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Why Microtransactions In Games Are Amoral
Sludge writes "Graham Jans, a founder of the Vancouver Design Dojo and designer of Zombie Minesweeper, provides well-thought-out reasons why microtransactions in games are an amoral concept that can be used for good or evil, defying the typical knee-jerk reaction to Zynga-style use of microtransactions as a cynical tool designed to siphon the maximum amount of money from your wallet. Quoting: 'As well, such a thing could be a tool for benevolence. A developer could tune the length between releases to offer just a little more content for the same price, if they felt that was the right thing to do. In fact, most of the factors in microtransactions work this way. The negative reputation these systems have comes from factors that are tuned to maximize profit and abuse players for their money. But that's not an inherent trait in the system; you could just as easily use it to ensure your own bankruptcy!'"
Gated content and microtransactions. First one's always free, etc. etc. This shit is like drug dealing.
So essentially, making money is immoral?
Maybe we should all work for free, or uss the barter system.
Or maybe we should convert to communism?
Or we can live in caves.
You can buy new costume parts, new archetypes, and some in-game bonuses. None are game required, just cool.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/06/10
BF Heroes is a good example of microtransactions gone ape...
You can buy yourself superior firepower, but most times it doesn't even last. Often you just rent it for a day, week, month...
Amoral:
amoral/môrl/
Adjective: Lacking a moral sense; unconcerned with the rightness or wrongness of something.
Immoral:
immoral/imôrl/
Adjective: Not conforming to accepted standards of morality.
What exactly am I missing here?
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
It is ok to charge more for your services than you pay to provide them. It is neither morally lofty, nor evil, to seek profitable ventures. This is simply how our economy works, and how it is supposed to work.
It is economically harmful to prevent competition. Whether or not that is also immoral is up for debate.
But in the face of open competition, there is nothing wrong with grossly overcharging. If people like your service that much more, and are willing to pay for it, then so be it. If not, you will just go out of business. And it is all ok.
It is only cheap bastards who want something for nothing that think charging for stuff is immoral.
Football Superstars did that nicely for microtransactions, you can buy XP directly, going from level 1 to level 100 cost may be a little bit less than $300.
New Economic Perspectives
... not amoral since the money you spend is gone and the game company still owns the game. All that money you invest is meaningless the second the one of the higher ups in the game company decides to shut-down the game or it goes out of business. This is the problem with game companies who try to sell 'games as a service'.
This also happens with games that are locked down to a service like Xbox live or their own service (steam sdk multiplayer lockdown some games have - see: supreme commander 2) and certain console games that ran their own server/master server (See: Burnout 3 for Playstation2) which later shut down their servers so you are SOL.
This is what I really hate about the game industry's move to try to enclose their games behind the rather dickish language of "games as as a service" and "microtransations". In the end it's just a neo-feudal model of extracting money from people without giving anything real back in return.
"The negative reputation these systems have comes from factors that are tuned to maximize profit and abuse players for their money."
What they are failing to take into account is that corporations, by law, have to abuse people for profit for their shareholders or face financial and/or legal consequences. So, because of the way the two systems interact, it all but guarantees that it will be abused for profit. Therefore, we should assume that it's bad until someone can prove that their system is benign and can't be changed quickly to catch people off guard and take their money.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
You don't have to play the game. There's a free market of video games out there, and it's large. If a developer uses these transactions and becomes unpopular for it, they'll get a bad reputation and people will stop buying the games.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
From the summary:
'As well, such a thing could be a tool for benevolence. A developer could tune the length between releases to offer just a little more content for the same price, if they felt that was the right thing to do.
So he's basically defending microtransactions for what should be in ... euh... the patches?
... when Lolita asks Humbert Humbert for something (presumably money?) while they are mid-coitus, and he grows angry and says she can't ask him for things while they are in the middle of it, that it's not fair.
I think in the old days of strip tease they'd call it a blow-off; get the crowd riled up, and make them pay even more to see what they had thought they had already paid for.
I find them immoral for most cases. I don't know whether DLC counts as microtransactions or not, so I'll leave it out.
The problem is that they are common in multiplayer games. Most multiplayer games involve some sort of competition between players. People play games to 'win', and to feel good about it. Now most multiplayer games I saw which have MT end up letting people who buy MT get a huge advantage. Then its not fun for the other players, because you can just buy victory.
Now some games DO keep it down low or don't confer that much of an advantage (TF2 comes to mind), however in the end you need to dangle something in front of the donkey to make it move, and if its a bonus you can only buy, then it'll be popular.
The sad part is that pretty much all the online games I ever played went like this:
Donation -> Basic cosmetic MT -> "Equal to skill" MT -> Overpowered MT -> Seriously if you're not buying you're going to suck -> Game dies.
You mean to tell me that selling stuff is neither inherently moral nor inherently immoral but it can be used for either purpose?
No fucking way...
Ensure your own bankruptcy
Leave the $70 monocle alone!
LEAVE IT ALONE!
*Emoweep*
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I'm one of those luddites whose cell phones makes phone calls, and I'm antisocial, so I'm kind of behind the curve here. Zynga's the guys behind Farmville, right? How do microtransactions come into it?
Are they basically trying to rent you the game by the minute? Or is it that they're trying to actually sell you in-game stuff with real money? I've never understood the point of their games. It's no worse than Solitaire in terms of pointlessness, I suppose, but I'm not exactly excited about Solitaire.
You didn't really expect that to help, did you?
(+1, Disagree)
technology can be used for good or evil...
moving on...
I hated when they brought "micro-transaction" to Everquest. I wouldn't mind paying a dollar here or 50 cents there... but they offered $10 items from day one... and the prices only went higher. Sure, there were deals, promotions, and the like, but I resented it.
And then I learned that the EQ engine is SO old and cobbled together that they would need extra revenue to justify the expense of creating newer prettier items. I began to accept it then, but would only actively participate in their micro-transaction system when there were charity drives.
They really could have suckered me into emptying out my wallet, in retrospect, had they just asked for less money.
Sadly...
The problem with microtransactions is that every incident of someone holding something up and telling someone "you probably will enjoy this but do you want to pay my price for it?" causes displeasure in the potential buyer. This on a per-incident basis. More incidents equals more displeasure. The displeasure is smaller if the active tempting is smaller.
For example, if your game has "premium features" that make it easier to win, and you're playing a PVP game, and there's an active indicator that says whenever someone who beats you uses a premium feature, many would get pissed off. If every time you lost there was a big popup saying "If you paid $1 for this you might have won" many would also get pissed off. Take hence e.g. World of Tanks, where you can actually pay to win, but the difference isn't enormous, there is no indication to the loser, and it's hidden away in a separate section.
You could make a hotel where everything cost a tiny bit of money but the average expenditure for the basics added up to the average cost of a room. You could then charge for things like: taking a shower, having hot water in the shower, access to toiletries, access to towels, heating the room at night, watching TV, etc. You could do this with some kind of swipe card system. Would people enjoy staying in a hotel like that? Probably not.
Or Correct me if I am wrong.. but the Amoral statement would be Neither Moral or immoral, right ? Isn't that just what the writer says ? Only that it can tend towards Immoral ? 'microtransactions in games are an amoral concept that can be used for good or evil" I am not the educated one.. but I think amoral fits.. read the article may be ?
Botulism doesn't give a shit about if you live or die.
It isn't immoral.
But is it good?
Is it better than if Botulism DID give a shit and decided it WANTED you to die?
I don't have an inherent problem with games that feature microtransactions. Provided, however, that the core game is free and that the game isn't specifically designed to be so tedious as to require those purchases to make the game playable.
I personally can't stand games with microtransactions. That's why I don't play them. I don't really understand what's so difficult to figure out here... A game is not a necessity. It's not like food, insurance or fossil fuels. Don't like it, don't play the damn game. If everyone followed this mantra microtransactions would go away. But a lot of people obviously don't care or are not principled enough to do something about it. So it gets forced on the rest of us, who evidently are in the minority.
You could make a hotel where everything cost a tiny bit of money but the average expenditure for the basics added up to the average cost of a room. You could then charge for things like: taking a shower, having hot water in the shower, access to toiletries, access to towels, heating the room at night, watching TV, etc. You could do this with some kind of swipe card system. Would people enjoy staying in a hotel like that? Probably not.
Apparently some Retirement homes work that way in this country. Just wanted to point that out.
See subject.
Reducing any moral problem to just whether making money is right or wrong, is, sad to say, bullshit. In fact if that's the only thing that you see relevant in such a discussion, congrats, you might be a sociopath. You may have a successful career in upper management ahead of you.
While nobody says that making money itself is immoral, certain ways of making them ARE. E.g., if you found out that your mayor or the local judge makes some extra money by taking bribes, well, I don't know about you personally, but most people would file that under "immoral."
But generally we have a long tradition of frowning against basically offering to bend the rules in exchange for money. Whether it's in politics or sports or whatever.
If the Superbowl involved officially letting teams pay for the privilege of punching opposite team members, or to get an extra kick at the opposing goal, most people probably wouldn't bother even watching just to see which team spent more money on unfair advantages. Most would also consider it fundamentally contrary to the spirit of sportsmanship or competition.
Ditto if, dunno, the boxing championships started auctioning the right to have a horseshoe in the glove, or if baseball championships started auctioning the right to use a tennis racquet instead of a bat, or if the Olympics started being ok with steroids as long as you buy them from the organizers. At some point any semblance of "may the best sportsman win" becomes "may the guy with the most disposable cash win", and it becomes just a meaningless competition to be the most financially irresponsible loser.
You'll notice that the above are direct equivalents of most micro-transaction schemes in most games. What once at least had some semblance of reflecting relative skill or effort or even just time invested, is becoming a competition in who's insecure enough to blow $1000 on overpowered equipment to finally feel secure to curb-stomp a newbie half his level. And there is no fundamental difference between paying to be allowed to use racquets instead of bats in baseball, vs paying for the Legendary Sword Of Newbie Slaying +9 to use in PvP, or vs blowing some money on whatever else to top some PvE charts either.
So, no, not many of us will frown at making money, but at the way you make them. And if more and more competitions and achievements become rigged to milk money from whoever wants to pay for unfair advantages, don't be surprised if most people don't exactly take that as a positive development.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Twenty years ago, this was a major paradigm in PC gaming. You get the introductory set of levels free, you get the rest when you cough up the dough.
What happened? Why is this paradigm now evil?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
If I do not insert money, I play an extra, a mobile, player controlled target for someone who did.
In a 1 paid hero vs. 100 free mooks situation, you and your free teammates need to think like Tucker's guerrilla kobolds.
In MMOs, it's really annoying when they actually lock content.
What that means is that if you want to play a certain area with your friends and one of you doesn't own that area, he will be left out unless he buys it.
Makes a game become the lowest common denominator.
Aka, boring.
So, micro transactions are only evil when used explicitly to maximise profits.
and I'm indie which is so not evil that I can use micro transactions and still be totally cool.
Sure, there isn't even a real moral dilemma-- people can choose which games they play, and there is practically an infinite supply of them. -- But:It's lame if the rich kids get to "own" the fantasy worlds of games. It's not like they don't have enough shiny toys IRL. Micropayments just create an uncomfortable tie-in between real life and games, removing the "magic" from it. Games are actually a bastion of fairness and equal opportunity in a world that seems less than fair to some people.
Extra Credit is a great show about games and their development. I'm into game development myself and please, everyone who is too do as I - watch their shows. Think about what they have to say.
They also got a video about microtransactions and one about the skinner box. They don't talk about moral though. So here for those interested in the topic but to lazy to RTFA. Its a video, just lean back and watch. Kinda entertaining as well.
Their video's are currently hard to find because they got apart from their old home "the escapist" and the videos there all just 404.
Micro-transactions are bad.
I'm not talking about bad in the moral sense, rather, bad in the efficiency sense.
There's a cost associated with every transaction.
That cost includes the cost of deciding to make the transaction.
More transactions, more cost of deciding.
To put it another way, the smaller the cost of the other things, the greater the percentage cost of making the decision to pay.
-- ABH
In Heroes of Newerth and League of Legends, the game is free but you can buy heroes, (there is a random selection of heroes each week, but you can "unlock" them by paying in-game points or real money),XP boosters, cosmetic skins for heroes...None of wich break the game, just make it more fun if you are not playing casually.
Gameloft has started adopting Zynga style payment model in their iphone games as well. Let's Golf 3 is the most blatent money grab from a game developer I've ever witnessed. It's actually insulting.
You grow two brain cells and don't put all the money that you own into a stupid game?
If, as a result, you do get bankrupt, can't buy perty clothes and nobody wants to mate with you? I'd say let evolution sort 'em out... That way the problem will take care of its own...
Hell... the avarage IQ will go up. I bet we're totaly screwed if that happens...
Here be signatures
Micro-transactions are a tool, a method of payment.
Can we reasonably assign a moral value to something that can be used for either good or evil?
Well, yes we can. In fact, the courts have already done just that when they ruled against Napster, and in favor of video taping.
We look at what the tool is primarily used for, and what other uses it has.
The thing about micro-transactions is that they work on scale which humans have difficulty making rational decision in.
Deciding if, for example, 1/10 of cent is a good price for a piece of paper is not something easy to do.
Slashdot readers are more likely than most to get it right, but that's beside the point. The point is that many humans get it wrong.
And getting it wrong is where most of the money is being made in micro-transaction.
In other words, the primary reason micro-transactions are viewed favorably by business and unfavorably by their customers is because people end up spending a lot more money than they would have if they were better at making decisions on such a small scale.
The primary reason businesses like micro-transactions is because they cause people to make mistakes.
It's like putting a 1 silver item in the auction house for a thousand gold, hoping that someone will accidentally buy it because of the crappy AH interface.
-- ABH
RTS? Gather resources, build little dudes, order little dudes to shoot at other little dudes. Repeat ad nauseam. Are new units significant? Hardly.
FPS? Shoot mobile targets. Over and over and over and over again. Shinier guns? Sorry, not significant.
JRPGS. Grindfest, enough said.
Tetris. Align little blocks. Over and over and over again.
Sophomoric philosophy is still sophomoric when spouted by a game designer.
Microtransaction systems are morally wrong? Who even suggested such a thing? It's like suggesting a hammer is morally wrong, or the idea of barter is morally wrong.
My goodness, I guess when I wasn't looking, computer games became "srs bznss"?
-Styopa
What about outside of gaming? For example I have an iPhone calculator app, Perpenso Calc, that includes scientific functionality, metric conversions, rpn, etc. However specialized functionality - statistics, business and hex - is made available through in app purchases. I thought putting the functionality of handheld scientific, business and hex calculators into a single app was more convenient than having separate apps. I also thought a single and higher bundled price would be disadvantageous. In app purchases seem to handle tailoring functionality for needs quite well. I'm interested in hearing opinions on what people think of this approach.
Back to games. For a gaming related app I would consider in app purchases for very high level things. For example the base game would only include single player functionality. Multiplayer functionality could be unlocked using an in app purchase. This keeps the base price of the game down, and from past experience with very popular single/multi-player games it was noticed that only have of the units sold ever connect to a game server. Again, price being tailored for desired functionality. Any opinions?
Thanks in advance for any opinions or insights.
In a few games, yes, they're cosmetic or offer negligible advantages. E.g., the jet pack in COH is fully equivalent to something you can buy in game from level 1 for 10,000 inf (think about the equivalent of 10,000 copper coins in WoW) and will last you longer, so, yeah, not much of an advantage.
In others it can get even more extreme than my analogies.
E.g., I remember a web game based on Battletech where
A) fights were at best limited by tonnage, not by points, and you could even spend on blowing that limit in an invasion,
and
B) with enough RL cash you could actually do crap like bring Level 2 or even Level 3 mechs against the Level 1 mechs everyone else was limited to. And if you're not a guru at Battletech, by "level", I mean basically sorta generation, with each being vastly superior per ton to the previous. At the same tonnage, a L3 will curb-stomp any L1. In the board game they're limited by also being worth more points, but, see above, in this game that was removed.
So, yes, for all practical purposes, you could pay to have the equivalent of a spiked steel gauntlet in a boxing match. In fact, you could even splurge a little extra and pay to have a couple more guys with you punching the opponent. It's not just a loaded analogy, you could literally pay to be as disproportionately more powerful as you wanted, if you had enough disposable cash. Rumour had it that the top guy in that game had blown 20,000$ on being the untouchable superpower he was.
It's not even the only game like that.
E.g., in Runes Of Magic, by buying skill books and leaving your character parked at home to study them over night, you can have vastly more skill points than an equal level character who didn't do that. In WoW terms, think having twice the number of talent points of someone who didn't pay. Yep, the equivalent of that was possible.
And it's a shame, really, because ROM was one of the first MMOs which nailed a good enough substitute for WoW. Long before Rift. If it hadn't been for the blatant RL money aspect of ROM, or if they had made a server where it's all free of that crap and rebalanced to work without dumping hundreds of dollars into making your raiding character epic, I wouldn't have minded giving them $15 a month. Heck, even 20 or 30. I'm not opposed to paying for good quality and casual-gamer-friendly gameplay.
But probably they're making more from fleecing their smaller player base than that, so, oh well...
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So.... Evil then.
No, seriously. Most buisness techniques and approches are (arguably) effectively amoral. Anytime someone has to take EXTRA time to discuss how a tool or an event or an action is "amoral" and it's people that are abusing it, well, you know it's probably being heavily abused for "evil."
Hell, he says it himself: "The negative reputation these systems have comes from factors that are tuned to maximize profit and abuse players for their money."
In other words, he seems to be saying the perception is that these systems are only used to abuse people is only because... well, they're frequently used to abuse people?
Personally? I think it's a crap way of squeezing extra money out of something that would normally have a one-time purchase price, or a subscription, by taking advantage of human nature, the same tendancy seen by folks that buy a few lottery tickets every day but are reluctant to tuck away what could be an equivilant amount into a savings account or an investment, because "that's a lot of money."
Feels dirty to me.
I get the impression that 99.9% of the in-game 'wealth' created (for eventual real-world transactions) is generated by bots. From 3 years ago: http://fora.tv/2008/08/08/Daniel_Suarez_Daemon_Bot-Mediated_Reality#chapter_08
You rent a seat in a concert. You have certain plays in an Asteroid arcade game. Etc. When you go home, you have nothing.
I don't understand how any reasonably intelligent person would play a game where one player can gain an advantage simply by paying more. Note this is different from games that charge a small monthly fee just to play. Myself, and everyone I know refuse to play (or admit when I asked) games with in game bonuses purchasable with real cash.
If you are the sort of person whose self-image would be affected by what ship/sword *I* use, then you are probably the sort of jerk I would prefer to not play with. Rational adults judge their play time over what they did and what they enjoyed. If you can only feel good when I don't succeed, then I am willing to spend some RL$ so you are not in my game.
You may not mindlessly grind to get those purple pixels if you know some kid can get them with mommy's credit card. Which is mostly a positive; you should do things in a game because they are fun. Jobs are where you get RL$ to do things you may not always find entertaining.
the last time i played games was the older d&d, and arduin grimoire, and before that, checkers, cards, life, monopoly, etc. all those games allowed you to purchase better equipment to enhance the aesthetic value of the game, but did not increase your ability to "win". that was moral. heres your game, now enjoy it. ever since those damn wizards cards, weve had a gaming environment essentially no different than gambling, where you increase your (perceived) ability to win based on expenditures. I dont personally care if someone wants to burn out their thumbs playing a game, but the person selling the game should not profit in relation to how much money is spent on the game. thats pure immorality. Gambling is highly addictive, and no one should be profiting, with protection of corporate law, off those who choose to gamble. dont make it completely illegal, just dont allow business to incorporate, and make it illegal to gamble if you are under 18: no lotto, no chuck e cheese, no magic the gathering, no WOW for under 18, and all gambling set up like a poker game, where the money circulates in a given group, never leaving it. if necessary, put some heads on pikes to enforce this.
You can purchase a monacle for the equivalent of 60 AU$ worth of "Aurum". A currency that can only be created through the destruction of a PLEX which is an game transferable item worth a months subscription/$15. You also still have to pay for a subscription.
I stopped playing when this change in business model occured and I havn't looked back. Try and find an MMO these days that doesn't use some kind of microtransactions these days.
I just watched a guy spend $500 on World of Tanks, a free game.
Traditional retail bombards a player with inscrutable advertising, senseless review scores, and non-interactive game media, and then demands that they fork over a large portion of money for a non-returnable box which may or may not contain a game that they actually enjoy.
Back in the day, going right back upto Doom, you could download a totally free demo version of the game with a few limited levels/weapons, and if you liked it you could buy the full version. At least you knew what you were getting. Game demos have totally vanished ever since the focus shifted to consoles, so someone would obviously balk at paying $40 to $60 for a title.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."