In my brush with Fortnite and its culture, this was the thing that surprised me the most.

What I wonder is, did Epic deliberately do this? It wouldn't take much to seed the initial culture with this idea.

If they didn't, it is certain that whatever the next "Fortnite" is will deliberately have its corporate creators try to seed the community with the idea that not spending money is socially bad, and you should feel bad about not buying things, and make other people feel bad about not buying things. I can come up with three or four subtle ways of slanting things against the "defaults" even in a nominally free-to-play game that on paper is indeed totally fair just by casually thinking about it for five minutes [1], and goodness only knows what I could come up with if I were in a position to think about this as my day job and run experiments.

I've posted on HN a few times about how I'm keeping my kids away from a lot of the modern ad-based or free-to-play stuff like this, because since I was a kid the market has become wildly more potent at extracting money from children. I often have phrased it in terms of ads being more sophisticated, but this is honestly more what I have in mind. This is so far beyond anything I was subjected to as a child as to be a quantitative difference.

(Let me emphasize that yes, I'm aware that such things existed as a kid. I remember the console wars, Furby, and the general stream of advertising aimed at me. It was not unheard of to have even a bit of spontaneous social pressure show up. But I'd still say this is some next-level stuff. None of that stuff really followed me home unless I let it; this actively shuts people out of full social participation even from their home if they don't give in to the social pressure.)

What prepubescent brain can be expected to stand up to this?

I'm trying to explain this stuff to my kids, but the simple truth is they are cognitively capable of getting hooked by this stuff years before they are cognitively capable of understanding the analysis, and then it's another few years of brain development after that when mere intellectual comprehension of what is being fired at them can be transformed into concrete actions to defend themselves.

[1] For example, suppose you have the player's name above the character, as it often is. Suppose you make one of the things you can get with a skin is the ability to change the fonts on that name. Suppose the default font is much higher visibility, and that when you buy something, the UI automatically changes them away from the "default" font, making their visibility de facto lower, even though it's officially just an "optional" font. You only have to provide a slightly gradient like that, and then let the community iterate it on it for a few months. You can even trivially be sure that your gradient is noticed by seeding the player forum with a couple of accounts pointing this out in week 2 or 3, and a couple dozen other accounts agreeing with it, and then a couple more later swearing up and down that they tried it out and it totally improved their game.

But you could claim with a straight face that the game is still totally fair to people who don't pay... "look, they get all the same weapons, the damage is the same, the win conditions are the same".... it's not even necessarily a bad argument!

I miss when you could be on the Internet and read a message from someone and safely assume it was from an actual person.