Micro-transactions have been a controversial topic for a long time, even before the whole Battlefront II thing happened. Many gamers hate them, but few of them try to defend this choice in video games. I’ll go through most of all the points why they don’t hate this system. While some won’t say all these reasons, they’re some of the most brought up points.
AAA Game Companies have trouble making back their money: AAA game companies spend most of their budget on the advertising for a game usually made a hundred time already. If people aren’t interested in your game, you need to rethink what you did and try to make sure you will get an audience, not make your already small audience buy what should be already in your game. It’s called Capitalism. You must study the markets interest or give them a different game to milk them, not offer an unfinished game that charges more to get the full experience. Many indie games have made a large audience by how unique the experience(Look at Minecraft or Undertale).
It’s Usually for something you can unlock later in the game: Their’s three ways this can go. One way is for speeding up the process in games. While mostly in cheep mobile games, AAA game sometimes use it. Why get the game if you will pay a large to buy the game, then pay to pay another price to win a game, when you can save your money? The next way this can go is loot boxes. In this way, you can get an item you want through a system that requires luck instead if skill. Sometimes, the game will give you a loot box through leveling up in a game, instead of relying a progression that have worked many times in the past. The other way this can go is skins for characters, or skins for guns. While this may seem to be a good thing, Counter Strike: Global Offensive skin market place was left unsupervised from Valve, creating high prices and gamboling for virtual skins leading to scandals like CSGOlotto. It’s possible for all of this to be done well, though those games are a are the minority.
Inflation of prices have cause this: while inflation of the dollar have definitely happened throughout the years, the popularity of video games have also happened since 2007, a year where games like Portal 2, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Bioshock, Uncharted, and many more modern classics were created. Unfortunately, Micro-transactions might of stop the rise of their popularity over the years. Now gamers switch to more unique experiences from indie developers.
Arcades from the Past made you pay a quarter to play a game: Did you also pay an upfront of $70 bucks before you put your quarters to play your arcade games?
They made Downloadable content that you had to pay for to get: and the reception to them was negative, only having a few diamonds in the ruff. And Micro-transactions are pretty much DLC with all the positives taken out of the equations.
While this may seem I’m beating strawmen here, these are some of the points the defenders bring up. And I’ll say Overwatch and Fortnight do it alright, but this isn’t a system that really should enter a marketplace