thing nowadays since people grew up with it and introduced their children to it. Same with Nintendo, and lego. I view these mega IP's as the new "sports". Sports has always been loved by society, yet always played by the young. Its a sort of cycle of never ending attention learn in>live it>love it. I learned about pokemon, enjoyed pokemon, now I teach my kids about pokemon, etc etc. Don't assume these insanely popular things from our childhood is only kept within our generation. We spread that shit buddy. We spread it like internet autist's spread cat pics.
You and the tova guy quoted below have a sadly traditional view on parenting and parental control over digital purchasing. Parents aren't GenX anymore. Parents are millenials, yes, people like you. Do you or him even have kids? Do you have nieces or nephews? Do you KNOW anyone with kids? I do, and I can tell you. Its pretty fucking hard being a helicopter parent or at least keeping track of the little fuckers when
1. People are worked harder than ever nowadays, leaving little room for "stay at home" parents to even exist.
2. Kids/GenZ are very tech savvy, leaving even regular millennials in the dust on some things, like roblox or especially tik tok. Hearing a millennial talk or try and talk about tik tok sounds like my dad or mom trying to understand youtube 10 years ago. Especially with mobile gaming, it just adds to your phone bill, unless the parent looks at the itemized bill (which most don't because auto pay is a thing), they won't see shit.
3. Not every millennial grew up with video games and anime and shit, or the birth of social media. There are plenty of 20 somethings and 30 somethings that are just as ignorant as GenX was. However this isn't the case for their kids, since even those types of people have had their kids using smartphones since they were toddlers. Meaning the gap shrunk considerably in regards to younger generations access to technology.
"WO WO WO, I AM TALKING ABOUT THIS MARIO TOY; WHICH IS A PHYSICAL PIECE OF MERCH. WE AREN'T TALKING ABOUT DIGITAL SHIT OK? THE PARENTS WILL KNOW WHATS UP WITH THIS."
Fair enough, my point mostly relies on digital goods. However. Parents, since forever, often buy toys for their kids because the kids simply want it. How many parents no matter the age do you know that play with their kids toys? Probably not many. Its buy and forget. Some parents may for a bit; in order to spend time with their kids, definately not constantly. Which leads to the "update" thing, if this toy can update and spout whatever garbage marketing the company wants, how will the parents honestly find this out without stumbing on it? Why should, or how could a parent even know about it doing that nonsense in the first place? Are you honestly saying every parent should know every minute aspect of every product they buy for their kids? Don't be absurd.
On your last point, ya, thats fair. He knows he is scum in regards to buying physical merch/garbage. I personally never subscribed to physical merch even as a kid. However, I do understand that is a big thing for a lot of people; most people honestly. Not to mention its one of if not the only way to support the creators of said thing you enjoy. The digital age is only like 10 years old man, and its still in its early life. Buying physical garbage is still the main way to support a company/product.
Jim keeps comparing this to the gacha/lootbox shit directly, but it's literally just a fucking Luigi edition of a lego mario board game. Luigi isn't some random chance thing you have to "go and buy all the lego boxes" to have a chance to find like jim fucking frames it as. If people end up buying both it more than likely means just that they want both the Mario and Luigi figures, and with how these board game sets are constructed you can use parts from both to make custom layouts. People buy Lego specifically to sell the individual parts for a fraction of the sets actual cost, if someone REALLY wanted a Lego Luigi but didn't want to pay 60 dollars for an entire extra lego game board, they can literally just go to any secondary market and get him for a much less hefty price. There actually ARE some blindboxed figures but they're all inconsequential generic enemy characters and they run about 3 to 5 dollars depending on where you buy them from. This whole video reeks of low effort 0 research outrage farming.
So, instead of acknowledging the creep factor or black mirror (lite) situation. You instead say how dumb the criticisms are...because...? You, can, simply BUY this garbage second hand...as if that somehow fixes the issue? Do, you, hear yourself?
"If the product tells you to buy more product, don't be some stupid idiot and buy it....full price GO AND BUY IT SECOND HAND YOU ABSOLUTE TOOL."
Seriously?
How bout, fuck that product?
Everything kids own is bought by their parents. If parents are too busy on their Career to give a fuck about their kid and what their kid is being exposed to, fuck it, let the kid be fucked up and parent's wallets raped.
I'll say it's a form of reintroduction of natural selection. Dumb kids who's parents are too busy making money gets trooned put by capitalist messaging and removes his genome from the pool, boo hoo, big pharma scores a win on another dumb fuck family that couldn't adapt to modern world and got fucked by it.
My family may have never been swimming in cash but I had a mom and dad who cared, some kids swim in hundreds of $ worth of merchandise designed to make the kid STFU and their worthless sperm & egg donors make someone and possibly their kids (going to elite school where smart phones and social media are banned) richer and better off.
Yes, most parents are too busy to know that the plastic toy they bought their kids as a quick gift, has wifi connections and updates with marketing nonsense. Is it their fault? Well, if they don't focus on their jobs, they get fired, meaning they can't support themselves of their family.
"They should obviously know the toy is wifi enabled and everything when they set it up."
Who said the parents would set it up? Like I said above, this is GenZ buddy. These little shits have been raised on smarphones and htlm5 since they were in diapers. They know how to connect something to their home wifi. The parents do too obviously, but they are parents, who just bought a stupid piece of plastic that may have made them go "Heh a mario lego, what an age". Which is probably the most they will think about it. Just because they recognize the products doesn't mean they understand every single product in that line of products, along with all of its different bells and whistles. They aren't some manchild youtube unboxing video channel that knows every little detail of every little product. As oliver above would have you believe.
My main point being this. None of you fucking people NO ONE! INCLUDING MYSELF! Would even know about or care about this mario lego garbage. UNLESS this jim guy never mentioned it. Except, you would I guess if you were one of those manchildren, which jim I guess is? If you guys knew about it before the jim video then well, guess that speaks more about you than whatever is going on here. For the rest of us ya, this was pretty eye opening, even more so since this shit had a direct influence in my real life.
I have a buddy with kids, and one of the kids was talking about the mario lego thin. My buddy was about to buy it. Mind you I watched that jim video BECAUSE I heard my buddies kid talk about it. We both just hand waved her (the kid). He had looked at it briefly since he was a nintendo kid himself and his intitial reaction to the toy was.
"It has an app? Eh, fuck it, ill just let my kid fuck with it. Tired of everything needing a fucking app to use. When did lego and nintendo get so tight anyway?"
After watching that video, I shared it with him, and we talked about it. He was like "oh wow, thats black mirror shit huh?" We kept chatting and talked about how we both just hand waved it, because why not? Its a fucking lego toy. We both noticed it said it had an app associated with it initially but said "eh what doesn't have one nowadays". Sort of like needing to register to do anything on websites/services. So ya, in a realistic setting the parents very much WOULD just buy the shit and not know any better. They would maybe assume the APP got updates; not the toy itself, or maybe the app updates and changes the toys behavior, regardless the end result is the toy can start automatically changing itself. Such as spewing new products at kids without changing anything inside the associated app itself? Yaaaaaaaaa, would not have been on the list. Then again after seeing the tesla meme about the car being able to self order shit. This is all starting to come together in a fucked up kinda way.
So again, I reiterate. Good on jim for making this video. The dude is not my first choice when it comes to who I agree with on a lot of shit, however he is self aware. Every person I have interacted or observed with even an ounce of self awareness usually ends up not being a total waste of time. In regards to opinions that is.
