Yesterday I made a random comment, and it seemed to gather a bunch of traction with my twitter feed, as I spent the rest of the evening reading comments in general agreement. The beginning of this thought process like so many that I have, actually started the other day. I was talking with a friend of mine and they displayed disdain with having to pay to purchase a game. It seemed to be causing them a certain amount of friction, and it didn’t read as “I can’t afford to purchase this” but more a case of “I don’t feel like I should have to purchase this”. This has made me contemplate the nature of where we are currently in gaming and the prevalence of the “Free-To-Play” business model.
The idea of this model is that they get you in the door with a simple game download and install, and then get you later when you are needing to purchase things to be able to maintain a certain “quality of life” within the game. For example playing Elder Scrolls Online without the optional “ESO Plus” subscription is miserable, because that crafting bag that magically takes away your inventory woes is a massive bonus. Similarly I feel like if I am going to play Star Wars the Old Republic, I am going to be paying for a subscription because the “free player” limitations just feel overtly cruel.
At least in the case of those two games there is a monthly amount of money that I can pay easily to take these woes away. When I get frustrated is with the more South Korean MMO model of having a bunch of purchases that effectively add up to a month subscription, without giving you the convenience of actually paying a monthly subscription. Essentially each month you are going too want a Premium pass and the Mission Pass Gold in order to get the full experience. Combined this is roughly $15 and lasts 30 days, but for quality of life purchases you are also going to want the Material Storage pass… which is 300 star gems. These in theory come from playing the game naturally, but if you for some reason you have to purchase them out right which is a horrible idea… it is $15 for 360 star gems.
There is a large part of me that longs for the era of MMORPGs when you purchased the box, purchased the occasional expansion every few years… and then had a simple subscription amount that you could budget for. The problem there is that this limits the amount of money that a game can drain from your pocket book, and even the bastion of the subscription model has found a way to add additional purchases to try and entice you to spend more. World of Warcraft has 15 mounts, 15 pets, 2 toys, a slew of deluxe bundles, and a large number of services that you can only obtain through hard currency. I am not faulting them for finding additional ways to claw money into the coffers, but it can be a bit exhausting especially if you add in the gold token economy.
Guild Wars 2 has been lauded as this buy the box once purchase without need for subscriptions, but even this game feels like I need to spend a certain amount of money to play it in a manner that feels reasonable. Firstly for each character I would want a set of unlimited harvesting tools, because it is annoying as hell to constantly keep running back to a vendor to purchase new pick axes. Each one of these tools and there are three is roughly $12.50 because unless you can catch them on fire sale they are 1000 gems each. I also feel like a Copper Fed Salvage machine is a significant quality of life improvement at $10, and you need shared account storage to keep it in so all of your characters can use it and that is $8.75 per slot or $35 for 5 slots for a bit of a price break. Black Lion keys are a trap but the game does in fact love to throw you chests that you cannot lock without spending money.
I miss what was essentially the Warcraft Battle Chest era of gaming, where you bought the base game and then every so often an expansion came out that tacked on to the original game and gave you new content. Hell I miss the era when “DLC” meant that I got a bunch of new content for a game rather than what is effectively a bunch of cosmetic gear. I get that cosmetics are the true end game, because this is something that I have said all too many times… but it would be nice to get content drops as well. I never minded paying my own way, and I guess the other day I was balking in part while talking to that friend how we have arrived at a point where some folks don’t expect to need to. During the DLC expansion era of games, I remember having friends that complained about not getting the entire game with their original purchase. So there will always be some controversy that is brewing and micro-transactions are just the newest version of the same discussion that has been happening for decades I guess.
I think one of the big challenges is that we have this artificial price ceiling for games at $60 each, and I am not exactly sure when that was set. I remember when Phantasy Star 4 released it was selling for roughly $90, and above is an example of some of the pricing from the late Super Nintendo era. Take the example of Street Fighter Alpha 2, that game was released in 1996 so that $69.99 in adjusted for inflation would be $114.37. While I realize that games are cheaper to distribute digitally than they were to actually put chips into a cartridge, no matter how you slice it there is still a significant amount of money missing from that $60 price tag.
As much as it might frustrate me, it is this long tailed monetary wrangling that keeps the lights on, the staff paid and the servers running. There are few things more disheartening when a game that you love dies. Talk to all of my friends who pinned their hopes and dreams on Wildstar about how bad it feels that the game is gone, and that there is no viable emulator option to keep playing it. So yeah it frustrates the shit out of me, and I throw some serious shade anytime I see that a game I am interested in is launching as the “fee to pay” model, as Jim Sterling calls it. The alternative of a game closing down however feels really bad. I feel like we had it better when we were just paying a flat subscription fee rather than being constantly needled for another small purchase.
That however is coming from a position of privilege. I can reasonably afford to pay whatever it takes to be able to play a game. There are a lot of folks out there who simply can’t because once you subtract groceries and rent, there just isn’t much if anything left over for an entertainment budget. I firmly believe that those folks have the right to participate in the same type of “games as therapy” that I ultimately do on a nightly basis. So if the cost of that happening is me being needled, than I guess that is the cost that I have to pay. I don’t love it, but I can be okay with it… I just wish more games gave me that “bullshit tax” that was an amount I could pay to ablate all of my frustrations.
So my fearless readers… what say you? What are your thoughts on this matter, because many of you responded last night on twitter. Now that I have laid bare the situation we find ourselves in, spill your soul in the comments below.
