Jonas looks at the past, present and future of Microtransactions and In App Purchases in gaming. How does it affect gamers? Does it work in the studios favour or the gamers?
HG writes: "Blizzard is usually pretty bad at keeping secrets, but the company somehow managed to keep this one under wraps until now. Plunderstorm is a special limited-time event that’s basically World of Warcraft’s take on the Battle Royale genre."
Created by Bethesda Softworks, The Elder Scrolls is hailed as one of the most groundbreaking RPG franchises.
Hanzala from eXputer writes "History is witness to their downfall, yet they keep coming."
It's not so much Devs as it is Invested and shareholders, issue is barely anyone has the backbone to stand up to them anymore and say no for the sake of the project.
This is a fairly interesting article that does summarize a bit of the history of this revenue type. But to answer the main question is a much simpler affair: While people will say in the internet that they hate GaaS games. The top revenue generating games are GaaS, so companies will try to have their own. Take Genshin Impact for example, that game alone generated more than 1.5 Billion USD in revenue during 2022. That is almost as much as the 1.9 Billion USD that Ubisoft as a whole generated that year.
It's definitely a risky move because the majority of GaaS games don't reach the level of success Genshin Impact achieved. However, companies can't seem to take their eyes off that tempting prize at the end.
Do you ever think that over the past year or so every studio who makes this shit has started to think
"GaaS is dying out partially because there's so many of them in the market now, I think other developers are moving away from the model now BUT lets stick to our GaaS game and then when it releases we'll be one of the few on the market still which allows us to get more of the market share since every one else has left"
Yet because every developer has that same thought process they've now all got GaaS games on a still over saturated market.
Premiere gaming is dying. With Spider-Man's 300 million dollar budget and Ratchet & Clank's ridiculously low return on investment (8 million Dollar loss) AAA gaming is going to be only filled with even more High profile IPs trying to make the biggest bang for buck. Expect to see more of this stuff.
"AA" level games are now making a big comeback and are usually even more beloved by playerbase now. So hopefully that's the silver lining. Smaller, better games.
It doesn't cost me much, personnally. I don't buy items or any in-game stuff. The only few additionnal contents that I bought are quality DLCs or extensions like Undead Nightmare (RDR) or Borderlands' add-ons, and that's about it. It has to be worth the money. I will never EVER contribute to the development of microtransactions. This is evil and ruins the essence of gaming.
The problem is it lowers quality of games, Real depth is taken out for vanity items and pay to win, or easy modes.
Like paying $10 to unlock all cars in multiplayer on a racing game, or $1 per character.
I remember when the micro-transactions were starting to get bigger *right after this previous generation started to take off* we all joked about having to pay $.25 to air up a ball in madden to play a game.
In truth its not to far off from that now with a lot of these silly costs. If you don't pay in a MMO that's "f2p" you end up leveling at 1/5th the speed.
Considering games where you have to pay to progress, I dont care as long as the total cost is somewhat cheaper than buying a game without MicroTransactions.
Their humanity.