3. The Price Of Multiplayer-Only Games - Rainbow Six: Siege, Evolve, Destiny, Star Wars Battlefront
This has to be addressed head-on, as although I've already mentioned Star Wars Battlefront's campaign omission being a big sticking point, 2015 really was the year where more developers released multiplayer-only games... at full price. Take Destiny's Taken King expansion/replacement, for example. The base game would've already set you back £60 at launch, and now that TKK is out, you need the previous two pieces of lacklustre DLC for it to work - which are £25 a pop. The 'deal' put in place is to re-buy the original game, both DLC packs and TKK for another £60, but that literally means you've wasted your money from 2014, as that version of the game is completely irrelevant. Turtle Rock Studio's Evolve was built "with DLC in mind", and although the developers sought to release all future map packs for free, its problem lay within a paltry selection of game modes to play. Rainbow Six: Siege has the same problem; a threadbare excuse to string together a handful of maps with some semblance of a 'campaign', then riddled with microtransactions and progression-skips if you have enough extra coin. It all comes across as very money-hungry, with consumer satisfaction discarded in favour of either brand identity or developer reputation bringing in the money regardless. Every time a game chooses to put any progression behind a paywall with real cash, it's an instant middle finger to the sense of reward you would've gotten by playing naturally. Microtransactions are a truly awful business practice born from the mobile gaming scene, and one that treats every property like a slot machine, the players forever pulling levers and hoping for satisfaction. Twin that with the multiplayer-only experiences that offer what used to be side modes for top dollar, and we've got one hell of a problem, where your love for a given property is thoroughly mined to get as much money out as possible.
