As long as whales keep buying stuff they'll keep putting microtransactions in games. Start making fun of people that buy skins and horse armor and maybe people will stop buying shit that has no value.
Ban the entire business model. It's neither a product nor a service - it's a scam. Games make you value arbitrary worthless nonsense. That's what makes them games. There is no ethical form of attaching real-world prices to that charade.
'Oh, but if it's only cosmetic...' Y'mean proof that people can be made to want stuff, even if it doesn't do anything? Entire games exist to funnel people toward emotional response, and some of them make billions. Saying 'it's just hats' is the opposite of a defense.
According to the 100 developers asked out of the 300 speakers at the event, 89% said that they believe that premium AAA games can be “financially successful just by being Buy-to-Play.”
Moving on to challenges facing the industry as a whole, 55% believe it’s caused by market saturation while another 46% point towards the rising development costs of games. Regarding layoffs, 57% said that layoffs will continue either at the same pace or a higher pace over the next 12 months.
All due respect to Gamescom speakers, but I may have some follow-up questions for at least 35 of them.
I mean I understand if it's a game like Dead By Daylight or something that has regular content updates that need to be paid for, but... there's no reason why Immortals Fenyx Rising, a single player narrative driven experience, should have me busting out the credit card to try to get some Adventure Time armor that I should just be able to unlock by playing the fucking game.
developers handle design, not finances. Microtransactions have always been in the interest of profit, not to make the games better. They were the markets compromise with gamers being unlikely to pay enough to cover costs of a Triple A development cycle.
Reminder that when the NES came out, it was still $60 dollars for a game, which would be about $180 today. And that's not accounting for all the extra manhours that now go into the major titles. Microtransactions and DLCs are the deal with the devil we made to keep games from being $200+ a pop