EA's Skate Gets Microtransactions Before Its Release Date
EA has added microtransactions to Skate during its latest alpha test, and ahead of a release date announcement.
Of course it does. We all saw it coming.
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I mean... yeah, that's normally when you add stuff to a game. Especially this stuff.
Adding it in the closed alpha though is a new level of greed & impatience
It really, really isn't. Guessing it's testing.
As per the article, they're refunding all purchases at launch.
It's a free to play game, there is absolutely nothing newsworthy about this. Path of Exile 2 just launched on early access with a bunch of microtransactions AND a paywall and people were absolutely delighted with it.
They are 'refunding' the virtual currency. I would bet at least some lf the items purchased during prerelease will cost more on release.
But the main thing is they are basically trying the 'free to play' version of preordering, where they get your money before releasing a finished game.
The implicit perception of value in this comment is making my head spin. We all realize that in-game cosmetics aren't real, right?
Also, yes, they are doing the free to play version of preordering. It's called Early Access and it's supposed to happen later this year. See also Path of Exile 2 and Baldur's Gate 3.
People are working overtime to get their knee-jerk reaction to be retroactively justified here. The thing is, I would get being mad at this being a F2P game in the first place. I would get being mad at it being funded through microtransactions. Those are meaningful changes from the previous trilogy that I don't particularly care for.
It's the being mad on the spot at a haf-misunderstood headline depicting something entirely unremarkable that rubs me the wrong way.
We all realize that in-game cosmetics aren’t real, right?
Yes, but the unavoidable advertising of those cosmetics frequently drag down the experience when there are multiple click through screens and progress bars on battle passes the player didn't buy and a ton of other negatives that have nothing to do with whether cosmetics affect game play. Free to play frequently means 'annoying nag menus'.
I happened to focus on getting their money early and calling a reset of their fake money a refund being misleading.
It also happens that my experience with early access free to play was Multiversus, where they took a moderately OK early access game that added mtx, then went silent for months and came back as a trash version of the same game with even more mtx. This being EA I expect them to go even harder into the mtx at the expense of game play.
You just made all that up. None of that is even tangentially related to the thing that actually happened.
I mean, now we're arguing that this weird ploy to extract more money for cosmetics is probably going to harm gameplay (even though it's unrelated to gameplay) because a different game from a different company also had MTX which were also not related to the bad gameplay changes they made.
I don't know what to argue there. It's entirely irrational.
To be clear, it's not irrational that F2P games often push them in intrusive ways that are annoying. It's not irrational that Multiversus had a very weird history and a poor relaunch. But the way you're connecting those pieces along wiht a healthy dose of entirely disconnected preconceptions based on branding is completely off the rails.
This is why this is so frustrating to me. People just want to be mad at things because some other things that are unrelated made them mad once and they want to just smear the anger a bit. It's pure mob mentality and I fully admit that it pisses me off in games as a proxy for how much of it informs modern society and politics in general. Which I guess I'm doing, too, a little bit. But still.
People just want to be mad at things because some other things that are unrelated made them mad once and they want to just smear the anger a bit.
Or maybe they are annoyed by the things they gave examples of instead of being some kind of crazy conspiracy.
But it IS a crazy conspiracy... theory. "Skate testing its MTX during an alpha means that they will be a scam at launch and/or impact gameplay because Multiversus also had MTX and that had a bad relaunch" is a complete non-sequitur. This is cavemen sacrificing goats to make it rain level of random event association.
So I have to conclude the emotional layer is what matters here. Being mad loudly online at a frequent punching bag with a bad reputation is sheer mob-induced dopamine and that's why that headline exists and why this conversation happens. And why social media exists and is killing liberal democracy, but that's probably beyond the scope of this thread.
Being mad loudly online at a frequent punching bag with a bad reputation is sheer mob-induced dopamine and that’s why that headline exists and why this conversation happens.
Or maybe they are a punching bag because of the things they repeatedly do, did you consider that?
It isn't like multiversus is the only one that did this. I clearly said they were an example of a larger trend.
I did! And if this conversation was even remotely related to any of them I'd give it more consideration.
But people read "microtransactions in Alpha", which was clickbaity on purpose, did not read the game was free to play, which was hidden at the bottom of the article on purpose, and got mad anyway.
So proxy for the disintegration of public discourse it is.