Please explain the concept of a "Battle Pass" is like I'm an idiot

Hello pals,

Ill just put it out there up front. I don't play a lot of videogames, but my partner and I wanted a nostalgic hit, so we bought the new Call of Duty game. It's really fun! The multiplayer is really exciting (Even if I hate that one death and wait for respawn mode on the trench map), and we've been enjoying it the last couple of days.

However...there's one thing I just don't understand. It's the "Battle Pass". I don't think I've ever played a "Live service" game before, but I understand they're all over these types of games. But it seems like at every avenue, there's a meter filling up, or we're unlocking baubles for our guns, or we're completing quests.

Now, the paid BP offers quicker unlocks and stuff, but honestly, I've not a clue what this BP is, how quests work, I feel like a dad playing a game with his kids for the first time.

I'm no stranger to videogames historically, but all this is new to me. Please can someone explain all this, what looks very predatory, concept? Please dumb it down as much as you can, because I'm utterly clueless.

Thanks!

Well, from the company perspective, it's pretty simple:

1. Make a game as quickly as possible, probably by crunching the staff half to death while not caring about bugs or overall quality.
2. Shove in a "battle pass" of "exclusive" content of dubious quality that took virtually no effort or money to make and easily could have been free. Bonus points if the content was AI generated or straight up stolen from other creators.
3. Design the look of the battle pass to maximize FOMO in the consumer. Bonus points if you can design it to be addictive.
4. Rake in the money.
5. Layoff 40-60% of the people who made the game.
6. Bonuses for everyone the talentless suits!
7. Repeat.

From the consumer side of things, that usually looks like this:

1. Gamer pays money for game.
2. Gamer sees battle pass, gets FOMO.
3. Gamer pays more money for the privilege of early unlocks and "exclusive" cosmetics of dubious quality.
4. Gamer complains that the content is low quality and predatory.
5. Gamer keeps spending money anyway because "Meter go up."
6. Gamer wonders why people keep buying low quality, predatory games. Realizes they probably shouldn't do that anymore.
7. Gamer buys the next low quality, predatory game anyway.

@sombre: While it might seem like a predatory system, it's actually a step to be less predatory since regulators were starting to wise up to how bad loot boxes were, whereas players tend to not like the "buy what you want from the store with Michael Transactions" style of monetisation.

The easiest way to explain the general gist of Battle Passes is actually CoD. Back when Call of Duty came up with leveling and prestiging, it was somewhat of a revolutionary concept for multiplayer games. Instead of the game relying on the core gameplay loop being fun, you earned stuff from just playing the game so it felt like there was permanent progress. Battle Passes are this, but brought to the modern live game ecosystem. You pay for a season's Battle Pass and it gives you an XP track, where you unlock cosmetics related to the theme of the Season and the more you play and achieve goals, the more you unlock.

The cool thing about Battle Passes is that it gives you a fun incentive for playing and coming back to the game. The flipside is the question of "what happens when the season is over?". Different companies have solutions that range from shitty to actually fair to the players. One: Do you lose your battle pass? Some games like Halo let you keep grinding even if the Season is over, others cut you off immediately so you HAVE to play it as much as you can to unlock everything. Two: If you missed a season, have you missed the cosmetics completely? For a lot of games the answer is yes, because bringing back old cosmetics pisses of the people who already own them. For others, they come back to the store from time to time.

Then there's the differences between what the free alternative is. Some games give you absolutely nothing in a Season if you don't pay, and others have fun stuff for them too.

But really, don't think of it as something you have to buy. If there are cosmetics that would seem cool to you in the Battle Pass and you feel like you want to play, go ahead and buy it. If not, don't. You're playing with your partner, so there's no peer pressure to get the coolest possible cosmetics anyway. Just do what makes you happy.

@retris: That is the answer right here.

It's pretty simple. If you like a game enough to pay a little bit of extra money for in-game content, the battle passes is a way to do that without breaking the bank buying store cosmetics and other items. However, these days, developers like Bungie will also lock story content and progression behind battle passes, so if you care enough about the lore of a game, you'd have to pay to see how the story advances. Call of Duty for example now has battle pass tiers like the "Black Cell", and they try to encourage players to pay for the most expensive version instead of the basic eleven dollar one.

But I will say when it comes to CoD, one of the good things is that you can earn in-game currency by playing through the battle pass, and save up enough to buy the next one without spending any more money. This is what I've been doing for years since the release of the Modern Warfare remake. For example, I recently got the last CoD MWII battle pass, because the character Spawn is featured, and I'm a fan of that series. But given how gross MWIII turned out to be, I might be done with CoD, at least for a while. We'll see...