The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was a monumental game. It redefined adventure games for generations to come and is still regarded as one of the best games of all time. Back in 1998, what did it not have? Cutting edge visuals, an epic story, fantastic controls, it was all there. Above all, however, it was a complete game.
Think that last part was obvious? Welcome to 2017.
2017 was the year where the issue of microtransactions in video games was finally brought to the forefront of the gaming community, and by extension, to the eyes of the gaming developers, and the way it was revealed – the broken world of Star Wars Battlefront 2 – serves as a talking point for what games are now compared to what they were in the era before microtransactions, and where video games go from here.
In case you don’t know, microtransactions is a term that is used to refer to in game transactions that the player can perform in order to get additional content or items that were not present in the original release of the game. For example, a game with microtransactions would make you pay an additional amount to unlock a new area that had to be downloaded via the Internet, or the game would offer you the chance to pay real world money for a piece of special gear that will dramatically increase your power in the game. Some popular games that have used microtransactions in the past and continue to use them to this day are Overwatch, Team Fortress 2, FIFA games and various mobile games such as Plants vs Zombies, Clash of Clans, Final Fantasy (mobile versions) etc.
Speaking from a business perspective, microtransactions are a brilliant move – they capitalize on the desire of the player to advance in the game and get better, and naturally, as most people will tend to see what happens to the characters and the story that they have invested time and energy in, they will pay to see what happens next. However, if you think about it from a customer perspective, it doesn’t sound fair, does it? Games like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Remastered and Middle Earth: Shadow of War were widely criticized by the gaming community due to a huge emphasis on microtransactions. Unfortunately, 2017 saw a considerable rise in the amount of microtransactions in the form of lootboxes and content being locked behind paywalls, and perhaps one of the biggest offender of this is Star Wars: Battlefront 2.
While EA had ditched the season pass system and made all the content accessible from the start, it was figured out that in order to gain items and/or upgrades that would make characters stronger, and to even get characters in the first place, they had to either pay real world money or spend an ENOURMOUS amount of time playing the game as they are hidden behind credit walls and lootboxes. I’m talking like around 40 hours to unlock a single character. No matter how you spin it, that is a really horrible thing to do. Here’s an example: a redditor by the name of The_Kratos calculated that it would take 4,528 hours of playing the game to manually unlock all the content that it had to offer. That’s roughly 188 days of a year. The alternative is to unlock it all, instantly, and with no effort at all, for $2,100 dollars.
This is the definition of a ‘pay to win’ system where how far you can advance in a game (in an online multiplayer paradigm) isn’t determined by how good you are or how skilled you are in the actual game itself – its determined by what gear you own and how much time/money you were willing to invest in it. This immediately turns off a significant portion of gamers, because who wants to spend hours upon hours of playing a video game to get something when someone who is just willing to pay for it could achieve the exact same thing? EA’s response to this was…interesting, to say the least. When a player highlighted the issue by citing that he had to pay $80 dollars for Darth Vader (arguably the most iconic Star Wars character and one of the most iconic villains in cinema history) on the reddit page for Battlefront 2, they responded with this:
‘The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes.’
I’m going to conclude with a situation that aptly demonstrates what the current scenario is like. Imagine you’re sitting in a theatre, and halfway through your movie, the screen goes blank and you hear a voice saying that you need to pay extra to see the rest of the movie. Some of the people who are really invested in the movie and want to see what happens next will inevitably pay up, but those who are indifferent will get up and leave. However, because the makers of the movie will get extra money from the people who paid extra because the movie wasn’t finished, they’ll keep doing it again and again, and soon, we’ll all get half finished movies, the ending being blocked by a paywall. You can never go to a theatre and just pay once to see a complete movie.
Doesn’t sound so fun, does it?