Slashdot Mirror
The Hidden Evil of the Microtransaction
An anonymous reader tips an opinion piece at #AltDevBlogADay written by Claire Blackshaw, lead designer at Jagex Games Studio, about where companies go wrong with microtransactions. While microtransactions aren't inherently evil, she says, they're often misused by marketing folks to the detriment of everyone. She encourages game developers to fight back. Quoting:
"The problem with all this is this it is an ambiguous, grey area. The real kicker is that grey areas are always green-lit by greed. In the interest of a 'little more,' so much wrong has been done. So many ideas ruined, communities broken, and teams overstretched by wanting that little bit more. The old sustainable farming arguments come into play here. The massive problem is that you as the Games Designer or other development members do not always have the final say, but you can still fight your corner. You can build your arguments and try to provide some strong research and data to help your money people see the long term view."
With micro transations is that sometimes they don't seem micro at all. My idea of micro transations are less than €1. I came across a game there recently (Burnout Paradise for anyone who cares) where all the micro transations that were available combined cost more the original game did.
There is no -1 disagree
As I see the problem, it's the old fashioned wrongfull assumption that pretty much everyone makes at one time or another: Your actions affect price.
It's like when someone writes "Since yesterday, Stock A's price went up 100 dollars, If only I'd bought a million of them and sold today". This is only true if the act of purchasing a million of them would not have no effect on the price, which is highly unlikely when you purchase large volumes.
With microtransactions is the case of putting in products. They want to generate objects which have som intrinsic value, so people will buy them. But when ever they see that 10% of the people bought black sunglasses for 10 Dollars they go "hmm, lets get them out to the remaining 90%, lets drop the price to 1 dollar" Suddenly they are screwing over the original costumers by devaluating the objects they purchased and eventually they completely ruin the value of the object, becase who wan'ts a pair of sunglasses everyone has?
At the root of the problem is the fact that microtransactions are god from the machines in these small virtual worlds. They have complete power to put in content at any price or volume they want, and they simply do not understand the caution which must be taken exactly because of that level of control. And ofcause you have no free market at all, because production price of the objects are virtually zero, they simply cannot allow competition as the prices would be undercut to the point of there being no profit.
they're often misused by marketing folks to the detriment of everyone
Bill Hicks, God rest your soul.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
I would argue that microtransactions are completely and utterly evil by their very definition. There is no "gone wrong" or "abuse" when it comes to microtransactions, because the sole purpose, the driving force behind them, is to deceitfully make large amounts of money. People are inherently bad at understanding how much money they're spending, particularly if it is done in small amounts. In fact, people will treat a five dollar bill differently than five one dollar bills. You buy an energy refill here and a potion there and all of a sudden you've spent $100 on that facebook game and have no idea what happened. That's exactly what they want.
I think microtransactions are incompatible with good and fun game rules.
The problem that I have with microtransactions is that a game that's designed around them is usually (I haven't yet seen an exception) that the primary focus is to make profit off the player. Whereas traditionally, the primary purpose was to entertain the player and thereby make money off of them.
The issue of entertaining the player gets completely lost and replaced by psychological tricks to make people spend more and more money without ever actually experiencing any entertainment.
I actually think that "games" like Farmville or The Smurfs are a strange new form of gambling than actual games.
In my relatively short time in the industry [...]
`nuff said, probably. While microtransactions may or not be "evil", I find it a bit strange that the person who wrote this says on her blog: "Games Designer & Programmer (yes I still code)" and very recently described herself as having spent a relatively short time in the industry. Something doesn't add up.
Sadly it's completely senseless to argue against greed when developing games. You create useless carbon poluting code that justifies widespread destruction of our ecosystem. If you want to deal with greed, stop developing games, cause the whole premise of commercial game development is based on a pyramid of greed.try the ultimate game: Dealing with reality.
It's arguably a problem of mismatch between economically feasible granularity(ie. the lower bound on currency unit or quantity of goods you can trade without transaction costs devouring both parties) and the "natural" granularity that people expect from various classes of product.
In some cases, increased granularity actually solves the mismatch, and thus makes everybody happier(Intel only sells CPUs by the 1,000 unit tray. Ordinary people think in a 'natural' granularity three factors of ten smaller. Thankfully, there are middlemen willing to handle this discrepancy for a small fee...)
In other cases, however, increased granularity moves away from an existing match between the feasible and the 'natural' and makes things worse: In this(and a fair number of other) cases, the villain is DRM. Without it, things like books, games, etc. can pretty much only be sold in lumps. There are grey areas(did game X phone in the last episode to sell a sequel/expansion pack? is book Y worthless outside of its trilogy?); but the rough outlines of both 'natural' expectation and economically feasible expectation are basically set. If it isn't big enough to be worth pressing onto CDs and shipping to retail stores, it isn't a product, ergo, all products end up basically being finished products, with the possible exception of some free patches or a sequel/expansion pack also large enough to ship retail. Once you get a reasonably robust DRM framework, though, you can slice and dice material almost arbitrarily finely and at low cost. Unlocks, metering, limited use objects, etc, etc. can all be easily implemented even if everything has to be burned to disk ahead of time. Once downloads come into the mix, you have even more room to move.
EVE Online has recently added so called microtransactions to their game but they are nothing but micro. The highest priced item is a monacle that your character can wear which is priced at $70! It's just another way of companies slipping unchecked greed into a game. Players, wake up, stop buying this crap!
Let not thine bean-counters have party to the "fun", for surely upon that day that thou let thine bean-counters soil the "fun", the Lord, thine customers shall smite thee in thine wallet and it shall sting, And there shall be weeping and gashing of teeth in the outer darkness of the unemployment lines by the wicked unfaithful devs, so saith the Gods of Gaming. Amen.
Take the Red Pill.
I've noticed that microtransactions fundementally change the developer-player relationship. In a subscription-based game, a developer and a player are on the same side: the player wants to buy an entertaining game to stick with, the developer wants to make an entertaining game people stick with. In a microtransaction-based game, it's an adversarial relationship: the player wants to minimize their spending to find entertainment while the developer wants to maximize the emotional impulse to spend. This creates a qualitative difference in the entire atmophere of a game. So although I used to be ok with microtransactions, their presence is now an automatic "no sale" for me.
I like to think of myself as someone literate, but I couldn't parse everything in the linked article.
All I know is that it had nothing to do with microtransactions, appeared to contain PHB-style solutions to problems that are no help at all (note, heavy rephrasing to make it sensible):
Problem: Someone wants the game to make money and it may impact core gameplay.
Solution: innovate, engage mindshare, customer focus.
Problem: Someone wants the the non-core gameplay elements to make money ... and so on.
Solution: Long tail opportunity, self-leadership, consensus-building
(Buzzwords were chosen because their nebulous nature seems to exactly nail the writing style, as though the article may have been put together by an auto-generator.)
Those aren't answers. Those are just concepts, and not well defined or even directly relevant ones at that. It's like having a business plan that just says "succeed". How do you fix the evil of a game that's meant to make money? Have a CEO that will stand up for you. Oh, gee, that helps. I'll get right on that.
This article appears to be entirely without value.
If you as a developer want to influence anything in your product, you'll want to start by working on your communication skills, especially when targeting other developers. This wouldn't even pass muster with PHBs.
Two things:
- On one side, the largest game publishers (hi EA) replaced free content updates released as part of game updates with paid-for DLC (and microtransactions).
Together with that came overbroad DRM with call-home-activation that doesn't work on the first week of a release and tightly controlled multiplayer that stops working as soon as the next game of the series is released.
- On the other side you have microtransactions being used as the "death by a 1000 cuts" - you can't really convince players to fork $200 upfront, but you can get them to spend that $1 at a time if you spread it long enough. Even worse in some cases, players pay a full game price up-front just to find out that they need to spend another $200 in DLC purchases just to be competitive in multiplayer (and for some of us, the whole fun of multiplayer IS the fighting in a level-field against equally skilled adversaries).
For those gamers that have been around long enough to have seen the prime time of gaming on the PC (when the 1st part of Quake including multiplayer was free, proper DEMOS were release for games and free game updates often had content updates), DLC and in-game purchases just look like a way of selling cripleware with hidden costs, monetising the (previously free) try before you buy period and sneakily turning the buy-to-own model into a buy-then-rent model.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You are missing something important. It also said: Greed is NOT good. That's what it said.
If it said so, then it must be true, because the word "not" was capitalized like so: "NOT".
You can't handle the truth.
[citation needed]
A teacher of mine once said that we must have a trump card, that is an strong argument ready to create a shield between ignorance and wisdom. You may not have the strongest judgement... but keep in mind that an opinion is just a feedback based upon a logical argument and it is always be weaker than an indispensable idea built by human empyrean propinquity.
This article fails to present any argument at all.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Microtransactions can certainly become evil:
90$ monocle.
Has anyone ever enjoyed a game that included microtransactions? I tried NFS World but it was horrible. I kept thinking there was fun right around the corner, but it never happened. It was extremely...drab. And "drab" is not good for games.
If so, please tell me the name of the game. It is my theory that there is something about the microtransaction that causes the entire game to suck. Or maybe it's that any game that is actually fun wouldn't have to rely on microtransactions to get paid.
Microtransactions are scummy. They're like pay toilets. They're like having a girlfriend that requires you to swipe a credit card on the promise of future nooky, but said nooky never materializes.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Classic examples of microstransactions gone wrong.
The games are free, and you can buy clothing/apparal with "credits" you earn as a soldier. However, they need to make money too, so the ithems you buy are always time limited to only a day or 3. For longer periods or permanent purchases you need to spend real money which you have exchanged for battlefunds.
This is all fine, except that the more powerfull weapons are ONLY purchasable via battlefunds, making them inaccessible to those without a creditcard or not wanting to spend more any or money. The kids running around with dads creditcard now starts ruening the gameplay by buying the most insane weapons and prancing around like invincable nitwits. Using healing-items like they were tictacs and blasting everyone away on first shot with some insane cannon costing around $20 or more.
With such microtransactions in play there is always the temptation to alter gameplay, prices and items to try and make more money. This is almost always viewed by the players as unfair as the items they invest in suddently become low-ranking tinkertoys to the new silly stuff they add. Oh, and you may not sell em back/trade so you can't get any money back. (Heroes is actually the worst as the purchasable weapons are a lot more powerfull than free ones.)
HAHAHA! If game developers don't fight back against lousy working conditions, domineering managers, horribly long hours on measly salary, unrealistic performance expectations, and changing requirements and deadlines, they sure as hell aren't going to fight back against such a low priority as how microtransactions get abused in gameplay.
"Dammit, they've worked me like a dog! 80 hours a week for months! Whips on my back! Low contrast monitors destroying my eyes! Gruel for every meal! But they'll have to pry the keyboard from my cold dead hands before they ruin the character of this masterpiece with [spit] microtransactions!"
"While microtransactions aren't inherently evil..."
That's where you're wrong, right there. They ARE inherently evil. Their very premise is evil. They are nothing more than an attempt to trick users into spending more on your game than they intended to. You are trying to obfuscate the true cost of playing your game. In many games it's nothing more that a subtly veiled form of gambling that you're allowing 11year olds to participate in. It drives people, not only away from your game, but the gaming industry as a whole. Have no doubt, micro transactions will eventually be taken to an extreme we haven't even imagined yet and this subject will end up in front of congress who will hand down the first federal regulation of video games in American history... which will be to all our detriment and thanks entirely to the greed behind micro transactions.
If a game's financial mechanics breaks the game, then nobody will want to play it, and the money will dry up. I don't think this is very hard to explain to the money people. They understand the mechanics of investment. True, someone has to put it terms they understand: "If you put a microtransaction around that game element, we estimate it will suppress game involvement by 5%, which can reduce fees by $x per quarter."
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
I was playing that game since closed beta and it's perfectly well playable without spending a dime.
Sure, those who pay will be able to use slightly better premium ammo, but that's not a gamebreaker.
Sure, they'll be able to support higher tier tanks without having to use tier 5 as a money maker all the time due to premium (FYI, that's the real value of a premium account - the double money makes tanks self-sustained up to tier 7,at least for a not too skilled but not a n00b like i was in the beta (back then we'd get some free gold) )
Sure they can get crew skills to 100 % straight off
Sure, they can platoon up with friends (the only thing that pisses me off, but then, WoT staff said they are going to put in free platooning in an update soon).
But guess what. asides from the last bit, (and that'll get fixed) i feel none of that is crippling trouble as a person who plays for free. I don't mind playing my KV and KV-3 more often than higher tier tanks, and the other advantages aren't that huge. Better ammo? Hell, i've killed people who had a better *tank*. Sure, it is an edge, but looking at how tank tiers mix in every game, it's the least of your worries as a free player. And premium tanks themselves aren't that great compared to same tier tanks fully upgraded (in some cases, outright worse) - they are mainly money makers.
In this way you can go through every paid advantage and see that in the end it doesn't amount to all that much.
tl;dr version: WoT does it right because unlike MMORPGs it relies a lot more on player skill, unlike FPS, the playing field is nothing close to level even without paid items, and there's little you can't do with free access.
I know, complimenting blizzard is a bit nuts, but they have the integrated monetary transaction system down pat.
Any game where you need to make extra purchases beyond your initial fixed costs to compete or progress is inherently flawed.
If a company wants to make money off these extras without ruining the game, the Blizzard model is, IMO, the best way to go.
You simply pay for convenience. In WoW, if you want to move to another server/faction/species without making another character(which is the normal method),
you can pay for the *convenience* of having your character transferred. If you want to change your appearance: you can do that, too -- for a fee.
These things are services people willingly pay non-trivial sums of money for without negatively affecting gameplay for other subscribers.
An example of a terrible implementation would be Call of Duty, where people were forced to purchase "new" maps to continue playing the game online
with their friends without restriction.
My $0.02
-cmor
The grammar and syntax of this post is so bad that I can't even tell what the author is trying to say.
I'm not a grammar nazi by any means but it should at least be understandable.
I know what micro-transactions are, if it weren't for past knowledge I'd be completely in the dark on the subject because the article does nothing to describe them nor to show how they are evil.
If it wasn't for the comments no reader would have a clue. Might as well just write "Micro-transactions, evil, no?" and end it at that.
smurfberries anyone?
I think that is pretty much the main example of in-game-transactions gone bad:
WAGON OF SMURFBERRIES$99.99
To make it worse, they are consumable as well, so you can end up paying for them many times.
Ugh...
I am a developer too, and I do use in-app-purchase in a free game.
But there is only 1 in-app-purchase and it is non-consumable: you buy it once, and it unlocks all premium levels.
Bram Stolk http://stolk.org/tlctc/
Done right they can be used to subsidize the cost of a game. Though what i have been seeing is the bad way of using micro transactions. Now i am not a mmorpg fan but for such a game allowing a micro-transaction to give a person the resources and skills to obtain and use a(item, weapon, armor, ship) that a non-paying player has to work for for months. is like putting feces in the eyes of your normal customer base. Or in the case of a zelda like game on android making it unplayable, the game in question had it so any non normal ie magical item could not be obtained except trough micro-transaction. Money was also near unobtainable except for paying for it with real money. A good way to use it is to have it so people can use micro-transactions to customize their appearance especially in mmorpg's
Microtransactions and social gaming are independent. There are MMORPGs without microtransactions, and paid upgrades for single-player games. Putting them together allows social pressures to induce people into spending. This works only on a fraction of the population, but that fraction is big enough to be profitable.
The same mindset can be seen in the slots department of low-end casinos. It's striking to watch a whole room of people in zombie mode, putting money into machines and pushing the buttons. Especially since the net expectation is negative and almost all of them lose.
There is a zombie mode involved. I've watched bus groups come into a Vegas hotel. the people get off the bus and head directly for the slot machines. You'd think they'd check into their rooms, maybe take a shower, find out what shows are in town. No. Straight to the slots.
That's Zynga's target market.
When APB came back and went free to play, I was looking forward to it, but one of the things that bothered me was that they did away with the previous (very solid) microtransaction method. Now, you can purchase temporary weapons using in game or real cash, but the kicker is that they have limited-time-offer weapons for sale, alternatives to weapons in game, no better, no worse, which are permanent. And these weapons will set you back SIXTY BUCKS of real world cash.
Yes, it's almost enough to make you want to do a price comparison at an actual Republican convention.
Some tidbits here: That's $60, for one gun, on one character, on one server, you still have to buy ammo for it, and if the game goes under (again) you're up shit creek without an MP5. And there doesn't seem to be a way to reach the developers to tell them that this is moronic.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
So a long time ago in the 90's people made games and then the players of those game made extra content for them and released it for free. This was good as games companies got free content and extra sales due to the game being improved and players got a chance to enter the world of games design and got a richer experience at no extra cost. Then Microsoft Sam was chillin watching southpark and heard this line
"Now let me tell you how it works in the real world. In the real world, I can either get a Chinpokomon, or I can be the only kid without one, which singles me out, and causes the other kids to make fun of me and kick my ass. "
Eureka! exclaimed Sam, Our product doesn't need to be any good we can just exploit aggressive marketing of children to play our 18 restricted games and lock down everything under the guise of copyright! People want extra content that they need to participate with online communities, we can control it and charge for it! who cares if its overpriced and the quality sucks, Thanks to copyright they have to buy it!
In next weeks episode...
1)Illegally log Amazon
2)Destroy free air supply
3)Profit!
in Restaurant City, 1 CC is currently 10 pence (1 pound GB gets you ten CC)... The currrent in game prices of items which are only available for CC make you wince... when you have to do a mental conversion to find out that 1 hard to find ingredient (of which you probably need twenty or more) is 80 pence and twenty of them would be £16.00!!! this is not a microtransaction...
IF they were to drop the in game prices to such a level where you didn't even blink at the cost, then far, far more people would be buying CC and using it...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Microtransactions = instant $$$
Standing so close to the money, it is just too tempting, too mind altering for most to walk away from. Greed in all its shapes and forms creeps in and next thing you know Pay to Win is the _only_ way to go.
Really its Vegas tactics being worked at its best here: Reel them in to the casino with cheep food and drinks, get them in debt at the tables. Lots of shiny, flashy stuff, its all good fun and games right?
You hear all the same type of excuses: if you cant spend the money then don't play, its all fun here, you can stop at any time....
Until the consumer public wakes up and finally gets wise to this money siphoning method, businesses will continue to thrive operating the F2P sales pitch.
Lastly not all are inherently evil. There are some really good examples out there using the to pay as you go method where its a fair exchange of money for entertainment value received.