7 Times The Video Game Industry Gave In To Greed

6 - The Extreme Nature Of Microtransactions

Microtransactions. It’s a term that has come to replace DLC and Season Passes as the champion of greed in the modern era and there have been some, quite frankly, ridiculous examples of how publishers have tried to con people out of their cash under this banner.

In Metal Gear Solid 5, Konami tried to charge fans for “insurance”, an out-and-out racket that asked players to spend real world money on protecting their bases from other players who might attack it. Not only was this a completely ridiculous thing to charge money for, but implied that the sole reason for them to include this pseudo-multiplayer offering was to then sell this “deal” as a way of mitigating the sheer annoyance losing progress would cause.

Metro had the cheek to charge for what was essentially a hard mode in their game, and we’ve even seen games charge money for single use items like ammo and health, meaning that you can literally buy your way out of troublesome situations. Hell, in the case of Tales of Vesperia, you can literally buy character levels and buff your party without any hard work - just cold hard cash.

Now here’s the thing: while the examples just given might cause you to shake your head in disbelief, there’s actually something much much worse going on under the surface. The implementation of microtransactions in this aggressive manner has seen the actual development of games change. By offering the player a chance to buy lives, health, ammo, better guns, and so on, you’re seeing cases of developers artificially increasing the difficulty of their games to make these purchases seem more and more like a great piece of value. It’s creating a false economy within video games that not-so-subtly pushes players towards microtransactions under the guise of having value. And worse still, it’s predatory.

On paper, there is a very simple and some might say agreeable way to implement microtransactions in video games: you make sure that they have no influence on the gameplay. It seems kind of obvious right? After all, why would it be acceptable for someone to get better odds of winning a game just because they paid more than someone else? That’s creating an unfair playing field and an unjust representation of competition.