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[polyh3dron]

Back in 2006.

This.

Horse armor was the line for me.

 

[ronaldthump]

its should be drawn at cosmetic shit and not for MP games where players who pay for better gear have the advantage

at the end of the day, you vote with your wallet. Dont buy them and it goes away

 

[patapuf]

Except games don't have to cost that much to make. That's the industry's fault not mine.

Not to mention Nintendo doesn't have microtransactions in ARMS or Splatoon, yet I'm getting plenty of free content.

Overwatch sold several times more than both those games combined. They can more then afford to give out free content.

If games had to be more expensive (they don't) then I'd rather see something like Titanfall 2's cosmetic DLC, instead of a loot box or premium currency system.

And splatoon got it's support cut less than a whole year in the market. Now you can buy the sequel. Yay!


Also try to release an AAA game with scaled back production values. You get skewered by fans and reviews. People want their expectations met.

 

[texhnolyze]

You don't have to actively buy-in to support it. Anyone who is happy to play a game that has microtransactions, enjoys it, and tells other people about it, is contributing success to the game. Anyone who buys a full priced game with microtransactions in it is supporting the game. It shows that having microtransactions is not detrimental to sales and popularity - but rather it is the opposite, not only does it not have an impact on sales and popularity, it opens up an additional revenue opportunity since some people are willing to pay for it. It is win-win and there is almost no reason not to do it if your game can support it. That's the reality.

It's not a defense, it's stating the obvious. Buying a game with microtransactions and then posting on NeoGAF going "fuck microtransactions!!!" is still supporting microtransactions. The actual people who do not buy games with microtransactions and care so much about it to want to push back are the tiniest minority.

Preach.

 

[Shifty]

The line has long since passed over the horizon behind us.

 

[patapuf]

Just out of curiosity, what do people that hate Micortransactions think of TCG's like pokemon or Yu Gi Oh, which are directly and obviously marketed to kids?

 

[Kovacs]

To be honest the line has already been and gone for me. It was when they started putting 'freemium' elements into full priced games and fudging the established economics of series to make blocking as part of natural progression more difficult.

Example - Forza on Xbox One. Although admittedly they did go back an readjust, but it should never have been an issue in the first place.

Then there are the examples of charging for things that used to be rewards or easter eggs like skins or cheats, and finally there are the pay-to-win boosts attached to multiplayer games.

I'll still happily buy a full priced game, and I'll also happily buy DLC that functions as as a real old-school Expansion Pack like the Shivering Isles, Blood and Wine and the upcoming Zelda expansion, but I'll never spend a penny on an in-game currency or boost.

 

[Pixels]

Slightly off topic but I wonder if something like Amazon Prime could be applied to f2p.

 

[LAM09]

Paying to win

 

[Falk]

Slightly off topic but I wonder if something like Amazon Prime could be applied to f2p.

You mean a set rate/spending-over-time with a set bonus?

How's that any different from various "VIP packages" or subscription in many freemium games?

 

[Sanjay]

Microtransactions in full-price games.

Rainbow Six Siege. Buy full game, find out you have to unlock everything which takes ages or buy points or season pass that gives you them. It's fucking bullshit.

 

[Pixels]

You mean a set rate/spending-over-time with a set bonus?

How's that any different from various "VIP packages" or subscription in many freemium games?

Yep, same thing. Do you have any good examples?

 

[grmlin]

Rainbow Six Siege. Buy full game, find out you have to unlock everything which takes ages or buy points or season pass that gives you them. It's fucking bullshit.

I fucking hate any real money progression-shortcuts, because the greedy publisher will make it harder to progress in return. No one would buy this nonsense otherwise.

This and random lootboxes that make my game feel like a F2P mobile game.

I can't stand this and I'm not buying this, especially not at full price.

 

[RollerMeister]

Microtransactions in the Call of Duty remaster seems pretty heinous, especially considering they're also overcharging for ancient DLC...

 

[Falk]

Yep, same thing. Do you have any good examples?

I think a lot of it would basically boil down to how players view the various transactions in the game, and what their own self-imposed limits are. Often this has to do with limited amounts of a much higher-value transaction vs. the default $$/lootbox ratio in the game.

The lowest-hanging fruit example I can think of, would be what FFRK userbase calls "100-gemming". Generally, a roll in FFRK is 300 gems (roughly 3 bux) per pull, or 3000 ($30) for an 11-pull. Each event (lasts about a week) offers two gacha banners, for which the first single pull bought with money costs 100 gems instead of 300. This is generally seen as much higher value, but is limited in that you'd only be able to get 2 pulls per 6 days at this rate.

The psychological effect this has, is a small but quite significant fraction of the playerbase limits themselves to only 100-gem pulls, which in turn is practically the same as a small subscription fee for a decent return (well... by gacha standards anyway since you can still have awful luck for months on end even at this discounted price)

Put another way, if FFRK had re-encapsulated this idea into "Pay 10 dollars a month, we'll give you 1 free pull per gacha banner" it'd effectively have been the same thing but presented in perhaps a much more appealing manner for people against gacha as an 'exploitative skinner box', since it's effectively a subscription.

In fact, Mobius Final Fantasy, if it hasn't changed, offers something along those lines - a 3000 Magicite "VIP box" that you can grab once every 30 days that gives you gacha pulls equaling 3000 of that same currency, a bunch of levelling/evolve mats, and a 1.5x XP boost. The big caveat here is that this is such good value for its currency cost that someone has to be insane NOT to get it, but on the flipside that currency is also obtainable in-game rather than being solely a $$$ deal.

Granblue has a system called "Surprise Tickets" where, for the price of a 10-pull ($$$ only, can't do this with the in-game currency), you get that 10-pull and your choice of anything in a predefined set every time the deal rolls around, which isn't often and thus follows the same psychology of heightened value at a controlled rate. You can definitely build a very competitive endgame team over a few months only spending on Surprise Tickets and nothing else, and the bottom boundary is not dictated by RNG at all since you know beforehand what you can choose.

 

[Lady Gaia]

In all honesty I'm probing for ideas for a game I'm working on. I have extensive experience with f2p monetization and here's a little bit of truth:

1. Blocking off content for a price makes very little. People are just not compelled by this.
2. Ads make nearly nothing. They suck.
3. Random loot boxes with extremely rare items make the most by far. We're talking many magnitudes larger.
4. Random loot boxes make people very angry and hostile.
5. Selling the contents of a random loot box brings in less than 1% of a loot box.

F2P is its own kettle of fish. Trying to coax people who are reluctant to spend money into rewarding you for your time creating something they enjoy isn't unreasonable. It's a natural evolution of shareware. The unfortunate part comes in when games start preying on addiction patterns and perceptual loopholes for assessing value that things get ugly. Loot boxes definitely fit this definition.

Not everything can be about maximizing revenue, or we'll follow that slippery slope to even worse business models. Would you accept a free in-game reward for agreeing to a 1% chance of granting permission to charge anything to your credit card for a day? After all, the odds are heavily in your favor that you'd get something for free! I sure wouldn't, but enough people would that you can imagine how lucrative that could be.

I hate loot boxes. I hate them more than anything. There has to be a better way.

A better way? Or merely a reasonably profitable way? One approach that doesn't immediately offend me would be to let people play through enough to let them decide they like the basic premise and mechanics, and then pay into a pool that grants access to every participating F2P title for a period of time. The player is assured of what they get for their money with limited downside if they tire of the initial game, and they're incentivized to check out other titles, which should keep them engaged well into the next pay period. You pay participating titles their part of the pool based on where a players' time is spent.

It's a little like a Prime model as suggested by somone above.

Horse armor was the line for me.

I wonder if it would have garnered the same initial negative perception if it was called "horse finery" instead. Armor carries a connotation of usefulness, which wasn't the case at all, whereas finery is clearly a luxury of no value except for cosmetic purposes.

 

[Imbarkus]

Just out of curiosity, what do people that hate Micortransactions think of TCG's like pokemon or Yu Gi Oh, which are directly and obviously marketed to kids?

Oh sure. And you got Stacker machines, The Claw crane games, Check E. Cheese, even just simple gumball machines with capsules with a variety of stickers, but never the good one you want that you see on the front. Baseball cards. All RNG games, really.
But it's just another "what about" argument in a world where Valve is facing down a lawsuit from the gaming control board in Washington over leaving it's skin trade economy API open to exploitation by all those skins gambling sites last year.

Game economies where you can trade items seem ripe for this sort of abuse, sternly-worded letters or not.
I wrote a piece about it for a casino blog a couple weeks back, check it out if you like: If Young People Hate Gambling, Why Do They Keep Getting Busted For It?

 

[Keihart]

Rainbow Six Siege. Buy full game, find out you have to unlock everything which takes ages or buy points or season pass that gives you them. It's fucking bullshit.

Basic characters unlock super fast, only dlc characters unlock at high prices, wich makes sense since that's the incentive for the season pass.

 

[Pixels]

A better way? Or merely a reasonably profitable way? One approach that doesn't immediately offend me would be to let people play through enough to let them decide they like the basic premise and mechanics, and then pay into a pool that grants access to every participating F2P title for a period of time. The player is assured of what they get for their money with limited downside if they tire of the initial game, and they're incentivized to check out other titles, which should keep them engaged well into the next pay period. You pay participating titles their part of the pool based on where a players' time is spent.

It's a little like a Prime model as suggested by somone above.

A reasonably profitable way.

I guess I may end up trying the RuneScape member road. Seems to be a prime type setup.

 

[Mandoric]

I think a lot of it would basically boil down to how players view the various transactions in the game, and what their own self-imposed limits are. Often this has to do with limited amounts of a much higher-value transaction vs. the default $$/lootbox ratio in the game.

The lowest-hanging fruit example I can think of, would be what FFRK userbase calls "100-gemming". Generally, a roll in FFRK is 300 gems (roughly 3 bux) per pull, or 3000 ($30) for an 11-pull. Each event (lasts about a week) offers two gacha banners, for which the first single pull bought with money costs 100 gems instead of 300. This is generally seen as much higher value, but is limited in that you'd only be able to get 2 pulls per 6 days at this rate.

The psychological effect this has, is a small but quite significant fraction of the playerbase limits themselves to only 100-gem pulls, which in turn is practically the same as a small subscription fee for a decent return (well... by gacha standards anyway since you can still have awful luck for months on end even at this discounted price)

Put another way, if FFRK had re-encapsulated this idea into "Pay 10 dollars a month, we'll give you 1 free pull per gacha banner" it'd effectively have been the same thing but presented in perhaps a much more appealing manner for people against gacha as an 'exploitative skinner box', since it's effectively a subscription.

In fact, Mobius Final Fantasy, if it hasn't changed, offers something along those lines - a 3000 Magicite "VIP box" that you can grab once every 30 days that gives you gacha pulls equaling 3000 of that same currency, a bunch of levelling/evolve mats, and a 1.5x XP boost. The big caveat here is that this is such good value for its currency cost that someone has to be insane NOT to get it, but on the flipside that currency is also obtainable in-game rather than being solely a $$$ deal.

Granblue has a system called "Surprise Tickets" where, for the price of a 10-pull ($$$ only, can't do this with the in-game currency), you get that 10-pull and your choice of anything in a predefined set every time the deal rolls around, which isn't often and thus follows the same psychology of heightened value at a controlled rate. You can definitely build a very competitive endgame team over a few months only spending on Surprise Tickets and nothing else, and the bottom boundary is not dictated by RNG at all since you know beforehand what you can choose.

It's funny, because the $10/mo is less appealing to me (and would be an increased burn rate for me even as $10/mo total covering EVERY game, barring one splurge which would have been extra under it anyway). It doesn't give a convenient option of dipping out if there's nothing in the box I want, and is likely to come with loyalty or even concurrent loyalty bonuses penalizing me for passing on boring-ass shit like the inevitable FF4/FF9 (NicoMaki? Spears and fists? etc) month.

 

[JigglesBunny]

Here. Here was the line and the exact moment it was crossed.