The video game industry cannot quit microtransactions. In fact, two of the largest video game companies in the United States — Electronic Arts and Take-Two I...
People have shown – and this is true of many industries other than video games – that they weight an up-front payment more-highly than later payments. Cell companies wouldn’t sell you a cell phone linked to a plan where they make the cost of the phone back over time with a higher cell service payment if that weren’t true for them as well. Same thing for, say, modems and ISPs.
If people want to have a game where one pays up front, they can get them; there are a bunch of games that don’t have microtransactions. I’ve only played one game that I can think of that I recall having in-game microtransactions – Fallout 76 – and never purchased anything there, because what they sold were cosmetic things that I had no interest in. What I wanted was more gameplay, and they weren’t in the business of selling that. It’s just that a lot of people do buy games that have microtransactions. Oh, and while I don’t typically play free-to-play commercial games, I did try DoTA 2 for a bit, and IIRC there’s some sort of cosmetics-selling thing there.
Is use of microtransactions intrinsically a negative? Well, it means that the company has an incentive to make a game that people want to keep playing, which isn’t true of a game where they make a one-off purchase, and I suppose that that’s a win over a game with an up-front purchase.
It also reduces a publisher’s risk – you aren’t making one giant investment and hoping it sells well. You can scale up and scale down as you see how the game does. Plus, more room to see what players actually want, based on what they get and what they don’t. And the lower the risk, the more-willing someone is to put the money in to develop something. That’s desirable.
That being said, my own preferred model is where one purchases a game with an up-front purchase, then the vendor sells large expansion packs/DLC. That way, if a game does well, one can get more similar content, and it gives the company an incentive to produce more content that I want. And I think that in general, content sold in larger blocks is both more-interesting to me and more-cost-effective than anything obtained via small purchases.
But, hey, I’m not gonna complain if someone else likes games like that.
And I can’t rule out the possibility that a game vendor might make microtransactions that I would like and make me want to play games that do have them. One irritation I had with the Fallout series was the limited selection of radio songs. I liked what was there, but wanted more of the same. There were some third-party people that made mods, but Bethesda never sold new licensed song packs and stations. Same sort of thing for the Grand Theft Auto series, which also does radio stations, or Stellaris, which doesn’t have radio but does have a lot of ambient music, and which one plays a lot of; the music can kind of get old. That’s legitimately something that I’d have paid for, and any purchase would probably qualify as a microtransaction, since it wouldn’t be a very large piece of content. But as far as I can tell, game publishers just don’t try identifying, licensing, and selling supplementary music packs.
Shouting “free!” and somehow getting billions of dollars is a sign of exploitation. They weren’t donated. Yes, people make harsher decisions about up-front costs… because rational decision-making requires that up-front honesty. We outlaw many abuses of “predictable irrationality” baked into the human brain. Current laws don’t cover being groomed into buying whateverthefuck by a Skinner box disguised as a puzzle game, because legislators were insufficiently imaginative.
But now we’ve seen that this business model is a problem - we can simply solve it.
Until then, it will continue infecting the entire industry. This started in “free-to-play” mobile trash and is now in full-price, “AAA,” flagship-franchise titles. It’s in subscription MMOs. It’s in single-player games. All excuses have failed and we need to admit the only motive is greed. This is a scam that turns generic decent games into whale-hunting exercises that want $70 up-front and $10 a month and $30 per “season” and $5 for imaginary fucking hat. If they don’t get that from every player - fine. They get it from enough. And everyone else has to suffer the constant spam reminders that they could be having so much optimal fun if they just paid the publisher again. Just one more transaction bro. Then you’ll be happy.
I don’t care if someone else thinks they like being manipulated that way.
Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.
in short, the market is formed by the money spent and what kind of product people buy. Simply don’t buy the stuff you don’t want, and spend actual money on things you want. People need to learn that their own preference does not reflect the actual statistic distribution on what others find “worthy” of their money.
Excellent comment. I’ve been playing more free to play games simply for the reason you mentioned, it’s clear those games will have developers working on them for a long time. Games like PUBG or Fortnite (hate it or love it), and more recently, The Finals (absolutely love that game) are clearly going to have dev resources available for a very long time.
That said, I never spent a dime on GTA online, even though I played that for quite a bit. It didn’t appeal to me as much for some reason. I think seeing devs adding cool things makes me want to buy a little something for all the enjoyment I’m getting - especially when it cost me nothing to start. With Rockstar (or Activision) I feel a lot of negative feelings about giving them money when it’s clear they’re trying to cut costs and maximize profits at every turn by holding features back or removing them and keeping them locked behind a paywall. The other games I mentioned let you play 100% of the game and money is more for actual bonus content that’s mostly irrelevant. It’s weirdly ironic, actually
I’ve bought some hats in TF2. Not because I wanted to have an edge or something, but because I liked that game. Many MTX games are just not good games to begin with. Especially mobile ones, and they have more success with children due to that. And to secure their habits at that stage of forming their mentality we probably need to judge what’s MTX, is it gambling, should we allow it etc. Because many devs do abuse that shit, and peers at school bully kids who can’t equip themselves like a normal person would. That’s not what we should support.
People have shown – and this is true of many industries other than video games – that they weight an up-front payment more-highly than later payments. Cell companies wouldn’t sell you a cell phone linked to a plan where they make the cost of the phone back over time with a higher cell service payment if that weren’t true for them as well. Same thing for, say, modems and ISPs.
If people want to have a game where one pays up front, they can get them; there are a bunch of games that don’t have microtransactions. I’ve only played one game that I can think of that I recall having in-game microtransactions – Fallout 76 – and never purchased anything there, because what they sold were cosmetic things that I had no interest in. What I wanted was more gameplay, and they weren’t in the business of selling that. It’s just that a lot of people do buy games that have microtransactions. Oh, and while I don’t typically play free-to-play commercial games, I did try DoTA 2 for a bit, and IIRC there’s some sort of cosmetics-selling thing there.
Is use of microtransactions intrinsically a negative? Well, it means that the company has an incentive to make a game that people want to keep playing, which isn’t true of a game where they make a one-off purchase, and I suppose that that’s a win over a game with an up-front purchase.
It also reduces a publisher’s risk – you aren’t making one giant investment and hoping it sells well. You can scale up and scale down as you see how the game does. Plus, more room to see what players actually want, based on what they get and what they don’t. And the lower the risk, the more-willing someone is to put the money in to develop something. That’s desirable.
That being said, my own preferred model is where one purchases a game with an up-front purchase, then the vendor sells large expansion packs/DLC. That way, if a game does well, one can get more similar content, and it gives the company an incentive to produce more content that I want. And I think that in general, content sold in larger blocks is both more-interesting to me and more-cost-effective than anything obtained via small purchases.
But, hey, I’m not gonna complain if someone else likes games like that.
And I can’t rule out the possibility that a game vendor might make microtransactions that I would like and make me want to play games that do have them. One irritation I had with the Fallout series was the limited selection of radio songs. I liked what was there, but wanted more of the same. There were some third-party people that made mods, but Bethesda never sold new licensed song packs and stations. Same sort of thing for the Grand Theft Auto series, which also does radio stations, or Stellaris, which doesn’t have radio but does have a lot of ambient music, and which one plays a lot of; the music can kind of get old. That’s legitimately something that I’d have paid for, and any purchase would probably qualify as a microtransaction, since it wouldn’t be a very large piece of content. But as far as I can tell, game publishers just don’t try identifying, licensing, and selling supplementary music packs.
Shouting “free!” and somehow getting billions of dollars is a sign of exploitation. They weren’t donated. Yes, people make harsher decisions about up-front costs… because rational decision-making requires that up-front honesty. We outlaw many abuses of “predictable irrationality” baked into the human brain. Current laws don’t cover being groomed into buying whateverthefuck by a Skinner box disguised as a puzzle game, because legislators were insufficiently imaginative.
But now we’ve seen that this business model is a problem - we can simply solve it.
Until then, it will continue infecting the entire industry. This started in “free-to-play” mobile trash and is now in full-price, “AAA,” flagship-franchise titles. It’s in subscription MMOs. It’s in single-player games. All excuses have failed and we need to admit the only motive is greed. This is a scam that turns generic decent games into whale-hunting exercises that want $70 up-front and $10 a month and $30 per “season” and $5 for imaginary fucking hat. If they don’t get that from every player - fine. They get it from enough. And everyone else has to suffer the constant spam reminders that they could be having so much optimal fun if they just paid the publisher again. Just one more transaction bro. Then you’ll be happy.
I don’t care if someone else thinks they like being manipulated that way.
Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.
in short, the market is formed by the money spent and what kind of product people buy. Simply don’t buy the stuff you don’t want, and spend actual money on things you want. People need to learn that their own preference does not reflect the actual statistic distribution on what others find “worthy” of their money.
Excellent comment. I’ve been playing more free to play games simply for the reason you mentioned, it’s clear those games will have developers working on them for a long time. Games like PUBG or Fortnite (hate it or love it), and more recently, The Finals (absolutely love that game) are clearly going to have dev resources available for a very long time.
That said, I never spent a dime on GTA online, even though I played that for quite a bit. It didn’t appeal to me as much for some reason. I think seeing devs adding cool things makes me want to buy a little something for all the enjoyment I’m getting - especially when it cost me nothing to start. With Rockstar (or Activision) I feel a lot of negative feelings about giving them money when it’s clear they’re trying to cut costs and maximize profits at every turn by holding features back or removing them and keeping them locked behind a paywall. The other games I mentioned let you play 100% of the game and money is more for actual bonus content that’s mostly irrelevant. It’s weirdly ironic, actually
I’ve bought some hats in TF2. Not because I wanted to have an edge or something, but because I liked that game. Many MTX games are just not good games to begin with. Especially mobile ones, and they have more success with children due to that. And to secure their habits at that stage of forming their mentality we probably need to judge what’s MTX, is it gambling, should we allow it etc. Because many devs do abuse that shit, and peers at school bully kids who can’t equip themselves like a normal person would. That’s not what we should support.