Microtransaction and my brain. Tiny stuff.

So I gave a lot of thoughts on this subject during the last few months. Maybe because I bought an Xbox One or maybe because more and more games have micro-transaction built-in directly in 60$ games.

I don't think I like it but, here are my questions :

- Why do people get angry when they are offered to pay money to; skip ahead, have better gear etc.? Why would someone be mad to be, at every turn of the game, advertised they can have a better car than the one they drive if they pay real money, right now, right here.

To me it never made sense that someone who wanted to pay to essentially NOT PLAY the game they bought to PLAY. If the micro-transactions is made "right" it will not hide features that are available by playing the game, plain and simple. People thinking otherwise just need to accept it, it's the world we live in and there's not much efficient way to get around it except by being wise about it right?

So the answer to me is : DESIRE.

The first desire comes from owning the game, then playing it, after that hopefully enjoying it. Then come other desires that we all have and that had not yet been monetized. Get better gear faster, finish the game faster cause I want to play another one, cause I want to see the story etc. The desire to have a better car than the one I own, a better one than the one my friend got and keeps bragging me about.

If you can't resist to your desire or if you refuse (can't) to pay money to get it right away when the option is there, you will be frustrated. If we would be able to resist these desires, there wouldn't even be a reason to complain about it. We would be enjoying the games by PLAYING them. That is to say, some games will lock away content behind an additional fee. That is bad and there's no defending that, right? Well, what if that great game was only 20$ instead of 60$ and for additional fees you can get the rest of it? What is the right price for these kinds of games then? I don't think there's an right answer for that. Simply because there will always be people who will desire things more than others.

Steam understood it. They created a game called steam where the goal is to fill up the desire to own as many games as possible. They stripped out all the other desires by focusing on the first one. By reducing the prices so much, almost anybody can get most of the games on steam. How many people have bought games on steam that they never played and will probably never played just because the price, at one point, was so low that they could fill the desire to own the game. First desire: owning the game. Playing it comes in second for steam. I know that people will say otherwise. That they played or will play every game they purchased out of steam. Good for them. They are smart about it and control their desire of owning more games than they can play. I think most people can't say the same. As I content creator and an "artist" myself, I don't like the idea of someone paying me 10$ for my album just to say that they own it. I want people to enjoy it (or not) and listen to it, experience it. I don't do it for money.

So in short, companies in the business of making money will always find ways to fill up your desires. You just need to be smart about it and not give in.

Because these are suppose to be AAA titles from respected studios, not cell phone scams.

- Why do people get angry when they are offered to pay money to; skip ahead, have better gear etc.? Why would someone be mad to be, at every turn of the game, advertised they can have a better car than the one they drive if they pay real money, right now, right here.

Because we are seeing game progression and game balance affected not by sound game design decision but by financial decision.

To me it never made sense that someone who wanted to pay to essentially NOT PLAY the game they bought to PLAY. If the micro-transactions is made "right" it will not hide features that are available by playing the game, plain and simple. People thinking otherwise just need to accept it, it's the world we live in and there's not much efficient way to get around it except by being wise about it right?

As you say "If done right". There are very few single player F2P games, right. Why is that? Because the F2P model mostly relies on an endless treadmill of unlocks. You'll never need to buy everything as you say. The issue is not so much that you'll never get it all. The issue is that in many cases unlocking that stuff becomes the game. Let's not lie to ourselves, we like to progress in game. The mechanics of getting new perks, new gear, level up, etc. are now all being co-opted into the monetization model of these games with various mechanisms like cooldowns timers, grinding, multiple game currencies, etc. These games no longer are balanced toward an increasing difficulty curve, slowly unlocking abilities to teach you slowly or to ensure that some level designs work with only a subset of abilities (for example you shouldn't have the boomerang or ladder at this point in the game cause it would trivialize this puzzle in dungeon 4); the abilities and gear are often time now part of a very large pot of stuff you'd like to get but won't because there's always 10x more stuff than you can legitimately unlock. Moreover, the game isn't design around you needing any of this stuff because they can't assume you'll have it, so mechanically it's no longer part of a careful design balance. If you've played enough F2P games, you've probably noticed these things.

Personally, I'm staying away from F2P game from now on. There are very few games that "do it right". DOTA 2 and Path of Exile are probably the only two games I can name where part of the game aren't taken away from you to tempt you into monetizing your game play. (If you want to be a real stickler, you could argue that the bank slots in PoE are "game features" that prior to the F2P shift would be set in the game and would not be monetized, and if you wanted to change that, you'd hack/mod the game; but PoE is so fair that I wouldn't go that far considering the damn game is free). I burnt out on WoW a few years ago because I thought the gear treadmill was pointless. F2P is relies mostly the same kind of machinations. They need you playing as long as possible to increase the probability that you'll drop some money. It's a hard balance to strike between trivial items and required items.

When this stuff starts to seep into single-player game, I think gamers should be very worried. The claims around the new Forza that they are "re-balancing the economy" is a total admission that they went too far locking content behind a paywall/grind treadmill. It's already happening. And let's be clear here. There is no economy in a single player game. Economy talk comes from MMOs where you have thousands of players engaging in trade where you have inflation and deflation, price fluctuation based on supply and demand, and other aspects of a real economic system. Pricing your unlocks in a single player game too high is not a game economy problem; it's a greed problem. Co-opting the term "economy" in the context of single player game is deceptive rhetoric.

Multi-player games are another beast entirely. Games where people spend hundreds if not thousand of hours playing can follow different rules, and I can't comment too much on them whether the balance is really there and all weapons are truly side-grades. Personally, I used to play a lot FPS back in the days of Quake 2 and 3 and Return to Castle Wolfenstein. I could jump in and be on a level playing field; same maps, same guns; my skills against yours. When I consider playing an FPS now, I need to look at all the landscape of unlock progression, map DLCs, and all that fluff and whether I can even have fun playing it. I just want to drop in for an hour occasionally and play. I don't have hundreds of hours to drop to level up and unlock stuff. So I chose FPS like CS:GO where I don't have to go on a treadmill.

I don't mind paying for game, and it's worrisome to me how the new F2P monetization model is slowly encroaching in a way that affects game design decision in single player games.

As fucked up as other industries are, they seem to have slightly less nefarious ways of milking money from their consumers. I guess I'd rather see yearly 'special editions' of games with 'deleted scenes' than have fucking armor and weapons dangled in front of my nose on the day of release.

A big part of it is that, when I buy a game, I want all of the game. I would happily pay $80 for my games if it meant that I would get all of the content for it right then and there and never be asked to pay one or two bucks each time I load it up. Recently I bought a copy of The Saboteur, a game I skipped and have been meaning to play. I actually got it second hand from a local used electronics store, gave them a few old DVDs and picked it up gratis. And now I'm sitting here debating if I want to buy that stupid fucking 'Midnight Show' DLC. Not because I want to see tits in my game, but because it seems like part of the content that I am just missing. It's frustrating as shit knowing that I bought this game and I only actually have 99% of it.

@nashvilleskyline said:

Because of expectation due to experience. It doesn't really matter if the game is balanced enough to where the pay to progress micro-transactions were completely optional, because the collective mindset on those features are that we will at some point have wasted a lot of time hitting our heads against a brick wall that takes money to get past. So even if that's not true, the perception that it might be the case is enough to ruin the overall impression of the game and as such color your experience playing it.

The first part of your point here hinges on the idea that the balance is fair and only rejecting my desire is enough. The problem we've been seeing time and time again is that that games are designed as money sinks and as such, the frustration isn't about whether I can or cannot spend money but rather that the game will continually need to be fed money in order for someone to have a good time. At a certain points, we've come full circle and we're back in arcades where every game is stacked against you so you feed it money.

To me it's not so much what do I have a desire for, but what is reasonable to expect. If I download Candy Crush, it's reasonable to expect that at some point, I'll either stop playing or pay money (or bother everyone on facebook all the time). But if I buy a brand new game, I don't think it's reasonable to expect that after that initial payment I'm supposed to pay more money on top of that to get the basic experience. And to make matters worse, it seems like these new retail games with micro transactions in them are not released with enough transparency for you to see whether they are optional or if they're just as bad as their cellphone counterparts.

Thank you guys for the chat.

I think expectation and communication are the keys here. In your personal experiences, did you buy a game expecting something out of it that was then locked behind you paying more to be able to experience it? I understand that there is a game design changing factor here. That some developers will build their 60$ around the idea that you will have to pay more once you're in. I don't think it's right. Don't get me wrong. To explain myself I think I need to give you an example of one of my favorite game of all time, if not my favorite;

Dark souls. The game will hide the content behind non conventional level design, behind a discovery system that doesn't really explain itself from the get go, that will brutally make you pay for your mistakes etc. Spending hundred of hours in this game was the only way I could experience most of it ( and I mean HOUNDREDS). Dam, the game even makes you work a hell of a lot to get access to the DLC you paid or it lol. I think that some of their design decisions would be considered bad for most gamers, but not for me. I also think that the same game, in another developer's hands would have been monetized as hell. Would have enjoyed the game less for that? I don't think so cause the experience I was expecting from the game was mostly discovery and mastery of the system. I was in fact expecting what they were communicating. Desiring what they were communicating. I was paying for a challenge. The game was built around it, communicated around that fact. But lots of people didn't enjoy the game, a lot of well respected "professionals" even slammed the game for most of the reasons I love this game.

I think desires get in the way of us enjoying some games that, yes, are built to get more money out of you after buying them full price. Is it a bad thing? I don't think so. I think judgement and informing yourself of every single purchase or investment is a responsibility and the lack of doing so is the real bad thing here. Because as I said, businesses will always find a way to get money out of our desires and unfortunately it's not gonna change. What can change though is our own behaviour and expectations toward such games. I didn't pay any extra for any of the games I bought or played for my Xbox One. Did it diminished the experience i got from them? ( Ryse, Forza 5, Dead Rising) nope. I made purchases based on critics and information given to me.

But I can give you a good example of a game I was expecting. A game I was reading a lot about and felt really let down after 80 hours of playing. Diablo 3. For me and many others, Diablo has always been about the "end game" content. The part were, once you've mastered the systems in place, you could have a greater challenge awaiting you with higher difficulty playthroughs and a loot system giving you the right tools. But Diablo 3 was the worst. It forced you, once you got to that point, to exploit the real money auction house to get those tools. I know there were ways around it, but I don't want to get into this because it's not the point. The point is, my expectations, even if I was well informed, were completely wrong. What did I do? Stopped playing the game. But after 80 hours of it can I be frustrated? Yes. But can I fault the developpers...hmmm not really. The auction house was advertised, there were countless hands on with the game on the internet. My expectations were just wrong.

The thing I should have done is just not buy the game. Plain and simple. There will always be other games that for my expectations, do it right. I'm 32 years old and have never been as satisfied to play games these days than the last 25 years before. We have more choices and countless ways to fulfill our gaming desires and for way cheaper than before. I remember buying a sega master system game for 75$ in 1990. 75$ for a game that I finished and completed in mere hours... That would probably be 150$ nowadays if I'm right.

If you can tolerate the bad audio and 2h length, I recommend you listen to this talk: IGDA: Ara Shirinian-Deconstructing Free to Play.

If it's too dry and academic, try Jonathan Blow's more poetic criticism of F2P: Jonathan Blow: Game design: the medium is the message.

You say you would be happy of a Dark Souls game with microtransactions, but you haven't told us how you'd think it would work. Let me give it a shot. Image that when you fight enemies, they drop souls and sometime coins, but very rarely. Souls can buy you weapons at merchants and also upgrade them, but the rate is 10x higher than what we have now. You can upgrade weapons for, hmmm, let's say 2$ worth of coins per upgrade level, or 50 000 souls. Sometimes you get really great weapons, like crystal weapons; they break really fast. Merchants sell crystal weapon repair kits for 5$ a pop. How does it sound so far? The game is half the size at launch, it's Early Access and costs 40$. Every two months, they add a new region and a bunch of new weapons that are quite a bit more powerful than what you managed to grind out before the new patch. The new areas are more brutal than the previous ones and you need those new weapons. They're 500 000 souls to unlock, or 5$ worth of coins a piece You can also buy souls doubler for 10$. They last 14 days. If you log in every day and play for 30 minutes, you start to get random drops after a few deaths. When you're human you can double your soul collection, but if you are invaded, you can get 10% of your souls stolen. You can buy souls protection for 5$ worth of coins, it lasts a week. Should I go on?

I'm with you that people need to do their research and be careful, and control their expectation. I still think there's an erosion of content, and co-option of game mechanics for profit which lessens the game experience. F2P opened up a pandora's box. People are growing up on "free" games at a time where the price of games probably should be increasing, at least in the mind of publishers. I really hope there will still be good developers who believe in the type of games I enjoy. I know I'll vote with my money. Witcher 3 will probably be reward with a full price purchase if it's good.

Glad to have a talk about that! Let me think of a good answer...had too many beers tonight lol :)

@noizy: I didn't have the time to listen to the first link you sent but I will. I did, however, listen the Jonathan Blow's 1 hour seminar trying to make people believe F2P is evil and Candy Crush will destroy every bit of good taste in left in people. I won't linger on this talk because frankly he starts really strong but end up comparing tastes and behaviour against design. He tries to make a point around the fact that a game is necessarily bad if it's designed around the carrot on the stick idea. He compares narritive atmospheric based games to games designed to fill up some time while you're taking a shit. To me, his tastes gets in the way of him making a good point. If he compared games like Peggle to Candy crush, maybe he could have been able to make a good argument here, but he doesn't. Anyway, I looooved braid, will play the witness, but don't really like his condescendant and patronizing speeches.

I gave some thought about the design around game mechanics built to get money out of you instead of enjoyment. I'm not gonna defend those games, I don't like them and don't play them and to be honest I would probably do them as bad justice as Jonathan Blow does since he doesn't play them and probably don't get why people play them. I do think that these games won't forever change the way games are designed. Same goes for music. I don't think that because there's more bad music out there than good that it will stop people writing good songs and stop people wanting to listen good music. Both educated and non-educated tastes will always co-exist. In the 60's and 70's yes TV was bad for the most part, but movies in those days were also freaking awesome and medium changers. The desire for good narratives and good mechanics in games will always be there.

I'll give you a point that is also true for any other type of entertainment. As people grow up with these lesser games, consumer behaviour will change along the way. I would also ask this question: Why do we see a rise in Independent games. Why do we get more and more bite sized experiences mostly built around a few simple mechanics? Because people don't have as much time to enjoy games as they did before. More and more games come out everyday. More games that I could ever play. That, to me, is way more of a game changer than anything.

Indie games are built around 2 principles:

- the first one is the constraint of a small team and a small budget. The result we get? Games that have rudimentary graphics, that are mostly shorter than "big budget" games like Dark Souls for example.

- the second is the desire to make a few things done right. The result we get? Games that have rarely more than a couple mechanics but are tight. Games that have a short narrative but a strong one.

I'm sticking to basics here because getting into the "what I get from those games emotionally" is far too complicated and frankly, emotions are unique for everyone. But here you go, the rise of indie has shown that you can get smaller experiences that are enjoyable, short for the most part and incredibly well put together. Does this start to sound like the music industry? Yes you won't get shorter songs because they are indie, but you won't get the same sound from an indie band than you get from Beyonce. It will sound a bit lesser produced but none the less interesting for the educated minds. My point is; do we get lesser experiences because of these factors? Nope. Different ones, but good ones.

As people grow on games like Gone Home and Papers Please (using Blow's references), they will forge an educated mind around games and game designs. The important thing to remember is that good and bad will always co-exist in any type of medium. I also think that most people playing only Candy Crush types of games would not play Dark Souls anyway. That's not what they get out of it. I could also say that people reading comic books are not necessarily the same people reading Dan Simmons. You know what that's fine.

I hope I didn't lose you along the way lol

Tx for the time you put in responding to the blog. It made my morning coffees more enjoyable.

Also, if you're interested, my gamer tag is Lynx67. I don't give away my Steam one since I no longer play PC games... my Macbook pro is getting old.

@nashvilleskyline: Hey there. I don't disagree with your assessment. It's a more optimistic rendering than mine and I hope you are right. I tend to be cautiously pessimistic when I make a case for something.

I agree that Blow's talk had some flaws and some of his conclusions were based on some value judgement. Fundamentally though I agree with his thesis that the format of your game constrains the type of experience it can convey; hence his 'the medium is the message' reference.

To go in the direction of what you were saying, if we see more games that are "casual" it does not necessarily hurt the "core" game industry, and hopefully some of these people who experience more casual games get into "core" gaming (I don't like these terms, but for this claim it'll work). I think that's right, and it's an optimistic way to look at the industry. If indies also provide an entry point for some people, that's great too.

I think that optimistic outlook is true, and it's also not contradictory to the recent trend we are seeing with DLCs and microtransactions in big-budget AAA title. The thing is I like these type of games too.

I'm trying to find a game that was ruined by these recent trends, and although there aren't too many, I think there are a few. I'd say SimCity has been ruined by all the worst recent industry trends; DLC expansion model where you buy content over time (if Sims 3 is any indication, that's what they were hoping for that game. The always online is another issue altogether, but was probably put in service to their idea of game-as-a-platform idea). Diablo 3 was also arguably affected by a desire to take a cut on in-game trades. I wish I had examples that haven't been beat to the ground because I'm tried of hearing about these as well. The point I'm wanting to illustrate though is that the positive pressure of indie and casual game aren't necessarily at odds with some of the worst trend on the big-budget titles. The business model on the games at the top tier are different than those at the bottom of the tier (from a capitalization standpoint I mean). There are very few really outstanding games coming out every year, a few dozens if we are lucky, and some of these are big budget games. As the industry tries to remain profitable, some publisher are exploring these monetization models. I just hope not too many games get ruined through these attempts.

I'm in agreement that if a game is bad then consumers should avoid it. As a result I haven't dared to play SimCity. I might buy it when it hits 10$ (ideally 5$) out of morbid curiosity. There's a downward pressure on the industry, and sometimes it's not necessarily on the designers to make certain key decisions; team are big and designing products is an ugly process; the right decision in service of the art of game design doesn't always prevail. When the industry is trending toward these practices, it's much easier for biz dev people to win their argument over the studios. (At work I am involved in product/services development, and the way some decisions are taken is pretty astounding sometimes. Why certain people believe certain things are the right thing to do is hard to explain sometimes).

Game making is still a business and things have to remain profitable. As much as I find the discourse on these issue bordering on hysteria, I am hoping that it's sending the a message that some bad design decisions will have negative impacts to the publisher's bottom line. I'm not entirely sure though, because sometimes (oftentimes?) the loudest people speaking against a product are still buying those games at launch, pre-order with season pass on top. Hook, line and sinker. Those that care so much about games to shout about it online are probably way too deep and will buy the games anyway, as was illustrated with the "MW2 boycott". They're not the "swing voters". They're the known quantity on the books.

I fear our texts are becoming less concise and we probably should leave it there :). Thanks for the conversation. I am unfortunately a PC gamer.

I'd like to add, it bothers me because there usually not charging for additional content like DLC but instead charging you to change a few numbers in a database. It's like hey asshole I already bought the game, if I want to change an imaginary number stat, I should, don't try to charge me for that. It comes down to ownership, what's the next part of the game will they decide I have no control over. I think it's also why they can't really get away with that crap on the PC and shows what a joke it really is.

I get bothered when the option of micro transactions is being shoved down my throat, particulaly in games like Dead Space where atmosphere is everything. Instead of being enraptured in the setting, I'm being encouraged to go to the in-game shop to buy materials, which itself is aggravating as it implies that I need those materials to match the pace of the game's difficulty curve. Assassin's Creed 4 did in right in this regard I feel. Instead of offering metal or wood packs, the likes of which are used to upgrade the ship, they offered an all or nothing proposition for all of the upgrades for the ship, which actually made it a time saving measure rather than simply saying that as an excuse to get me to accept them.

Really glad to read the comments. Thank you very much for taking the time. My english is not too good and hopefully it wasn't too painful to read. Have a great all.