It isn't useful to damn every game that has micro transactions, but rather to focus on the ones that have the progression in those games artificially lengthened or padded out in order to incentivize you to buy DLC to move things along.This concept is the foundation of the F2P model, which is only a few years old really.
It is useful to warn against the games that are proven to have done this to incentivize purchasing virtual currency, because it negatively affects everyone who bought the game.
But it does no good to prematurely damn games that just have the presence of DLC or currency purchases before we have a good idea of if progression is artificially lengthened or not to incentivize those purchases.
It seems like the big offender here is Forza 5. Multiple reviews have clearly demonstrated that it takes several hours of play to earn enough currency to get a million credits, and plenty of cars will cost that or more. Also, considering that the game has a pretty small offering of career modes and tracks, getting all the cars unlocked would require repeating every event several times over if you didn't want to buy virtual currency, which is blatantly exploitative and awful. It's a clear case of the entire experience being altered with the intent that you are tempted to buy virtual currency.
The other big offender being identified is GTA online, which isn't anywhere near as bad for several reasons. First off, there are hundreds of missions and plenty of various activities to do, and even completing all of that once over would take around 100 hours. And you don't even have to do that stuff to get EXP and cash. Sure, the progression is slow, but there's plenty to do without unneeded repetition, and you can't buy your way to the top anyways due to not being able to purchase EXP boosters. That situation would be way worse if you could drop $20 and get the mini gun to tear everyone up in MP who have put 30-50 hours in.
However, on the other hand, most console games have totally optional DLC that don't affect the game for those who don't buy it at all.
There are several games from EA this generation that I've thoroughly enjoyed (NFS: Most Wanted 2005, NFS Hot Pursuit and the Skate games) that had paid options to unlock everything. You unlocked everything by playing normally, content unlocked at a quick pace, and the games were enjoyable from beginning to end and beyond. The presence of an option to unlock everything did not have any effect on the game, so why should I skip out on a game just because there is something available for sale that I wont want and have no need for?
In an ideal world, we would just have cheat codes, but now these publishers have the option to profit off of creating simple unlocks for sale. These take so little effort to create that it's just pure profit for them, so I don't expect this kind of option to go away.
Also, for all the crap that CoD and BF get for their season passes, those are pretty fantastic deals for those who really enjoy and play a lot of those games. I purchased the BF3 Premium for PC for $20 several months ago, and for a package that was less than the price of the original game, you get more maps than were in the original game, along with new weapons, vehicles, and even a couple new gameplay mechanics, and none of it is rehashed or lazy. And actually, most of them are better than the maps in the base game. Plenty of season passes are pretty scummy, but most anyone who has purchased the recent CoD or BF season passes will tell you that they don't just phone it in by any stretch. And if you are way into that game, it will be a great deal to more than double the amount of MP content in the game for less than the cost of the original game.
At some point though, if i like playing a game, i play it a lot and unlock everything anyway. Why would i pay to skip that?
If i think a game sucks i won't unlock everything in the first place and therefore don't care about unlocks or whatever i didn't get.
If a game is so bad you can't have fun without paying for DLC, i simply won't buy it.
Yep. At the end of the day, I'm playing a game because it is fun to play, and I'm not going to bother buying anything extra in a game I don't enjoy. And if a game artificially stretches out the progression in an attempt to get you to buy DLC, then that game is not going to be as fun. If I read about on e of these games, then I won't buy it, and if I bought a game and found out that it did do this, I would likely burn out on the game due to repetitiveness before I went and bought anything.
Very slippery. Just look at how many games have XP, crafting and unlock systems. Its infecting a lot of games that could be just fine if not better without them, and its exactly these kinds of "RPG elements" and progression systems being shoehorned into games for monetization potential. Similar to how everything had to be multiplayer with map packs, and now everything has to be always-online, err, I mean a connected experience, blurring the lines between single player and multiplayer.
In isolation and even moderation all of these things can be OK when properly utilized. But history doesn't paint a pretty picture here.
History paints a picture that is the opposite of what you are claiming. The F2P model of stretching out progression in order to tempt people into spending money has only been popular for a few years now, and while there are signs that fullprice game are taking some of those tactics, there are very few cases of this actually happening. Subscription based MMOs have been around for nearly 15 years now, and while they very well could've slowed down progression in order to get you to buy cash or EXP boosters, that trend didn't catch on in MMOs until a couple years ago.
Out of the hundreds of RPG's released on consoles this generation, only a couple let you buy items or EXP with real currency. Aside from Diablo 3 and ME3 MP, most of them were niche JRPGs. The only one I played was Tales of Vesperia, and I and anyone else who played that game will tell you that progression was not hamstrung by those options. I didn't play ME3 MP and I stayed the hell away from Diablo 3 for plenty of reasons, and Blizzard openly admits that the RMAH was a big mistake.
And while the introduction of RPG-lite elements into lots of games these days could potentially give opportunity for monetizing in the future, there is extremely little indication from the past that they will. Since COD:Modern Warfare started this trend of putting RPG-lite mechanics into everything in an attempt to make their game more addictive or feature-rich, of the hundreds of games that followed, the only game I'm aware of that sold unlocks to get you to the top to unlock everything was BF3. And items unlock quicker in BF4, even though they weren't much of a grind in BF3. But I never played bf3 for the grind, I played it because the MP was ridiculously intense and rewarding on its own.
While plenty of games are using those kinds of systems as a crutch at times to make them supposedly more involving or to create the illusion of depth, practically none of those games are selling EXp or cash boosters. It doesn't do anyone any good to create a pattern out of thin air to fit a conspiracy theory.
The only single-player exceptions I'm aware of are Forza Horizon and 5. While Forza Horizon was rife with micro transactions, the game was still easy to progress through and really fun. The presence of that stuff did not negatively impact the gameplay experience. It seems as if the rate of progress has been drastically slowed in Forza 5 to get you to buy virtual currency, and that would be a deal breaker for me if I were planning to get that game.
