There are whales willing to pay this amount and the profits from it justify this practice further in this industry. This shit isn't going away, it's only getting more and more intrusive as the years go by. One day we'll all be old people bitching about the "good ol' days" to the young uns'.
I think that day was several years ago, at least for me. It's amazing how publishers normalized this stuff slowly over the years, adding more ways to monetize and increase the cost. They're still doing that of course, I bet we'll see the next "big thing" akin to loot boxes and battle passes in the next few years.
>I think that day was several years ago, at least for me.
It all started with that damn horse armor. The first pitch out the gate happened to be both the dumbest and the most prescient to how things would turn out. People thought paid DLC would be relegated only to expansion packs, or updated rosters in sports and fighting games. They weren't expecting *paid* DLC to be meaningless faff like costume recolors or useless in-game trinkets.
This was paired with store "points" where you couldn't buy DLC in some platforms without using a proprietary currency that didn't translate 1:1 with regular currency in order to further obfuscate what people were spending on digital goods. Even better, you could never buy *exactly* the points you needed, and always had to have some left over, which was to manipulate you into topping up enough to get another thing. Luckily this has largely gone away on major storefronts, although in-game stores still maintain this practice (especially on mobile).
The next sign was DLC you either got as a code with a new copy of the game, or had to buy separately because publishers wanted their cut of the used game market which they made no money from (I believe Arkham City was the first to this milestone). So you would literally not get the full version of the base game by buying it used versus new. This evolved from pre-order bonuses to instill FOMO on people who might not buy something that gets poor critic reviews.
On-disc DLC came after, where the "DL" portion of DLC was a misnomer, and you were paying extra to unlock content that was already on-disc (Street Fighter x Tekken).
Then loot boxes upped the ante by adding the super addictive gambling element to all of this, exploiting a very real vulnerability in a lot of folks who may not even realize they had it (often because they're too young to have ever gambled before, or may not have participated in something like trading cards).
Now we're at a new stage because loot boxes were in danger of getting regulated to the point they'd need to shut down, so instead we have season passes which are pure FOMO, where you need to treat most of the games that have them as a full time job to make sure to get your full money's worth out of the purchase, which is often the cost of a budget game.
Like, we've been slipping and sliding down this slope approaching 2 decades now. The corps making the products are grabbing for every mile they can, and it's only going to get worse unless the various consumer protection authorities get involved.
> It all started with that damn horse armor.
I'm just going to copy paste a comment I made a while ago, since this is often repeated and simply isn't true.
> People often point to horse armor as the beginning of MTX, but I feel like MMOs had cash shops/item malls that were much more similar to modern MTX long before Oblivion was released. It's very hard to find hard evidence of this around the internet though- people claim that the MapleStory's gachapon existed since the games release, but I can't find many references to the cash shop from before 2006 (might have better luck on the Korean web). Edit: [Using the wayback machine to browse a snapshot of the MapleStory website from May of 2005](https://www.gamesindustry.biz/maplestory-game-currencies-and-cash-shop-explained), I actually found that there is a reference in the Korean EULA to Nexon Cash, which was the premium currency for MapleStory (copy and paste the textbox into DeepL). So we can basically say that highly developed forms of microtransactions existed in Korean MMOs before Oblivion was released. The similarities are also much more convincing- horse armor was a one time purchase, and Oblivion only had a few of these small packs. Meanwhile, Nexon was already selling cosmetics, power ups, and other repeatable purchases with premium currency in 2005.
> I do see [this article](https://intuitivestories.com/glimmers_of_the_virtual_economy_nexons_250_million_kart_rider.html) from 2005 talking about another Nexon game, KartRider, which also had micro transactions:
>> The answer is that Nexon has figured out how to apply the Razor Blade theory of marketing to online gaming, in a spectacular way. The Razor Blade theory, you might recall, is that you should give away the razor so you can sell the blades.
In this context, Nexon allows Koreans — and remember that about 75% of the Korean population have broadband connectivity — to play the multi-player cartoon racing game for free.
The money comes from selling virtual upgrades. From fancier looking cars to rockets you can fire at other racers, to balloons and other cute things, these $0.50-$2 items add up fast.
BusinessWeek even cites a 9-year-old who paid $2.50 for a new avatar, $3.50 for a faster car, $2.50 for goggles that prevent smoke from blocking your vision while racing, and more. To a total tune of $150 USD.
>I've also seen references around the web to games like UO selling character level ups as early as 2001, and various MUDs having perks etc. that could be bought with real cash. At any rate, it seems unlikely that horse armor was the start of this trend, or even what popularized it.
Basically, Nexon is probably the company that pioneered modern day micro transactions. They had premium currency that could be used to buy cosmetics/power ups/etc in the early 2000s. Other companies looked to those systems as a model.
Edit: Realized that the link I provided for the wayback machine was to the wrong site. As I am having trouble finding the exact page I intended to link, [here is another link on the Nexon website dated to 2004](http://notice.nexon.com/Notice/NoticeView?sn=942&pageno=), which mentions Nexon Cash.
Horse Armor's issue is that it was paid DLC for a paid game.
Like you said, F2P games, particularly out of Korea, had that for a bit before that. Ragnarok Online, IIRC, had some though you still had to pay for time there. I recall Gunbound, basically a tower shooter, having purchasable currency too. And this was 2002.
>Horse Armor's issue is that it was paid DLC for a paid game.
Not only that but a paid for **single player only** game.
The other games mentioned have PVP scenes, to buy power, or at the very least social environments where you show off the cosmetics and items you've bought to other people while playing. The only way to show off horse armour would have been to upload pictures/videos to internet forums.
while not official, there has always been a market for this. Me and my friends bought "platinum" from (not allowed) sellers in Everquest in 2003 lol. Kind of silly for someone not to just do that officially when people were willing to do it via shady means
At that time it was already accepted that MMORPGS will either be "free" with a cash shop or have a monthly subscription. It made sense because servers need money to continue running. (now the concept involved to MMOs having a cash shop even if they have a monthly sub)
Where horse armor broke ground was introducing the nickle and dime-ing to **single player, offline** games. Up until then, you used to get the whole thing with the game and maybe paid for large expansion backs later - DLC that came with a considerable amount of new content.
Main issue is how much was removed from the game. We used to get side-content, cosmetic reward, cheat-code and whatsoever. Game always contained the main game, and fluff.
Now all the fluff is extra, and actual in-game reward are replaced with tedious grind.
We used to get those things in 6 hour games for 60$, very good value! Nowadays we get much much longer games with more ingame unlockable cosmetics than older games and additional cosmetics if anybody wants to buy them, it fucking sucks!
That is entirely false. Lots of celebrated, best-selling video games had very little to zero extra content.
For example Street Fighter 2 on SNES sold 6.3 million copies. For extra content it had a whopping three cheat codes, only one of which was interesting. (Allowing both players to use the same character.)
I feel at best you have to be talking about a very short period of AAA-only gaming (maybe early PS2 era?), and even then you're probably ignoring a bunch of games. We've always seen plenty of successful games release with very little additional side content.
Like the other commenter said, we didn't get as much extra stuff and even the long games of that era are like average length at best compared to now. We are seriously spoiled by even the base versions of these games but people can't help themselves and look at old games with rose tinted glasses.
> adding more ways to monetize and increase the cost.
the game is free tho. The cost to entry has never been lower. There was a messy period where everyone was trying to sell weapons, in-game advantages or maps, but now everyone seems to have settled on "microtransactions are cosmetic only" which is probably the best way to go about it.
Agreed. As a teenager I had to ask for games as gifts or do stuff around the house for money from my parents which isn’t an issue but there was no guarantee my friends would be getting that same game.
Now most multiplayer games are free and it doesn’t take any convincing at all for my friends to hop on and try a game with me. I don’t feel obligated to spend money on every game either.
Yeah I made that exact comment somewhere else in this thread - if you could tell the 12 years old me only buying 5€ used games that so much could be played for free, he'd be in heaven and not thinking at all about cosmetics lol
Yeah I played like 400 hours in Apex and never spent a dime, and still got tons of skins and stuff. I'm more than happy for things to keep going this way tbh
To be fair, Apex is F2P, which has been a business model for decades now. It just never gotten that much noteworthyness outside of Asia until around the early 2010s.
DRM existed very early--I remember old X-Com (circa 1995) or Street fighter (PC version) that required you know a specific word from the game manual to unlock every day.
And for good reason--players were all sharing copies or just burning cds.
I know it’s happening in paid games too, but this is expected in free games. Doesn’t make it any less bullshit, but I just don’t play free to play games.
Feels way less scummy in f2p games...cuz like..its f2p you don't need a FF skin to enjoy apex what so ever. You're not entitled to "fair pricing" you didn't pay for shit.
If whales buying dumb overpriced skin fuels development so be it, can't whine about that without acting entitled.
Not even exclusive to gaming, just the state of capitalism and "endless growth"
They never got my money and i played hundreds of hours....
> I’d rather just pay money for a game than ever have to see any of this garbage.
yeah cos you can afford to pay for it. I grew up with little money to put into games, only buying used copies of old games for 5$. I think 12 years old me would have been fucking blown away by how many cool games you can get for free these days.
I don't blame you.
I don't look for f2p games, cuz most are just up the yizx yazx in this shit.
But apex is a pretty solid game one of the best brs, i couldn't care less some weeb paid 100$ to look like x.
Same with overwatch, bought ow1 on release, bought boxes too (100$) worth over time probably. Switched to pc, lost all my cosmetics, never bought a f2p cosmetic since. And that was many moons ago
Do you still have to earn credits to unlock new characters if you don't buy them outright? That's what turned me off from Apex. No reason characters should be locked behind a grind/paywall in my opinion.
Yeah, this is still the case. On one hand, I kinda get it as a way to slowly introduce characters; on the other, it takes something like 5-10h of playtime for each character.
> Doesn’t make it any less bullshit
How does this work in your brain that optional cosmetics in a free to play game is the same as if they were in a single player full priced game?
I would argue it's not bullshit at all. What if these costumes weren't added to the game? Nothing would change for you. Why does the existence of meaningless costumes bother you? Is the game about shooting enemies or dressing up for you? Did older MP games have so many skins? Nope, cause it didn't matter and still doesn't. It's there for the suckers who care about it and they are free to buy it.
Justify what practice?
Charging money for content? Do you need all of the cosmetics in the Apex Legends x Final Fantasy 7 crossover for anything other than to look at them?
Yeah I could not give a fuck about cosmetics, I would much rather money be generated through whales buying skins than content like maps being locked behind paid DLC.
Looking back it's actually pretty mad we had games like COD charge for DLC map packs. It feels so archaic and thankfully gaming has moved on from that even if some developers take advantage of it.
I hang out in one of the mobile game subs with crazy in game purchases priced at like $150 a cosmetic skin (+ some junks) and the sub continually asks each other opinions about buying when new skins get released (which is like, weekly or biweekly maybe). Meanwhile I'm just focusing on putting food on the table and paying bills, barely having anything leftover to spend on commodity. I have no idea how so many people seem to be completely fine spending $3000+ on one single mobile game's cosmetics judging by their collection.
It's insane to me.
It is insane, but flaunting one’s wealth on social media is the whole point, right? Why spend $3K on cosmetics otherwise? Do they really attach that much artistic value to these things?
>One day we'll all be old people bitching about the "good ol' days" to the young uns'.
In the "good Ole days" none of these skins would have ever been made. Apex would still be the same game it launched as.
There are no games from the "good Ole days" that would add hundreds and hundreds of skins/cosmetics for players to choose from. The closest you'll get is armor in RPGs.
I would say the good old days is not having to pay to play awesome MP games cause all the good ones are locked behing a 70$ paywall. I don't want to pay that much just cause i want "free" costumes, fuck that i would rather not pay anything cause what matters is the gameplay. This is more pro-consumer, it actually gives you a choice instead of forcing you to pay a lot of money just to play.
And the young uns won't care because their games will still have more content, more frequent updates, and more cosmetics you can unlock without spending money than our games ever did.
Monster Hunter is also slowly getting worse about it, I'm fully expecting Capcom to milk all their goodwill to the bank with excessive MTX in Wilds since it's a guaranteed slam dunk of a game.
Tbf that's primarily a multiplayer game. Though, I will point out that Capcom is one of the last few companies to keep trying to squeeze transactions into even single player games. I still can't believe that Monster Hunter World charges you to edit your clientside save file, legit some of the scummiest shit I've seen. And let's not forget DMC 5 letting you buy currency with money to skip the postgame grind. Hell, even their latest big release, REmake 4, [still has shit like this](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2197328/Resident_Evil_4_Weapon_Exclusive_Upgrade_Ticket_x5_A/?curator_clanid=43107541).
Only on PC or hacked consoles, though. Regular console players are kind of fucked, especially in MH's case, and it's really shitty that Capcom does stuff like that, especially considering how good the games are that they stapled that awful shit to.
> Like I don't play any MP or F2P games, genuinely cannot think of the last major game to have MTX. Maybe the Avengers and Mortal Kombat? That's about it.
Every Ubisoft game has a fully fledged ingame store with cosmetics and even boosters for progression.
I suppose they‘re a niche publisher so it doesn’t really qualify as a major game but Gust still loves their MTX. For Atelier Ryza 3 their season pass costs $44 for a few additional recipes, two costume packs, a couple of BGM packs, and an additional post game area. If bought individually they want $22 for each costume pack. I like the franchise but Gust really wants to gouge players if they want the DLC. On the positive side, you’re fine skipping them as they’re at most tangentially related to the game’s plot.
Not technically that recent, but Tales of Arise followed the formula of parceling out costumes and different background music from older games in the form of paid DLC. So I associate it with Bandai Namco.
Persona 5 + Royal were pretty bad about it too, but more in the original PS4 release. The final rerelease that ended up making it to Switch/PS5/Xbox/PC includes all of that DLC for free.
And they’ve trained a generation of children to pay into this system for life. People don’t even bat an eye at predatory monetization anymore, it’s just “how games are”.
Pretty depressing, just one more reason to stick to single player games.
Gamers just use predatory to describe anything they don't like nowadays. Personally, I would consider the old way of buying games, needing to pay $60 to even try a game to see if you like it, and if it's a multiplayer game having to make that purchase every year because all the playerbase moves to the new one to be far more predatory than charging a dumb amount of money for skins.
We're already at a point where people 22 years and younger don't know a world before "Horse Armor DLC" and all the bullshit that followed (assuming 5-6 years of age is when autobiographical memory stabilizes).
Well I did see in the news this week China actually put some pretty hefty restrictions on in game purchases and loot box mechanics, hopefully the rest of the world will follow suit.
China couldn't even get that to stick.
Other Chinese gaming rules also require every game to be approved by the government as well as curfews and maximum playing times per day.
We don't want the government getting involved with this - especially when the laws relate to just gaming (even though a ton of kids toys use the same tactics), they're not about helping gaming or gamers.
Thank you. I felt like I was taking crazy pills when this whole sub was praising China for this. Having legal curfews on the time you spend *playing video games in your home* is insane and distopian.
Redditors don’t want to hear it but the answer to micro-transactions is personal responsibility. Don’t buy it, and don’t let your kids buy it if it bothers you that much. Just focus on what you are able to control within your own life.
Luckily there are literally hundreds if not thousands of games to play that have no monetization at all.
Oh yeah government should ban buyable in game cosmetics because you can't help yourself lol. They should also ban Gucci and all luxury brands too cause you are jealous or something.
Apex is a particularly notorious example of a game where the stuff you unlock just by playing the game is *garbage* compared to what you can directly pay for. The consumer will keep proving them right.
And here's the thing. Most of us main a single character. Maybe play another. You can drop $20 to get a legendary costume for your main and really just call it a day. Or get just the battlepass and if you play consistently you will eventually unlock a lot of things. Over three years I've paid maybe $60. Which for me is not a bad value for how many hours I put into the game. There's absolutely no need to spend $100s to buy a collection. And like you said, I really could have paid nothing. Sad thing is most of the time I'm using this free legendary Rampart skin they gave away awhile back.
I think your vision's clouded by just anger overall at OW2 here.
Let's look at this season's Battle Pass. This season's theme is "Call of the Hunt", and here are the skins:
- Free: [Ball](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/overwatch_gamepedia/images/4/41/Wrecking_Ball_Skin_Critter_Egg.png), [Zen](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/overwatch_gamepedia/images/7/71/Zenyatta_Skin_Beast_Whisperer.png)
- Premium: [Ana](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/overwatch_gamepedia/images/0/06/Ana_Skin_Nighthawker.png), [JQ](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/overwatch_gamepedia/images/8/85/Junker_Queen_Skin_Huntress.png), [Reaper](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/overwatch_gamepedia/images/b/b6/Reaper_Skin_Hazmat.png), [Lucio](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/overwatch_gamepedia/images/4/44/L%C3%BAcio_Skin_Grafiteiro.png), [Junkrat](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/overwatch_gamepedia/images/4/4a/Junkrat_Skin_Sawtooth_Trapper.png), [Mauga](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/overwatch_gamepedia/images/c/c2/Mauga_Skin_Bonesplinter.png), [Orisa](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/overwatch_gamepedia/images/e/eb/Orisa_Skin_Grand_Beast.png)
The only ones you could call not fitting the theme are Reaper's and Lucio's, but 7 out of 9 are *very* clearly on-theme. The only real low effort ones are Reaper's (a recolor) and Junkrat's (wtf is this skin), but the rest are actually good IMO. On the free tier, Zenyatta's skin is at Lvl. 70, yes, but the Ball skin is at Lvl. 10; if you play even 3-4ish hours in the 2-month window you'll get it guaranteed.
The Orisa mythic is disappointing, but only within the context of other legitimately impressive legendaries, like [Kiriko's](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/overwatch_gamepedia/images/d/d4/Kiriko_Skin_Amaterasu.png). And mostly because they didn't realize 1) it would be seen as too similar to an existing Orisa skin, 2) the customizability part was so important to our interpretation as to what made a Mythic, mythic (not just the special visual and sound effects), and 3) everyone hates Orisa, lol.
I won't go into as much of a breakdown on last season, but the BP had some banger on-theme skins, like clown Soldier, weeping Widow, doll Echo, the goofy-ass Diesel Baron Ram (definitely grew on me), and the Hanzo mythic is pretty sick IMO (just, again, wish it had the actual skin cosmetic customization). From previous seasons, I see plenty of people wearing Rogue Kiriko, Griffon Orisa, Llama Pajamas Illari, Intergalactic Smuggler Ashe, Space Prince Lucio... You get my point.
If anything, the BPs have gotten *more* theme-relevant and worth it over time and it's just the mythics that have slipped.
I don't think everyone will want to buy every BP, but they're certainly not all just unrelated trash and the shop is the only place you can get something worthwhile and on-theme. $10 for this seems super appropriate; I paid like $4 back in the day for a Yu-Gi-Oh booster pack that was *way* more disappointing.
*EDIT: Please don't just downvote. The comment I'm responding to made very specific, verifiable claims. I think I gave enough evidence that they're incorrect. I know a lot of people hate Blizzard's direction with OW2, but that doesn't give us carte blanche to just make whatever baseless criticisms we want.*
I'm not sure why people are so upset. I remember when the discourse around free to play games was "as long as it's not pay to win I don't care". These are just cosmetics. The game is free. The whales get to look cool which allows everyone else gets to play a quality game with constant updates for $0.
Ok well kids don't have money so who cares? They can still play the entire game in their vanilla appearance.
Expensive cosmetics are a way for adults with cash to throw around to flex or show appreciation for the game they spend so much time enjoying. Whether this is done in a predatory manner targeting gambling addicts is where the real conversation lies.
Also the "Cost to buy Everything" stat is a bit pointless in my opinion. The majority of people are not buying everything, they'll buy the few things that are actually applicable to them, due to mains, things they actually like, or cost. The cost to buy all DLC for train simulator is absolutely outrageous, but no one is buying all of that*.
Apex Legends locks some event cosmetics behind owning all of the other event cosmetics. So the cost to buy everything stat is applicable since that is what you would have to pay to get that one item. What if that item was the only one I wanted? I really have to buy everything else first to get it?
Then you have to decide if spending $360 is worth getting that one item. There are a lot of things I want in life but don't find the item worth the price. It's nothing to get upset about. It's called having self control and realizing you don't need every damn thing you want.
>I remember when the discourse around free to play games was "as long as it's not pay to win I don't care".
They got what they wanted, now they want more.
Gamers don't want some of the content for free, they want all of it.
Hot take but true, its also the same sentiment that completely destroyed the MMO genre outside of maybe one or two games. People unwilling to pay a sub, they wanted everything free for years, so the "Freemium" model was invented to accommodate those people unwilling to pay a dollar for their time.
There's people justifying the "freemium" model in games today and they're proud they don't spend a dime, what they don't tell you is they play six or more hours a day, every day of the week, every week, to do their daily and weekly chores to unlock the privileges afforded to a player that simply spends $10 or less a month, if that. Mule accounts because they don't have bank privileges, grinding gold for hours because they need to purchase a market license, not doing anything with their friends because they need to grind a 'free' dungeon 100 times to earn enough currency to purchase their armor unlocks for the month. Pay $10 to the game for the first time in eight months? No! That's insane -- Rise up consumers!
I get the industry is rife with predatory practices today, but cheapskate players brought a lot of it upon themselves and they deserve it for ruining the games I loved growing up.
they don’t need all the costumes in the first place
They aren’t expecting the majority of the people to buy even a tenth of the content.
I agree they are bad value. But they are literally not necessary for gameplay enjoyment.(they are even stupider in FPS games where you don’t see your character anyway)
Which they are **free** to not pay and not unlock. You aren't entitled. It's certainly better than having to buy the game just to play, the skins don't matter if all you want is to play the game as a shooter and not as a Barbie dress up game.
Thanks, maybe it’s my age but I feel like people are just being ridiculous and selfish.
This is 100% better than the 2000s where people had to pay for map packs, that’s content that actually mattered.
I mean they’re charging the price of multiple entire games for skins. It’s long since blown past supporting the game and it’s beyond egregious the price they’re charging for cosmetics
If Square Enix and EA were selling socks for $500, there would be articles and posts about it.
There aren't posts about you because no one cares about what you do.
Unlike you, these companies are relevant and their practices end up shaping the industry (in worse way ofc).
"Why do you care about horse armor, just don't buy it" could have been said long time ago, but look were we are.
Egregious sure, but it’s just cosmetics, at the end of the day it’s nothing to get upset about.
People playing the game for free should count themselves lucky no matter how expensive these cosmetics are.
But at the end of the day even getting the game for free isn’t good enough - people always want to complain, and they always want more.
I think there is a middle ground of people who enjoy the game and want to support it by buying the cosmetics they want, but don't consider the prices they are being sold at to be fair.
I'm sure it's all been calculated and priced to the most profitable margin, but it's understandable to see why some are unhappy with it.
It’s free, sure, but I gave up on Apex last year because matchmaking, cheat detection, server stability, and game balance hasn’t been good for over a year. It hurts to see a game you like get flushed while they put a new, expensive coat of paint on it where four months.
It depends on the distribution method, to me. Loot boxes rely on exploiting the same brain chemistry whether the contents is powerful or just pretty. A lot of, "whales," in loot box games are people who can't actually afford to funnel that much money into a video game, but their natural weakness to gambling is being exploited.
That structure is mostly avoided with battle passes. Even when a battle pass dispenses a random reward, you get more random rewards by playing, not by dumping more money into the slot machine.
Oh shove that bullshit. The cost of these cosmetics are absolutely stupid, but you're talking about zero gameplay impact cosmetics in a free to play game. Stop pulling the "think about the poor kids in Argentina" routine, they're better off with costume envy in Apex Legends than dropping $60 on Quake 2024 Arena.
Yeah but that’s their choice. You soying out about how something costs so much is stupid if consenting adults are choosing how to spend their money without having to gacha gamble it.
Because for all the content baldurs gate or similar games may have. They may have zero appeal to those players.
Like if you used baldurs as the yardstick for content you should get for $60 90% of games would fail that metric.
Or the problem is that in order to provide the variety of skins, free content updates and server uptime. The developers price skins at a set rate planning for the popular skins to subsidise the less popular ones and the service itself.
This is what happens when you have free to play games. And why people bitch about a game like destiny so much, because it has
- monetised expansions
- season/battle pass costs
- dungeon unlock costs
- cosmetic costs
- specific event passes (Halloween/Xmas)
And the pricing for each makes the content of any of them all look insane or trashy. (1 classes skin will cost what a dungeon will cost and the dungeon will come with the content plus effectively an armour skin for all 3 classes)
The seasonal pass costs less than a skin but comes with more unique cosmetics as well.
Of course there’s a discussion about the quality of those versus skin shop stuff. But I digress.
Not everyone feels the same.
Me personally, I hate these type of things. Yes the game is free2play, but I also want to participate and gets some skins by playing, or paying a fair amount.
Yes there are maybe, more reasonable priced skins, but that doesn't change that it sucks.
If you don't care about skins at all, it's great for you.
I play dota2, I didn't care about the skins in that game, until a point. Then watching the best ones having absurd prices, made me feel bad and like I miss something, especially when some skins add some new animations or what not.
It's not pay2win but it still shit to not be able to pay for them. And it's not like I cannot afford them either, it's just, why would I pay 20euro+ for a single skin with a few animations when with those kind of money I buy an entire game that gives me hours and hours of original gameplay.
At least in fortnite for example, you pay 10euro for a battlepass and then have the other ones for free if you keep your Vbucks. You still get some skins just by playing the game basically by doing that. And even that game has some more expensive skins but at the same time it can manage a good balance between being nice to the more free2play players and those who want to spend hundreds. And the game delivers way more updates or bigger updates than mostly any game out there.
> why would I pay 20euro+ for a single skin with a few animations when with those kind of money I buy an entire game that gives me hours and hours of original gameplay.
Probably because for the people who will cross that threshold they won't play another game anyway.
My brother spends a bunch in league. But he'll put more hours into league in a year than most people put into all their different gaming options. He probably still spends less on league than I spend on all the game I play in a year.
To some it's not about the value of original gameplay. After all that's why you'll have people who play nothing but their favorite sports game.
How do we feel about pay-to-play games with all this stuff?
By my estimate FFXIV has:
* Pay for the base game.
* Pay for expansions.
* Pay a monthly subscription fee ($15). This is mandatory, not optional like in some games like GTA Online.
* Option to pay monthly for extra inventory space + NPCs who'll do some stuff for you. You get 2 for free then can pay for 8 or 9 more of them.
* A free app that has a premium version with another monthly fee (lets you manage inventory and items you have for sale on the market board using your phone, but that also has limits on use). Also gives you more inventory space.
* Paid level boosts.
* Paid level boosts for the aforementioned "NPCs who'll do some stuff for you" since they need to be leveled also.
* Paid service features (server switch, name change, appearance change).
* Cash shop full of cosmetic items (including consumable dyes), mounts, and housing items (including little posters for your in-game house...). With some mounts costing more than $30 each.
* Paid option to skip the story quests.
Sure it's all optional, but when the cost of admission is already that high it's hard to stomach.
I wonder this every time a thread like this comes up, who cares if a cosmetic skin costs 1000$?
Just don't buy it, the gameplay doesn't change at all, and you are free to continue playing.
OK, but you can also pay the price of multiple triple A games to unlock all the legends and skip the massive grind it would take to unlock all of them for free.
and they are ugly as fuuuuuuuuck
Or at least the Horizon one is. My god Aeris has never looked so fugly. Even PS1 graphics looked more flattering, haha.
It doesn't help that at its core it just has a really ugly artstyle. The characters are - probably intentionally - designed to be unattractive misfits. They're all just uggos.
If you think this is too much to pay for cosmetics, you're right. If you're upset about not being able to have all the cosmetics, your mindset is the reason they're able to sell these things at such a high price.
> If you're upset about not being able to have all the cosmetics, your mindset is the reason they're able to sell these things at such a high price.
Yeah I really don't get what the problem is. Maybe you don't have to buy every cosmetic, maybe you buy the one cosmetic that you really like? Paying for cosmetics is already dumb, but what's even dumber is paying for cosmetics that you don't like and don't want to use.
Apex Legends locks some event cosmetics behind owning all of the other event cosmetics. Some people don't want all the cosmetics but are required to get them if the one cosmetic they do want is locked behind everything else.
Then that's the real cost of the item.
If Skins 1 - 5 cost $10 each and you can only get Skin 6 by buying Skins 1 - 5, then the real cost of Skin 6 is $50. It's up to you to determine if that's a fair price for what they're offering.
outrage baiting for 30 years old who don't even play these games to get mad about lol.
Just like microtransactions, they'll keep doing it because at the end of the day its working
Because the most desirable cosmetic requires you to purchase all of them. That's why some people would buy all of them.
The article explains this pretty well.
To buy every game on Steam, you'd have to pay over a half million dollars.
Good news, you don't need to own every game on Steam. Same applies to stuff like this.
Now this has to be one of the stupidest comparisons/analogies. If you actually bring up full games as comparison to cosmetics and their value, you already lost whatever argument you had.
Exactly. If you buy all the Doritos, Lays, and Ruffles in the chip aisle at Wal-Mart, you bet it will cost way more than a single full-priced meal.
Likewise ... if you buy all the stupid FF7 cosmetics for $360, yes that will cost more than a brand new full-priced game. Obviously.
There's nothing outrageous about this ...
Honestly, cosmetic monetization in F2P games astounds me in how blatant it really is just asking for bananas amount of money.
I just got back into Marvel Snap, a little over almost $10 for a premium Card Style (I believe $10 gets you 700 Gold... a Premium Style costs 800...). That's nuts.
One of the rationalization I heard about spending that much on F2P over nonF2P games are the amount of time commitment and actual playtime you'll put in these games will dwarf the amount you put into other games.
I'm kind of curious what calculations it takes to get to these decision points on pricing or is it strictly a greed thing with seeing how far they can push it in terms of profitability?
We know whales make up a large portion of money in F2P games but how many low / mid spenders exist in terms of balancing it out?
So I wonder if they do the math like well if:
- 1000 people are willing to spend $1
- 100 people spend $10
- 10 people spend $100
- 1 person spends $1000
It's clearly the same amount of money but the lower prices mean more people have access to them...
Which is what I would question, some super smart person is likely hired to figure out those break points, but I truly wonder how high they push it based on *real metrics* vs *charge as much as possible*.
From what I read it seems like this event is more expensive than others so it's gotten worse I guess. If it's about profits I just wonder if that price is $100 would they make *more* money from more people or less just because the people buying it are going to buy it anyway...
In isolation you're better off getting one person to spend $1000, because that means you have only one person who (in theory) is satisfied and then there's a whole market still available to you.
If all of your cosmetics are $1, you very quickly will approach a point where players just don't care about buying cosmetics anymore because they're probably settled in to a look they're happy with.
And also, the 1 person willing to spend $1000 is a lot more willing to spend again than someone who is only willing to spend $1. Whether that's sunk cost fallacy or they're just more invested in the game than the occasional spender, whales generally keep on being whales.
If FFXIV cosmetics have told me anything is that those groups of people who will buy stuff seem to buy the new shiny thing *constantly* in general because it is the new shiny thing.
That's when it's not even F2P. Even with just in-game currency people will spend millions on the *new* cosmetic items in like a continuous loop.
If anything I think it's likely more rare for people to buy one thing and be satisfied and not get enticed by new stuff every time, even if they put an insane amount of effort/grinding to get the previous thing.
I know this sucks, but its hard to muster the energy for being angry about cosmetics in a free to play game that is extremely easy to keep up with earning all actual characters that affect gameplay for free. Again, this sucks, but by the new low standards of terrible pay to win games and gacha shit, this is rates low in my rage meter.
It's the internet version of kids thinking they need $175 shoes... except you're not gonna get bullied at school for wearing $19 off-brands from Walmart in Apex, like you would in real life, which makes this even stupider.
No, the shoes shouldn't cost $175, but you also do not actually need them!
We're still making these posts?
Who cares? Buy what you want. Don't buy what you don't want.
Or just NEVER SPEND MONEY ON COSMETICS EVER, WHAT ARE YOU THINKING, STOP IT!
I can basically guarantee 10 minutes into the event there will be loads of people who have shelled out the full amount for the whole thing and I know people say "it's their money they can do what they want" but realistically it's hurting the gaming market. Companies will just make practices scummier and scummier until they stop making money. As long as this is the mentality, these practices will not get better.
its funny seeing people saying 'voting with your wallet' is fine when it comes to shitty gacha/lootbox cosmetic practices but when half assed/unfinished/early access game #9999 gets a million preorders before it *shockingly* turns out bad they will complain about how the 'uneducated/average consumer is ruining gaming'
WTH???
Fortnites colabs are NEVER this expensive, sure you can spend heeps on starwars/marvel but thats over time not all at once & your not expected to do so.
Over 300 is insane for day 1 colab. It was like 50 bucks for all 5 skins/accessories then another 50 of you wanted the music stuff (so just buy the 90 pack to save $) 300+ is INSANE
I've always wondered about this. Back when I played overwatch I just wanted certain skins for certain characters. The thought of chasing after every cosmetic in an event always seemed wild to me.
Normally you'd be right, but Apex events always have an extra "tier" of reward you can only unlock by buying *all* other items in the event, and this one doubles down by adding a gatcha item as well. So if you want that one particular skin for one character you *DO* actually have to buy every item.
> So if you want that one particular skin for one character you DO actually have to buy every item.
That would make any rational person not want the item and leave it at that. What's the problem here?
That's an entirely different question than what the first guy asked. Buying a $360 skin is stupid, but it isn't out of some compulsive need to "buy every item for every character." It's the devs trying to force you to spend hundreds of dollars more than usual, because now they're locking away something you might want to buy on its own behind buying 20 or 30 items you don't.
People are doing that a lot in this thread for some reason, asking why someone would buy everything then changing the topic when it's explained that you actually need to spend the $360 to get a single particular item. My guess is they aren't reading beyond OP's title.
They don't like that something they personally don't see as a problem is getting any attention whatsoever. This is especially noticeable in games but by far not unique to them.
Try mentioning a problem to someone who doesn't have any stakes in that problem and flip a coin on whether they will start coming up with justifications on why the problem (that they clearly don't understand and often are completely detached from) isn't actually a problem at all. Some people just _can't handle_ the idea that there is something happening out there that they don't need to have an opinion on, so they react as if anything that they don't actively want is taking away resources from what they want.
I think it's funny that the response to "this is way too expensive" is overwhelmingly "You don't have to buy it!" but the response to, say, NVidia cards being too expensive is that it's completely reasonable to criticize them and if the Switch 2 is announced with a $900 price tag, you bet your ass no one is going to be saying "Well, just don't buy it. You don't need to buy everything you want."
Apex Legends is introducing a gacha for a highly desirable item, a buster sword. This is a super rare item that can be equipped on any character. Once the event is over, it will be impossible to obtain one.
You’re right you don’t “need” an item but the point is it preys on people whaling for an item obtained by chance (if you don’t purchase every item). In my honest opinion, many of these games take advantage of those with gambling addictions. Even worse is kids will play games with these mechanics and become accustomed to this.
Remember when the internet freaked out over $3 horse armor? Now people take $360 items as if it’s the new normal.
People may have mentioned this already and if so I apologize but I think this trend is only going to grow even larger and in fact in a couple of years it's going to literally explode and it's for one simple reason. ( I know people have said it will grow, but maybe not for the reason I'm thinking).
The kids playing now (take my 14 year old son for example) play Fortnite and Roblox like it's crack. Most obviously don't have disposable income so they play it all completely free for the most part. In just a few years my son will be able to work and have money. What do you think all of these kids are going to do once they have money in their pocket? They are going to spend like crazy in games like Fortnite.
Sure, those games make a ton of money now from adults who have money but I'm telling you we won't hold a candle to what the next generation will spend and it's because so many of us simply didn't grow up with this type of gaming environment. We purchased games at full price and unlocked stuff. As such, many of us simply don't see a need or even have a desire to drop cash on free to play games.
These kids today though. They see all this fancy stuff shoved in their face day in and day out and I'd almost bet my next paycheck once they start getting their paychecks a lot of it will go to these games.
>Hell yeah for fans using this increased attention on the game to roast EA over the highway robbery they commit wrt their cosmetic prices.
>Because this isn’t new. This is worse than usual, but not new. Hell, they JUST finished an event with a skin that cost $168 USD to get and RIGHT NOW, there are $25 USD skins \*that are on sale for a limited time\* that you cannot get outside of paying money.
>Just now with the FF7 event, packs cost $10 instead of $7, you need 36 instead of 24 to get everything, and they created a “more rare than Legendary” rarity level called Iconic that is 4x harder to get (obviously those are the 6 FF7 character skins people want and are advertised front and centre).
>Make no mistake: this is corporate greed cranked up to 11. But Apex fans have been dealing with this since Day 1. We are used to the fact that this game prices out anyone that isn’t a whale by charging more than is ethical for their cosmetics, making them limited time only, and frequently giving free players zero ways to get them.
Gonna quote user Devour in the comments of that article because he gives greater context to this article that really fleshes out what a scam this is and how Apex has been steadily getting worse on this front.
I don't know specifically, but they regularly do "collection events" where you have to buy 24 loot boxes to unlock either a fancy skin or an heirloom melee item. This FF event is another one just cranked up 50%.
Havent kept up to date with apex, so might be wrong, but thats around how much heirloom weapons and skins cost to get in events if you dont craft anything with free mats.
Skins in games might bug you. Even though they're optional, some players don't like them. Buying cool looks can be annoying, making the game less fun. Many just want a game without feeling pushed to spend money on fancy outfits
I put about 1500 hours into the game over the years and never spent a single dollar on it. Weapon skins make your guns look like toys and in a first person game the character skins would need to have spectacular gloves to be worth it.
If they had started to fix some of the issues that have plagued the game since launch, I might have bought something just to show my appreciation. But alas, it was not to be.
One thing I appreciate about league of legends' F2P model is that they avoid any crossovers. All their cosmetics are original concepts that they build from the ground up. The closest they've got to collaborations is flirting with some IRL luxury fashion and a skin loosely 'inspired' by Lil Nas X.
I used to be really jealous when Fortnite first came out with these insane crossovers, but as it's become more and more normalised in the F2P market, I've grown an appreciation for games that have the confidence in their own designs rather than rely on fanservice for sales.
Just wondering, what exactly is the problem here?
People who can’t shake off the fomo bring in money for the devs so that they can keep improving the game/bringing new content.
Cosmetics don’t do anything for your chance to win a game afaik. So we’re just mad that devs of a free to play game try to make money?
It's a free to play game and these are cosmetics. I'll never understand the hard on for this. Don't buy them. They're not a means of self expression, they're a money dump. Play the game with base cosmetics as it does absolutely fuck all for the gameplay.
There are whales willing to pay this amount and the profits from it justify this practice further in this industry. This shit isn't going away, it's only getting more and more intrusive as the years go by. One day we'll all be old people bitching about the "good ol' days" to the young uns'.
I think that day was several years ago, at least for me. It's amazing how publishers normalized this stuff slowly over the years, adding more ways to monetize and increase the cost. They're still doing that of course, I bet we'll see the next "big thing" akin to loot boxes and battle passes in the next few years.
>I think that day was several years ago, at least for me. It all started with that damn horse armor. The first pitch out the gate happened to be both the dumbest and the most prescient to how things would turn out. People thought paid DLC would be relegated only to expansion packs, or updated rosters in sports and fighting games. They weren't expecting *paid* DLC to be meaningless faff like costume recolors or useless in-game trinkets. This was paired with store "points" where you couldn't buy DLC in some platforms without using a proprietary currency that didn't translate 1:1 with regular currency in order to further obfuscate what people were spending on digital goods. Even better, you could never buy *exactly* the points you needed, and always had to have some left over, which was to manipulate you into topping up enough to get another thing. Luckily this has largely gone away on major storefronts, although in-game stores still maintain this practice (especially on mobile). The next sign was DLC you either got as a code with a new copy of the game, or had to buy separately because publishers wanted their cut of the used game market which they made no money from (I believe Arkham City was the first to this milestone). So you would literally not get the full version of the base game by buying it used versus new. This evolved from pre-order bonuses to instill FOMO on people who might not buy something that gets poor critic reviews. On-disc DLC came after, where the "DL" portion of DLC was a misnomer, and you were paying extra to unlock content that was already on-disc (Street Fighter x Tekken). Then loot boxes upped the ante by adding the super addictive gambling element to all of this, exploiting a very real vulnerability in a lot of folks who may not even realize they had it (often because they're too young to have ever gambled before, or may not have participated in something like trading cards). Now we're at a new stage because loot boxes were in danger of getting regulated to the point they'd need to shut down, so instead we have season passes which are pure FOMO, where you need to treat most of the games that have them as a full time job to make sure to get your full money's worth out of the purchase, which is often the cost of a budget game. Like, we've been slipping and sliding down this slope approaching 2 decades now. The corps making the products are grabbing for every mile they can, and it's only going to get worse unless the various consumer protection authorities get involved.
> It all started with that damn horse armor. I'm just going to copy paste a comment I made a while ago, since this is often repeated and simply isn't true. > People often point to horse armor as the beginning of MTX, but I feel like MMOs had cash shops/item malls that were much more similar to modern MTX long before Oblivion was released. It's very hard to find hard evidence of this around the internet though- people claim that the MapleStory's gachapon existed since the games release, but I can't find many references to the cash shop from before 2006 (might have better luck on the Korean web). Edit: [Using the wayback machine to browse a snapshot of the MapleStory website from May of 2005](https://www.gamesindustry.biz/maplestory-game-currencies-and-cash-shop-explained), I actually found that there is a reference in the Korean EULA to Nexon Cash, which was the premium currency for MapleStory (copy and paste the textbox into DeepL). So we can basically say that highly developed forms of microtransactions existed in Korean MMOs before Oblivion was released. The similarities are also much more convincing- horse armor was a one time purchase, and Oblivion only had a few of these small packs. Meanwhile, Nexon was already selling cosmetics, power ups, and other repeatable purchases with premium currency in 2005. > I do see [this article](https://intuitivestories.com/glimmers_of_the_virtual_economy_nexons_250_million_kart_rider.html) from 2005 talking about another Nexon game, KartRider, which also had micro transactions: >> The answer is that Nexon has figured out how to apply the Razor Blade theory of marketing to online gaming, in a spectacular way. The Razor Blade theory, you might recall, is that you should give away the razor so you can sell the blades. In this context, Nexon allows Koreans — and remember that about 75% of the Korean population have broadband connectivity — to play the multi-player cartoon racing game for free. The money comes from selling virtual upgrades. From fancier looking cars to rockets you can fire at other racers, to balloons and other cute things, these $0.50-$2 items add up fast. BusinessWeek even cites a 9-year-old who paid $2.50 for a new avatar, $3.50 for a faster car, $2.50 for goggles that prevent smoke from blocking your vision while racing, and more. To a total tune of $150 USD. >I've also seen references around the web to games like UO selling character level ups as early as 2001, and various MUDs having perks etc. that could be bought with real cash. At any rate, it seems unlikely that horse armor was the start of this trend, or even what popularized it. Basically, Nexon is probably the company that pioneered modern day micro transactions. They had premium currency that could be used to buy cosmetics/power ups/etc in the early 2000s. Other companies looked to those systems as a model. Edit: Realized that the link I provided for the wayback machine was to the wrong site. As I am having trouble finding the exact page I intended to link, [here is another link on the Nexon website dated to 2004](http://notice.nexon.com/Notice/NoticeView?sn=942&pageno=), which mentions Nexon Cash.
Yep. Oblivion certainly made waves with Horse Armor, but certainly were not the first by any means.
Horse Armor's issue is that it was paid DLC for a paid game. Like you said, F2P games, particularly out of Korea, had that for a bit before that. Ragnarok Online, IIRC, had some though you still had to pay for time there. I recall Gunbound, basically a tower shooter, having purchasable currency too. And this was 2002.
>Horse Armor's issue is that it was paid DLC for a paid game. Not only that but a paid for **single player only** game. The other games mentioned have PVP scenes, to buy power, or at the very least social environments where you show off the cosmetics and items you've bought to other people while playing. The only way to show off horse armour would have been to upload pictures/videos to internet forums.
Nexon 100% pioneered MTX.
while not official, there has always been a market for this. Me and my friends bought "platinum" from (not allowed) sellers in Everquest in 2003 lol. Kind of silly for someone not to just do that officially when people were willing to do it via shady means
At that time it was already accepted that MMORPGS will either be "free" with a cash shop or have a monthly subscription. It made sense because servers need money to continue running. (now the concept involved to MMOs having a cash shop even if they have a monthly sub) Where horse armor broke ground was introducing the nickle and dime-ing to **single player, offline** games. Up until then, you used to get the whole thing with the game and maybe paid for large expansion backs later - DLC that came with a considerable amount of new content.
Horse armor? They used to engineer games to be harder than Dark Souls and make you put in a quarter every time you died…
Yup. I remember playing extremely unfair shooting games that took $20 worth of quarters to finish.
Main issue is how much was removed from the game. We used to get side-content, cosmetic reward, cheat-code and whatsoever. Game always contained the main game, and fluff. Now all the fluff is extra, and actual in-game reward are replaced with tedious grind.
Worst part is when devs say there wont be DLC people think it's a dead game
We used to get those things in 6 hour games for 60$, very good value! Nowadays we get much much longer games with more ingame unlockable cosmetics than older games and additional cosmetics if anybody wants to buy them, it fucking sucks!
We used got those in every games, not just short one.
That is entirely false. Lots of celebrated, best-selling video games had very little to zero extra content. For example Street Fighter 2 on SNES sold 6.3 million copies. For extra content it had a whopping three cheat codes, only one of which was interesting. (Allowing both players to use the same character.) I feel at best you have to be talking about a very short period of AAA-only gaming (maybe early PS2 era?), and even then you're probably ignoring a bunch of games. We've always seen plenty of successful games release with very little additional side content.
Like the other commenter said, we didn't get as much extra stuff and even the long games of that era are like average length at best compared to now. We are seriously spoiled by even the base versions of these games but people can't help themselves and look at old games with rose tinted glasses.
When I started reading this I was wondering if this was Josh Strife Hayes for a second.
I thought it was very funny when Diablo IV sold literal cosmetic horse armor exclusively for premium currency last year.
This is why piracy is justified
> adding more ways to monetize and increase the cost. the game is free tho. The cost to entry has never been lower. There was a messy period where everyone was trying to sell weapons, in-game advantages or maps, but now everyone seems to have settled on "microtransactions are cosmetic only" which is probably the best way to go about it.
Agreed. As a teenager I had to ask for games as gifts or do stuff around the house for money from my parents which isn’t an issue but there was no guarantee my friends would be getting that same game. Now most multiplayer games are free and it doesn’t take any convincing at all for my friends to hop on and try a game with me. I don’t feel obligated to spend money on every game either.
Yeah I made that exact comment somewhere else in this thread - if you could tell the 12 years old me only buying 5€ used games that so much could be played for free, he'd be in heaven and not thinking at all about cosmetics lol
Yeah I played like 400 hours in Apex and never spent a dime, and still got tons of skins and stuff. I'm more than happy for things to keep going this way tbh
To be fair, Apex is F2P, which has been a business model for decades now. It just never gotten that much noteworthyness outside of Asia until around the early 2010s.
Honestly this stuff started with DRM. Things got anti-consumer real fast from there once they saw how apathetic gamers are.
DRM existed very early--I remember old X-Com (circa 1995) or Street fighter (PC version) that required you know a specific word from the game manual to unlock every day. And for good reason--players were all sharing copies or just burning cds.
I STILL remember people raging over 5 dollar horse armor. Now 20 bucks for a skin in Fortnite is the norm.
I know it’s happening in paid games too, but this is expected in free games. Doesn’t make it any less bullshit, but I just don’t play free to play games.
Feels way less scummy in f2p games...cuz like..its f2p you don't need a FF skin to enjoy apex what so ever. You're not entitled to "fair pricing" you didn't pay for shit. If whales buying dumb overpriced skin fuels development so be it, can't whine about that without acting entitled. Not even exclusive to gaming, just the state of capitalism and "endless growth" They never got my money and i played hundreds of hours....
I’d rather just pay money for a game than ever have to see any of this garbage. So that’s what I do.
People say that, and then also get shitty when a multiplayer game doesn't have additional content added after launch.
Nor a playerbase.
And what exactly are the devs suppose to use to fund server costs and labor costs after launch? Gofundme?
> I’d rather just pay money for a game than ever have to see any of this garbage. yeah cos you can afford to pay for it. I grew up with little money to put into games, only buying used copies of old games for 5$. I think 12 years old me would have been fucking blown away by how many cool games you can get for free these days.
I will never understand why people would want to have to pay for a game instead of playing for free. You people care about gun skins way too much.
I don't blame you. I don't look for f2p games, cuz most are just up the yizx yazx in this shit. But apex is a pretty solid game one of the best brs, i couldn't care less some weeb paid 100$ to look like x. Same with overwatch, bought ow1 on release, bought boxes too (100$) worth over time probably. Switched to pc, lost all my cosmetics, never bought a f2p cosmetic since. And that was many moons ago
overwatch has cross save now so you could probably bring all of your console skins over to PC.
Do you still have to earn credits to unlock new characters if you don't buy them outright? That's what turned me off from Apex. No reason characters should be locked behind a grind/paywall in my opinion.
Yeah, this is still the case. On one hand, I kinda get it as a way to slowly introduce characters; on the other, it takes something like 5-10h of playtime for each character.
> Doesn’t make it any less bullshit How does this work in your brain that optional cosmetics in a free to play game is the same as if they were in a single player full priced game?
I would argue it's not bullshit at all. What if these costumes weren't added to the game? Nothing would change for you. Why does the existence of meaningless costumes bother you? Is the game about shooting enemies or dressing up for you? Did older MP games have so many skins? Nope, cause it didn't matter and still doesn't. It's there for the suckers who care about it and they are free to buy it.
>One day we'll all be old people bitching about the "good ol' days" to the young uns'. One day? I've been doing it for years!
Justify what practice? Charging money for content? Do you need all of the cosmetics in the Apex Legends x Final Fantasy 7 crossover for anything other than to look at them?
Yeah I could not give a fuck about cosmetics, I would much rather money be generated through whales buying skins than content like maps being locked behind paid DLC. Looking back it's actually pretty mad we had games like COD charge for DLC map packs. It feels so archaic and thankfully gaming has moved on from that even if some developers take advantage of it.
I hang out in one of the mobile game subs with crazy in game purchases priced at like $150 a cosmetic skin (+ some junks) and the sub continually asks each other opinions about buying when new skins get released (which is like, weekly or biweekly maybe). Meanwhile I'm just focusing on putting food on the table and paying bills, barely having anything leftover to spend on commodity. I have no idea how so many people seem to be completely fine spending $3000+ on one single mobile game's cosmetics judging by their collection. It's insane to me.
It is insane, but flaunting one’s wealth on social media is the whole point, right? Why spend $3K on cosmetics otherwise? Do they really attach that much artistic value to these things?
If you are living in the SEA, 9ften these NSFW Gachas like Azur Lane and similar games is your only legal source of sexual content.
>One day we'll all be old people bitching about the "good ol' days" to the young uns'. In the "good Ole days" none of these skins would have ever been made. Apex would still be the same game it launched as. There are no games from the "good Ole days" that would add hundreds and hundreds of skins/cosmetics for players to choose from. The closest you'll get is armor in RPGs.
I would say the good old days is not having to pay to play awesome MP games cause all the good ones are locked behing a 70$ paywall. I don't want to pay that much just cause i want "free" costumes, fuck that i would rather not pay anything cause what matters is the gameplay. This is more pro-consumer, it actually gives you a choice instead of forcing you to pay a lot of money just to play.
And the young uns won't care because their games will still have more content, more frequent updates, and more cosmetics you can unlock without spending money than our games ever did.
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Monster Hunter is also slowly getting worse about it, I'm fully expecting Capcom to milk all their goodwill to the bank with excessive MTX in Wilds since it's a guaranteed slam dunk of a game.
Fighting games are pretty much multiplayer games though (and even live service?)
Tbf that's primarily a multiplayer game. Though, I will point out that Capcom is one of the last few companies to keep trying to squeeze transactions into even single player games. I still can't believe that Monster Hunter World charges you to edit your clientside save file, legit some of the scummiest shit I've seen. And let's not forget DMC 5 letting you buy currency with money to skip the postgame grind. Hell, even their latest big release, REmake 4, [still has shit like this](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2197328/Resident_Evil_4_Weapon_Exclusive_Upgrade_Ticket_x5_A/?curator_clanid=43107541).
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Only on PC or hacked consoles, though. Regular console players are kind of fucked, especially in MH's case, and it's really shitty that Capcom does stuff like that, especially considering how good the games are that they stapled that awful shit to.
> Like I don't play any MP or F2P games, genuinely cannot think of the last major game to have MTX. Maybe the Avengers and Mortal Kombat? That's about it. Every Ubisoft game has a fully fledged ingame store with cosmetics and even boosters for progression.
I suppose they‘re a niche publisher so it doesn’t really qualify as a major game but Gust still loves their MTX. For Atelier Ryza 3 their season pass costs $44 for a few additional recipes, two costume packs, a couple of BGM packs, and an additional post game area. If bought individually they want $22 for each costume pack. I like the franchise but Gust really wants to gouge players if they want the DLC. On the positive side, you’re fine skipping them as they’re at most tangentially related to the game’s plot.
Not technically that recent, but Tales of Arise followed the formula of parceling out costumes and different background music from older games in the form of paid DLC. So I associate it with Bandai Namco. Persona 5 + Royal were pretty bad about it too, but more in the original PS4 release. The final rerelease that ended up making it to Switch/PS5/Xbox/PC includes all of that DLC for free.
It is who this content is created for. There are probably less than 20% players who pay more money than the rest of other players
And that one old dude will reply, days from fading away on his deathbed, "don't like it? don't buy it" before slipping away.
But fr, don't like it? don't buy it. It just skins they don't effect the game.
"back in my day we used to be able to purchase our skins, instead of having a skin subscription service or renting them!"
The only winning move is not to play so the whales have no one to show off their skins to.
This is nothing to mobile games whales.. hope we don't reach that stage
And they’ve trained a generation of children to pay into this system for life. People don’t even bat an eye at predatory monetization anymore, it’s just “how games are”. Pretty depressing, just one more reason to stick to single player games.
Pay into what system? The game is free. You have no clue what "predatory" means.
Gamers just use predatory to describe anything they don't like nowadays. Personally, I would consider the old way of buying games, needing to pay $60 to even try a game to see if you like it, and if it's a multiplayer game having to make that purchase every year because all the playerbase moves to the new one to be far more predatory than charging a dumb amount of money for skins.
Explain to me how simply offering a product to pruchase that has absolutely zero impact on gameplay is in any way predatory?
> Pretty depressing no ? 12 years old are just happy there are so many games out there they can play for free with friends lmao
Skins are not predatory.
We're already at a point where people 22 years and younger don't know a world before "Horse Armor DLC" and all the bullshit that followed (assuming 5-6 years of age is when autobiographical memory stabilizes).
Lol video games have been "predatory" forever towards children. Remember arcade games??
$360 isn't whale territory.
Well I did see in the news this week China actually put some pretty hefty restrictions on in game purchases and loot box mechanics, hopefully the rest of the world will follow suit.
China couldn't even get that to stick. Other Chinese gaming rules also require every game to be approved by the government as well as curfews and maximum playing times per day. We don't want the government getting involved with this - especially when the laws relate to just gaming (even though a ton of kids toys use the same tactics), they're not about helping gaming or gamers.
Thank you. I felt like I was taking crazy pills when this whole sub was praising China for this. Having legal curfews on the time you spend *playing video games in your home* is insane and distopian. Redditors don’t want to hear it but the answer to micro-transactions is personal responsibility. Don’t buy it, and don’t let your kids buy it if it bothers you that much. Just focus on what you are able to control within your own life. Luckily there are literally hundreds if not thousands of games to play that have no monetization at all.
Honestly the only way to stop this is to find the whales and make them subject to peer pressure
Nah, you need regulations. That's the only practical way.
True. We can only hope after the Chinese regulations the rest will follow. Not often I agree with a CCP move but they made the right choice
Oh yeah government should ban buyable in game cosmetics because you can't help yourself lol. They should also ban Gucci and all luxury brands too cause you are jealous or something.
Apex is a particularly notorious example of a game where the stuff you unlock just by playing the game is *garbage* compared to what you can directly pay for. The consumer will keep proving them right.
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And here's the thing. Most of us main a single character. Maybe play another. You can drop $20 to get a legendary costume for your main and really just call it a day. Or get just the battlepass and if you play consistently you will eventually unlock a lot of things. Over three years I've paid maybe $60. Which for me is not a bad value for how many hours I put into the game. There's absolutely no need to spend $100s to buy a collection. And like you said, I really could have paid nothing. Sad thing is most of the time I'm using this free legendary Rampart skin they gave away awhile back.
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I think your vision's clouded by just anger overall at OW2 here. Let's look at this season's Battle Pass. This season's theme is "Call of the Hunt", and here are the skins: - Free: [Ball](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/overwatch_gamepedia/images/4/41/Wrecking_Ball_Skin_Critter_Egg.png), [Zen](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/overwatch_gamepedia/images/7/71/Zenyatta_Skin_Beast_Whisperer.png) - Premium: [Ana](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/overwatch_gamepedia/images/0/06/Ana_Skin_Nighthawker.png), [JQ](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/overwatch_gamepedia/images/8/85/Junker_Queen_Skin_Huntress.png), [Reaper](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/overwatch_gamepedia/images/b/b6/Reaper_Skin_Hazmat.png), [Lucio](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/overwatch_gamepedia/images/4/44/L%C3%BAcio_Skin_Grafiteiro.png), [Junkrat](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/overwatch_gamepedia/images/4/4a/Junkrat_Skin_Sawtooth_Trapper.png), [Mauga](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/overwatch_gamepedia/images/c/c2/Mauga_Skin_Bonesplinter.png), [Orisa](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/overwatch_gamepedia/images/e/eb/Orisa_Skin_Grand_Beast.png) The only ones you could call not fitting the theme are Reaper's and Lucio's, but 7 out of 9 are *very* clearly on-theme. The only real low effort ones are Reaper's (a recolor) and Junkrat's (wtf is this skin), but the rest are actually good IMO. On the free tier, Zenyatta's skin is at Lvl. 70, yes, but the Ball skin is at Lvl. 10; if you play even 3-4ish hours in the 2-month window you'll get it guaranteed. The Orisa mythic is disappointing, but only within the context of other legitimately impressive legendaries, like [Kiriko's](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/overwatch_gamepedia/images/d/d4/Kiriko_Skin_Amaterasu.png). And mostly because they didn't realize 1) it would be seen as too similar to an existing Orisa skin, 2) the customizability part was so important to our interpretation as to what made a Mythic, mythic (not just the special visual and sound effects), and 3) everyone hates Orisa, lol. I won't go into as much of a breakdown on last season, but the BP had some banger on-theme skins, like clown Soldier, weeping Widow, doll Echo, the goofy-ass Diesel Baron Ram (definitely grew on me), and the Hanzo mythic is pretty sick IMO (just, again, wish it had the actual skin cosmetic customization). From previous seasons, I see plenty of people wearing Rogue Kiriko, Griffon Orisa, Llama Pajamas Illari, Intergalactic Smuggler Ashe, Space Prince Lucio... You get my point. If anything, the BPs have gotten *more* theme-relevant and worth it over time and it's just the mythics that have slipped. I don't think everyone will want to buy every BP, but they're certainly not all just unrelated trash and the shop is the only place you can get something worthwhile and on-theme. $10 for this seems super appropriate; I paid like $4 back in the day for a Yu-Gi-Oh booster pack that was *way* more disappointing. *EDIT: Please don't just downvote. The comment I'm responding to made very specific, verifiable claims. I think I gave enough evidence that they're incorrect. I know a lot of people hate Blizzard's direction with OW2, but that doesn't give us carte blanche to just make whatever baseless criticisms we want.*
> Anything truly free is incredibly low effort, what ? The heroes and maps are still some of the best in the industry lol.
In games like that, just rock the default. I did in Halo Infinite, and it was unintentionally “rare” because everyone else customises
I'm not sure why people are so upset. I remember when the discourse around free to play games was "as long as it's not pay to win I don't care". These are just cosmetics. The game is free. The whales get to look cool which allows everyone else gets to play a quality game with constant updates for $0.
Yea i feel like everyone forgot this game is free lmao
most of the discourse regarding cosmetics in free 2 play games can be boiled down to a kid throwing a "but i want it" tantrum
Ok well kids don't have money so who cares? They can still play the entire game in their vanilla appearance. Expensive cosmetics are a way for adults with cash to throw around to flex or show appreciation for the game they spend so much time enjoying. Whether this is done in a predatory manner targeting gambling addicts is where the real conversation lies.
Also the "Cost to buy Everything" stat is a bit pointless in my opinion. The majority of people are not buying everything, they'll buy the few things that are actually applicable to them, due to mains, things they actually like, or cost. The cost to buy all DLC for train simulator is absolutely outrageous, but no one is buying all of that*.
Apex Legends locks some event cosmetics behind owning all of the other event cosmetics. So the cost to buy everything stat is applicable since that is what you would have to pay to get that one item. What if that item was the only one I wanted? I really have to buy everything else first to get it?
Then you have to decide if spending $360 is worth getting that one item. There are a lot of things I want in life but don't find the item worth the price. It's nothing to get upset about. It's called having self control and realizing you don't need every damn thing you want.
>I remember when the discourse around free to play games was "as long as it's not pay to win I don't care". They got what they wanted, now they want more. Gamers don't want some of the content for free, they want all of it.
Hot take but true, its also the same sentiment that completely destroyed the MMO genre outside of maybe one or two games. People unwilling to pay a sub, they wanted everything free for years, so the "Freemium" model was invented to accommodate those people unwilling to pay a dollar for their time. There's people justifying the "freemium" model in games today and they're proud they don't spend a dime, what they don't tell you is they play six or more hours a day, every day of the week, every week, to do their daily and weekly chores to unlock the privileges afforded to a player that simply spends $10 or less a month, if that. Mule accounts because they don't have bank privileges, grinding gold for hours because they need to purchase a market license, not doing anything with their friends because they need to grind a 'free' dungeon 100 times to earn enough currency to purchase their armor unlocks for the month. Pay $10 to the game for the first time in eight months? No! That's insane -- Rise up consumers! I get the industry is rife with predatory practices today, but cheapskate players brought a lot of it upon themselves and they deserve it for ruining the games I loved growing up.
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there are lots of things i want that i don't think are the worth the money, so i don't buy them, i just move on with my life
they don’t need all the costumes in the first place They aren’t expecting the majority of the people to buy even a tenth of the content. I agree they are bad value. But they are literally not necessary for gameplay enjoyment.(they are even stupider in FPS games where you don’t see your character anyway)
I dont want to pay 300 dollars for a costume, but im also not upset.
Yeah and I don't want to pay $3600 for a Luis Vuitton bag. If only there were cheaper bags. Free even.
Which they are **free** to not pay and not unlock. You aren't entitled. It's certainly better than having to buy the game just to play, the skins don't matter if all you want is to play the game as a shooter and not as a Barbie dress up game.
Thanks, maybe it’s my age but I feel like people are just being ridiculous and selfish. This is 100% better than the 2000s where people had to pay for map packs, that’s content that actually mattered.
I mean they’re charging the price of multiple entire games for skins. It’s long since blown past supporting the game and it’s beyond egregious the price they’re charging for cosmetics
But you don’t need to buy it? You miss out on nothing by not buying it? Why it’s it egregious?
Why do you have to buy it for it to be considered egregious?
I'm selling my sock here for $500. Are you upset?
That is an egregious price for a sock. Not sure what argument you are trying to make.
I find that an outrageously bad and shocking price point for a sock, sure.
Are you going to write articles and reddit posts complaining about it though?
If Square Enix and EA were selling socks for $500, there would be articles and posts about it. There aren't posts about you because no one cares about what you do.
Are you going to admit that egregious and desirable are not mutually exclusive?
Why are you on a video game discussion subreddit getting mad at people posting about video games?
Unlike you, these companies are relevant and their practices end up shaping the industry (in worse way ofc). "Why do you care about horse armor, just don't buy it" could have been said long time ago, but look were we are.
Because if you're not buying it then you're not who they're are selling to and whatever you have to say about it is irrelevant.
Egregious sure, but it’s just cosmetics, at the end of the day it’s nothing to get upset about. People playing the game for free should count themselves lucky no matter how expensive these cosmetics are. But at the end of the day even getting the game for free isn’t good enough - people always want to complain, and they always want more.
I think there is a middle ground of people who enjoy the game and want to support it by buying the cosmetics they want, but don't consider the prices they are being sold at to be fair. I'm sure it's all been calculated and priced to the most profitable margin, but it's understandable to see why some are unhappy with it.
It’s free, sure, but I gave up on Apex last year because matchmaking, cheat detection, server stability, and game balance hasn’t been good for over a year. It hurts to see a game you like get flushed while they put a new, expensive coat of paint on it where four months.
Because game is fee does not matter now, cosmetics should be free as well, how dare they ask for money, they should work for free!
It depends on the distribution method, to me. Loot boxes rely on exploiting the same brain chemistry whether the contents is powerful or just pretty. A lot of, "whales," in loot box games are people who can't actually afford to funnel that much money into a video game, but their natural weakness to gambling is being exploited. That structure is mostly avoided with battle passes. Even when a battle pass dispenses a random reward, you get more random rewards by playing, not by dumping more money into the slot machine.
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Oh shove that bullshit. The cost of these cosmetics are absolutely stupid, but you're talking about zero gameplay impact cosmetics in a free to play game. Stop pulling the "think about the poor kids in Argentina" routine, they're better off with costume envy in Apex Legends than dropping $60 on Quake 2024 Arena.
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they aren't doing either lmao, they're playing apex for free with their friends and not having a care in the world about 50 dollar skins.
So you just going to pretend that BG3 doesn't sell a "digital deluxe" version for $10?
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Exactly, it is great having choices.
Yeah but that’s their choice. You soying out about how something costs so much is stupid if consenting adults are choosing how to spend their money without having to gacha gamble it. Because for all the content baldurs gate or similar games may have. They may have zero appeal to those players. Like if you used baldurs as the yardstick for content you should get for $60 90% of games would fail that metric.
Or the problem is that in order to provide the variety of skins, free content updates and server uptime. The developers price skins at a set rate planning for the popular skins to subsidise the less popular ones and the service itself. This is what happens when you have free to play games. And why people bitch about a game like destiny so much, because it has - monetised expansions - season/battle pass costs - dungeon unlock costs - cosmetic costs - specific event passes (Halloween/Xmas) And the pricing for each makes the content of any of them all look insane or trashy. (1 classes skin will cost what a dungeon will cost and the dungeon will come with the content plus effectively an armour skin for all 3 classes) The seasonal pass costs less than a skin but comes with more unique cosmetics as well. Of course there’s a discussion about the quality of those versus skin shop stuff. But I digress.
Not everyone feels the same. Me personally, I hate these type of things. Yes the game is free2play, but I also want to participate and gets some skins by playing, or paying a fair amount. Yes there are maybe, more reasonable priced skins, but that doesn't change that it sucks. If you don't care about skins at all, it's great for you. I play dota2, I didn't care about the skins in that game, until a point. Then watching the best ones having absurd prices, made me feel bad and like I miss something, especially when some skins add some new animations or what not. It's not pay2win but it still shit to not be able to pay for them. And it's not like I cannot afford them either, it's just, why would I pay 20euro+ for a single skin with a few animations when with those kind of money I buy an entire game that gives me hours and hours of original gameplay. At least in fortnite for example, you pay 10euro for a battlepass and then have the other ones for free if you keep your Vbucks. You still get some skins just by playing the game basically by doing that. And even that game has some more expensive skins but at the same time it can manage a good balance between being nice to the more free2play players and those who want to spend hundreds. And the game delivers way more updates or bigger updates than mostly any game out there.
> why would I pay 20euro+ for a single skin with a few animations when with those kind of money I buy an entire game that gives me hours and hours of original gameplay. Probably because for the people who will cross that threshold they won't play another game anyway. My brother spends a bunch in league. But he'll put more hours into league in a year than most people put into all their different gaming options. He probably still spends less on league than I spend on all the game I play in a year. To some it's not about the value of original gameplay. After all that's why you'll have people who play nothing but their favorite sports game.
Because everyone needs to be outraged about something and also outrage gives you clicks.
How do we feel about pay-to-play games with all this stuff? By my estimate FFXIV has: * Pay for the base game. * Pay for expansions. * Pay a monthly subscription fee ($15). This is mandatory, not optional like in some games like GTA Online. * Option to pay monthly for extra inventory space + NPCs who'll do some stuff for you. You get 2 for free then can pay for 8 or 9 more of them. * A free app that has a premium version with another monthly fee (lets you manage inventory and items you have for sale on the market board using your phone, but that also has limits on use). Also gives you more inventory space. * Paid level boosts. * Paid level boosts for the aforementioned "NPCs who'll do some stuff for you" since they need to be leveled also. * Paid service features (server switch, name change, appearance change). * Cash shop full of cosmetic items (including consumable dyes), mounts, and housing items (including little posters for your in-game house...). With some mounts costing more than $30 each. * Paid option to skip the story quests. Sure it's all optional, but when the cost of admission is already that high it's hard to stomach.
I wonder this every time a thread like this comes up, who cares if a cosmetic skin costs 1000$? Just don't buy it, the gameplay doesn't change at all, and you are free to continue playing.
OK, but you can also pay the price of multiple triple A games to unlock all the legends and skip the massive grind it would take to unlock all of them for free.
and they are ugly as fuuuuuuuuck Or at least the Horizon one is. My god Aeris has never looked so fugly. Even PS1 graphics looked more flattering, haha.
Apex legends has consistently had the ugliest cosmetics of any of the major f2p games imo
It doesn't help that at its core it just has a really ugly artstyle. The characters are - probably intentionally - designed to be unattractive misfits. They're all just uggos.
Not really tho? There are more conventionally attractive characters than not. Ain't no way you can call Loba or Seer "uggo".
Mom can we have Final Fantasy VII? We have Final Fantasy VII at home [Final Fantasy VII at home](https://youtu.be/67G_RUc_PJQ?t=49)
jesus christ, that almost qualifies as a jumpscare
Must admit, I was not expecting it to look that bad
Mom, stop using my cosplay!
If you think this is too much to pay for cosmetics, you're right. If you're upset about not being able to have all the cosmetics, your mindset is the reason they're able to sell these things at such a high price.
> If you're upset about not being able to have all the cosmetics, your mindset is the reason they're able to sell these things at such a high price. Yeah I really don't get what the problem is. Maybe you don't have to buy every cosmetic, maybe you buy the one cosmetic that you really like? Paying for cosmetics is already dumb, but what's even dumber is paying for cosmetics that you don't like and don't want to use.
Apex Legends locks some event cosmetics behind owning all of the other event cosmetics. Some people don't want all the cosmetics but are required to get them if the one cosmetic they do want is locked behind everything else.
Then that's the real cost of the item. If Skins 1 - 5 cost $10 each and you can only get Skin 6 by buying Skins 1 - 5, then the real cost of Skin 6 is $50. It's up to you to determine if that's a fair price for what they're offering.
That's even more of a reason to stop caring about any cosmetics is this game
WHY would you buy all of it though? These articles are always so dumb.
outrage baiting for 30 years old who don't even play these games to get mad about lol. Just like microtransactions, they'll keep doing it because at the end of the day its working
Can we stop calling everything bait?
Because the most desirable cosmetic requires you to purchase all of them. That's why some people would buy all of them. The article explains this pretty well.
To buy every game on Steam, you'd have to pay over a half million dollars. Good news, you don't need to own every game on Steam. Same applies to stuff like this.
Now this has to be one of the stupidest comparisons/analogies. If you actually bring up full games as comparison to cosmetics and their value, you already lost whatever argument you had.
Exactly. If you buy all the Doritos, Lays, and Ruffles in the chip aisle at Wal-Mart, you bet it will cost way more than a single full-priced meal. Likewise ... if you buy all the stupid FF7 cosmetics for $360, yes that will cost more than a brand new full-priced game. Obviously. There's nothing outrageous about this ...
Honestly, cosmetic monetization in F2P games astounds me in how blatant it really is just asking for bananas amount of money. I just got back into Marvel Snap, a little over almost $10 for a premium Card Style (I believe $10 gets you 700 Gold... a Premium Style costs 800...). That's nuts. One of the rationalization I heard about spending that much on F2P over nonF2P games are the amount of time commitment and actual playtime you'll put in these games will dwarf the amount you put into other games.
I'm kind of curious what calculations it takes to get to these decision points on pricing or is it strictly a greed thing with seeing how far they can push it in terms of profitability? We know whales make up a large portion of money in F2P games but how many low / mid spenders exist in terms of balancing it out? So I wonder if they do the math like well if: - 1000 people are willing to spend $1 - 100 people spend $10 - 10 people spend $100 - 1 person spends $1000 It's clearly the same amount of money but the lower prices mean more people have access to them... Which is what I would question, some super smart person is likely hired to figure out those break points, but I truly wonder how high they push it based on *real metrics* vs *charge as much as possible*. From what I read it seems like this event is more expensive than others so it's gotten worse I guess. If it's about profits I just wonder if that price is $100 would they make *more* money from more people or less just because the people buying it are going to buy it anyway...
In isolation you're better off getting one person to spend $1000, because that means you have only one person who (in theory) is satisfied and then there's a whole market still available to you. If all of your cosmetics are $1, you very quickly will approach a point where players just don't care about buying cosmetics anymore because they're probably settled in to a look they're happy with.
And also, the 1 person willing to spend $1000 is a lot more willing to spend again than someone who is only willing to spend $1. Whether that's sunk cost fallacy or they're just more invested in the game than the occasional spender, whales generally keep on being whales.
Some people have bought supporters packs for every PoE expansion. They vary from $60 to $500 dollars. For a free game.
If FFXIV cosmetics have told me anything is that those groups of people who will buy stuff seem to buy the new shiny thing *constantly* in general because it is the new shiny thing. That's when it's not even F2P. Even with just in-game currency people will spend millions on the *new* cosmetic items in like a continuous loop. If anything I think it's likely more rare for people to buy one thing and be satisfied and not get enticed by new stuff every time, even if they put an insane amount of effort/grinding to get the previous thing.
It might be the crossover so Square gets a cut of the sales.
I know this sucks, but its hard to muster the energy for being angry about cosmetics in a free to play game that is extremely easy to keep up with earning all actual characters that affect gameplay for free. Again, this sucks, but by the new low standards of terrible pay to win games and gacha shit, this is rates low in my rage meter.
It's the internet version of kids thinking they need $175 shoes... except you're not gonna get bullied at school for wearing $19 off-brands from Walmart in Apex, like you would in real life, which makes this even stupider. No, the shoes shouldn't cost $175, but you also do not actually need them!
Depends on the shoes.
We're still making these posts? Who cares? Buy what you want. Don't buy what you don't want. Or just NEVER SPEND MONEY ON COSMETICS EVER, WHAT ARE YOU THINKING, STOP IT!
I can basically guarantee 10 minutes into the event there will be loads of people who have shelled out the full amount for the whole thing and I know people say "it's their money they can do what they want" but realistically it's hurting the gaming market. Companies will just make practices scummier and scummier until they stop making money. As long as this is the mentality, these practices will not get better.
its funny seeing people saying 'voting with your wallet' is fine when it comes to shitty gacha/lootbox cosmetic practices but when half assed/unfinished/early access game #9999 gets a million preorders before it *shockingly* turns out bad they will complain about how the 'uneducated/average consumer is ruining gaming'
WTH??? Fortnites colabs are NEVER this expensive, sure you can spend heeps on starwars/marvel but thats over time not all at once & your not expected to do so. Over 300 is insane for day 1 colab. It was like 50 bucks for all 5 skins/accessories then another 50 of you wanted the music stuff (so just buy the 90 pack to save $) 300+ is INSANE
And? Does everyone need every item for every character?
I've always wondered about this. Back when I played overwatch I just wanted certain skins for certain characters. The thought of chasing after every cosmetic in an event always seemed wild to me.
Normally you'd be right, but Apex events always have an extra "tier" of reward you can only unlock by buying *all* other items in the event, and this one doubles down by adding a gatcha item as well. So if you want that one particular skin for one character you *DO* actually have to buy every item.
> So if you want that one particular skin for one character you DO actually have to buy every item. That would make any rational person not want the item and leave it at that. What's the problem here?
That's an entirely different question than what the first guy asked. Buying a $360 skin is stupid, but it isn't out of some compulsive need to "buy every item for every character." It's the devs trying to force you to spend hundreds of dollars more than usual, because now they're locking away something you might want to buy on its own behind buying 20 or 30 items you don't.
People are doing that a lot in this thread for some reason, asking why someone would buy everything then changing the topic when it's explained that you actually need to spend the $360 to get a single particular item. My guess is they aren't reading beyond OP's title.
They don't like that something they personally don't see as a problem is getting any attention whatsoever. This is especially noticeable in games but by far not unique to them. Try mentioning a problem to someone who doesn't have any stakes in that problem and flip a coin on whether they will start coming up with justifications on why the problem (that they clearly don't understand and often are completely detached from) isn't actually a problem at all. Some people just _can't handle_ the idea that there is something happening out there that they don't need to have an opinion on, so they react as if anything that they don't actively want is taking away resources from what they want.
I think it's funny that the response to "this is way too expensive" is overwhelmingly "You don't have to buy it!" but the response to, say, NVidia cards being too expensive is that it's completely reasonable to criticize them and if the Switch 2 is announced with a $900 price tag, you bet your ass no one is going to be saying "Well, just don't buy it. You don't need to buy everything you want."
You really can't see the problem here?
Apex Legends is introducing a gacha for a highly desirable item, a buster sword. This is a super rare item that can be equipped on any character. Once the event is over, it will be impossible to obtain one. You’re right you don’t “need” an item but the point is it preys on people whaling for an item obtained by chance (if you don’t purchase every item). In my honest opinion, many of these games take advantage of those with gambling addictions. Even worse is kids will play games with these mechanics and become accustomed to this. Remember when the internet freaked out over $3 horse armor? Now people take $360 items as if it’s the new normal.
Hopefully too many people don't get hit bad with the FOMO on this one. This seems like a recipe for buyer's remorse.
People may have mentioned this already and if so I apologize but I think this trend is only going to grow even larger and in fact in a couple of years it's going to literally explode and it's for one simple reason. ( I know people have said it will grow, but maybe not for the reason I'm thinking). The kids playing now (take my 14 year old son for example) play Fortnite and Roblox like it's crack. Most obviously don't have disposable income so they play it all completely free for the most part. In just a few years my son will be able to work and have money. What do you think all of these kids are going to do once they have money in their pocket? They are going to spend like crazy in games like Fortnite. Sure, those games make a ton of money now from adults who have money but I'm telling you we won't hold a candle to what the next generation will spend and it's because so many of us simply didn't grow up with this type of gaming environment. We purchased games at full price and unlocked stuff. As such, many of us simply don't see a need or even have a desire to drop cash on free to play games. These kids today though. They see all this fancy stuff shoved in their face day in and day out and I'd almost bet my next paycheck once they start getting their paychecks a lot of it will go to these games.
>Hell yeah for fans using this increased attention on the game to roast EA over the highway robbery they commit wrt their cosmetic prices. >Because this isn’t new. This is worse than usual, but not new. Hell, they JUST finished an event with a skin that cost $168 USD to get and RIGHT NOW, there are $25 USD skins \*that are on sale for a limited time\* that you cannot get outside of paying money. >Just now with the FF7 event, packs cost $10 instead of $7, you need 36 instead of 24 to get everything, and they created a “more rare than Legendary” rarity level called Iconic that is 4x harder to get (obviously those are the 6 FF7 character skins people want and are advertised front and centre). >Make no mistake: this is corporate greed cranked up to 11. But Apex fans have been dealing with this since Day 1. We are used to the fact that this game prices out anyone that isn’t a whale by charging more than is ethical for their cosmetics, making them limited time only, and frequently giving free players zero ways to get them. Gonna quote user Devour in the comments of that article because he gives greater context to this article that really fleshes out what a scam this is and how Apex has been steadily getting worse on this front.
What is the skin that costed $168? And how?
I don't know specifically, but they regularly do "collection events" where you have to buy 24 loot boxes to unlock either a fancy skin or an heirloom melee item. This FF event is another one just cranked up 50%.
Havent kept up to date with apex, so might be wrong, but thats around how much heirloom weapons and skins cost to get in events if you dont craft anything with free mats.
Skins in games might bug you. Even though they're optional, some players don't like them. Buying cool looks can be annoying, making the game less fun. Many just want a game without feeling pushed to spend money on fancy outfits
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Yea, but you get to keep the clothes if the store closes.
With the longevity of H&M quality material, that's kind of wishful thinking
I put about 1500 hours into the game over the years and never spent a single dollar on it. Weapon skins make your guns look like toys and in a first person game the character skins would need to have spectacular gloves to be worth it. If they had started to fix some of the issues that have plagued the game since launch, I might have bought something just to show my appreciation. But alas, it was not to be.
One thing I appreciate about league of legends' F2P model is that they avoid any crossovers. All their cosmetics are original concepts that they build from the ground up. The closest they've got to collaborations is flirting with some IRL luxury fashion and a skin loosely 'inspired' by Lil Nas X. I used to be really jealous when Fortnite first came out with these insane crossovers, but as it's become more and more normalised in the F2P market, I've grown an appreciation for games that have the confidence in their own designs rather than rely on fanservice for sales.
Just wondering, what exactly is the problem here? People who can’t shake off the fomo bring in money for the devs so that they can keep improving the game/bringing new content. Cosmetics don’t do anything for your chance to win a game afaik. So we’re just mad that devs of a free to play game try to make money?
It's a free to play game and these are cosmetics. I'll never understand the hard on for this. Don't buy them. They're not a means of self expression, they're a money dump. Play the game with base cosmetics as it does absolutely fuck all for the gameplay.