(Photo courtesy of Spellbinder.com/Paige Burgueno) An example of video microtransactions
Aaron Preziosi
Connector Editor
As Editor of our Arts & Entertainment section, I believe it to be my responsibility to stay as up to date as possible with what’s happening in the world of gaming. That involves reading about what’s going on in terms of developers and publishers, the general state of the industry, how players tend to interact with games, and of course, playing new releases and reviewing them. However, over the last year, doing so has become increasingly more difficult. As triple-A studios create bigger and bigger projects with bigger and bigger budgets, they have been demanding more and more cash upfront for their releases.
Normally, I would not take issue with this. I believe that developers, among all the other people who contribute to a video game, should be fairly compensated for their work and receive all the credit that is rightfully theirs. That’s the ideal. However, we do not live in an ideal world. We live in the real world, and in the real world, developers are often forced to crunch long hours into the night by their triple A publishers, who are often publicly traded and either massively influenced by or directly controlled by greedy corporate shareholders. These companies understand nothing of healthy development cycles, player goodwill, or integrity. They do not see players as “players,” but as customers and consumers who are obligated to spend their money and time on whatever they force their overworked employees to churn out.
For context: An average triple A-published video game costs $60. Lately, the biggest releases from the most iconic triple A publishers are pushing $80, or sometimes even $90. These prices make sense when considering how much money, time, and effort ought to go into the average video game. However, these prices are becoming less and less indicative of a game’s quality, and more and more indicative of how much “value” the publisher believes they can squeeze out of each and every consumer. I refuse to continue to use the word “player” in this context because it is not the way we as people are treated by these publishers. If we are paying $70 for Activision’s “Call of Duty: Black Ops 6,” surely it is because it is the latest, most innovative entry in the series, not because Activision thinks they can lure us in with blistering fast, barely recognizable gunplay, then shove season passes, dozens of microtransactions, AI-generated skins, and blink-and-you-miss it FOMO slop down our throats, right? Or Bungie’s Destiny 2? Once an inarguable pillar of how great the “live service” model can work; a constantly evolving world held up by numerous industry veterans and a loving community; now eroded into little more than set dressing for a bloated in-game storefront, teeming with literal dozens of meaningless cosmetic microtransactions every new season, while the seasons and expansions themselves suffer and are barely playable on release most of the time. Funny how the in-game store continues to work flawlessly, though.
This is a huge problem. Why is it okay to price something like it’s a fully finished, comprehensive experience, when in reality, it is the equivalent of a door fee? I should not have to pay full price for what is marketed to me as a fully developed, well-made game, only to then have my experience literally interrupted by pop-up ads in the corner of my screen for whatever cosmetic, expansion, battle pass, or whatever virtual good the publisher is peddling this week. I realize that the video game industry is in fact an industry, and is designed to make money, but the money will come naturally if publishers just make good games. Take “Baldur’s Gate 3,” for example. Larian Studios is not quite a triple A developer, but they’re big enough to be considered in the same vein. There is not a single microtransaction, in-game store, season pass, or other trite money extraction method in that game, and it performed as well as it did, remarkably, because Larian made the choice not to include any of these things and instead focus on just making the best game they could, save for a completely optional, non-marketed “premium edition” that provides the player with some cosmetics.
I will end my impassioned rant with my point: Please stop enabling triple A studios to prey upon us players. Games should be fun and enjoyable, not taxing. Think more about what studios you’re supporting and how. You don’t have to stop playing Activision or EA titles, I have my fair share of those games I like, just think about them more and be aware of what’s going on. I will if you will.
