Do you like the current state of microtransactions?

[Lotus Victoria]

Greetings champions, good to see you all.

So, I'm not a big fan of microtransactions, but in the good old days, we used to buy whatever skin we wanted and that's it.

With the inclusion of lootboxes in almost every new multiplayer (and even some single player games), gaming is slowly crawling to a business model similar to gambling, which I don't like. If this continues like that, one day they'll lock game progress behind lootboxes as well (Quests, etc), and this would be catastrophic to the gaming market.

Do you like the current state of microtransactions? (Lootboxes, Season Passes, DLC).

[pateuvasiliu]

I'd never spend money on boxes.

DLC if it's good but I'm mostly skeptical.

Witcher 3 good? Sure. They deserve all the money in the world. That's how you do a DLC: a proper plot, lots of content and it's a side quest that you don't need to play to truly enjoy the game.

Shit like Bioware pulled where Dragon Age 3's ending was behind a DLC paywall? Fuck no.

Remember when Dragon Age 3's main antagonist was a dude you'd only know if you played the DA2 DLC? Fuck that shit.

[dope_danny]

I dont like them period. So i dont buy them. I buy a complete product and at best buy content heavy dlc. "Micropay freebuys" are a scam to part rubes of their money more than once for the same product.

[Coldkil]

I'm actually pretty torn on the subject. Also, i'll use "reasonable" A LOT of times, and its meaning may vary a lot between different people (like "how much you think a game is worth?").

First of all, i'm not much of a fan. I simply think that devs should design a finished product and i should be paying for a high quality good. Anyway i recognize that objectively while development costs spiked up a lot, game prices pretty much stayed the same through the years, so software houses have to find different ways to get the needed revenue to continue their work, hence microtx system happened (however, how much of this is spend on crappy marketing and how much on actual development resources? but that's another story).

Given this, there's quite a bunch to say about every type of mictotx system, and each has its pros and cons.

Again, obviously microtx shouldn't provide ANY kind of advantage (be it shorter times or more power) to players who pay more compared to the ones who don't, because that's just bad and everyone who does that should stop developing. They're literally money traps for oblivious people who don't know better. I'm willing to make an exception for single player games because honestly who cares if my 9yo cousing uses hid dad credit card to buy his way to the endgame - (very big and mandatory) IF the game is playable in its entirety and there's no time/power wall encouraging people to buy boosts (YES I'M TALKING ABOUT YOU SHADOW OF WAR).


As for the systems, i'll give a short lookup on what come to my mind:

- lootboxes/gambling: if it's all about cosmetics, i'm fine with it. However there should be a way provided for unlucky buyers to farm enough currency so they can buy their item of choice in a reasonable time/price. Anyway they come with the very bad trait of being an addiction - this side effect should be monitored but here we're going more outside of the game mechanics (little children with no control for example).

- DLCs: oh my, the cancer of our times. Honestly, i see them as the old major patches. Instead of selling you a 3 parts expansion for 30 euros, they're selling you 1 part at a time for 10 euros, because smaller prices are way more attractive and you're getting the same content for the same price, only one piece at a time. Imho it's not a bad idea, makes also way for a more flexible pipeline for devs that can focus better on single aspcets instead of delivering a huge mess of many things where something goes always overlooked. The problem here aren't DLCs per se, but what's inside of them. Being slightly bigger patches, we've seen too many times crap like "day 1 DLC" and "new uniforms DLC" that are pretty much overpriced s*** and are a sorry excuse for some devs to make more money with the minimum effort. Also there's quite a bunch of stuff that's CLEARLY content scrapped from the original game or stuff that didn't make it in time, and then sold for additional money, which is complete garbage behaviour.

- Season Pass: well, look above. It's just a "pay less in advance for all DLCs", without any guarantee that they are actually good. Again, problem is not the season pass itself but what's inside of it.

- convenience microtx: comes to my mind the Currency/Cards/Essence tabs in PoE. They're fucking wonderful and don't cost jack shit (given the quality of the game which is F2P). That's a perfect example of microtx done good, cosmetics and covenience that are in no way required to play but can make a difference in quality of life. Also worth noting that convenince stuff are the ones that cost LESS while cosmetics are the more expensive - so it's not like they're gating the actually useful stuff behind a huge paywall.

All in all, you can sum it up with "are they worth the money", which again is subjective. There are unfortunately too many cases where the answer is NO for everyone. I'm in for different pricings/way of making revenue; i played wow for 10 years paying a sub and all expansion packs, but i never felt (even if sometimes i stopped playing after a while) that i wasted my money - the game was fun with a continuos stream of new content (with his ups and downs) so spending that 13 euro/mo was not a problem.

Spending 20 euros for a batch of skins is crap and seeing games with huge potential basically being heavy makeup cash garbs makes me mad.