Microtransactions

If you somewhat pay attention to the drama world of Gaming Industry, you certainly have heard about the whole EA Star Wars: Battlefront 2 fiasco with greedy mechanics. I felt like sharing my opinion about the situation. Not just EA but microtransactions in general.

How it started.

The microtransaction problem has been around for quite a while now and it has been so because it was kept under the radar for a while. As far as I can remember, it was always present in browser games and MMORPG's. "Bloodcrystals", "gold coins" and all that stuff that could be used in the black market. Some of these games were free and really popular, but there was a much smaller gaming community too. Could these be considered Pay To Win? Maybe.
I might be wrong, but the first big popular microtransaction service started off with Dota2 and League of Legends when these rose to popularity. And it was fine because it was merely cosmetic purchases.
Then, mobile games like Clash of Clans introduced the same concept but with an unfair advantage to it: "Buy more resources", "Pay X money to get more lives", same thing with facebook games. No one really cared since they were just free casual games in not so popular gaming platforms. Again, could these be Pay To Win? A slightly stronger "maybe".

It was always ignored because "we are just supporting the creators", "you know what you're paying for" and "you don't have to buy it if you don't want to". And I 100% agree with all these statements, microtransactions are "fine" if they are kept safe. The word "fine" in quotes because there's still a lot of debate in the unfair advantages of some.

And then came the gambling.

Gambling Mechanics.

Again, correct me if I'm wrong but, the first big "gambling system" was introduced by CS:GO. From top to bottom, it was all a big gamble. You would pay a certain ammount and spin a slot machine-like mechanism that could give you a normal cheap skin that costed three cents, OR A SUPER MEGA RARE SKIN THAT WOULD GIVE YOU HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS. ... Moving on,

Again, it was all fine because they were just cosmetics, you weren't paying for advantages and you didn't have to buy it if you didn't want to.
Was it fine, though?
There are more than just a few stories of addiction to this gambling system, and became worse and worse when gambling websites came along, "Bet on what team is gonna win", "Flip a coin and win all of your opponents weapon skins", "Compete against several people in a roullete system to win their skins".

Do I even need to talk about PhantomL0rd?

You get the idea.

True endings hidden behind money and paid mods.

Now, they really messed up the "staying under the radar" part when it got to the DLC's. That's when people started to get mad. You would pay $30-$60 for a game but its' true ending would be revealed in a 20$ DLC? Come again? How is that fair?
Recently, Shadow of War got a lot of hate because of how unfair it was to grind to its' true ending and how it was an obvious scam to make you buy their loot boxes that COULD contain a better item to help you grind. Could this be considered Pay to Win? Do I even need to answer?
But the DLC problem started way before that, don't get me wrong.

Oohoohooh, should I even talk about Bethesda???? How they messed up move after move after move, and the Creation Club really did it for the community. That was not acceptable. There have been free mods for their games ever since anyone can remember, and all of sudden they introduce "unique" mods that you have to pay for? With "unique" do you mean mods that are out there for free already? Nice one.
Now now, I've always loved Bethesda and I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt because they announced that they were bringing bigger content to the CC. Not DLC sized, but bigger. So I'll give them another chance.

EA and Battlefront 2.

And then EA announced Battlefront 2.
The hype around this game was overwhelming. It looked like they finally did it: a really good star wars game. The campaign is there, the flying mechanics are there, a good-ish multiplayer is there, it even has classes!
Everyone was itching to get their hands on this game!

But that was before loot boxes were announced.

Everyone got a little skeptical once a loot box system was announced to the game. But they tried to soften it by turning it into a simple card system that could also be crafted and that it would properly adjusted to your rank and level. The issue was obvious here: unless rank 50's only played against rank 50's, this system would be incredebly unfair to latecomers to the game.

The community still complained about all of the weapons that could be unlocked through loot boxes, so, again, they adjusted it. "Now they're acquirable through playing. Play with class X to get their weapons at a milestone"... wasn't this obvious from the beginning?... Stay with me.

Now there was another issue. In the game, there's the "Hero" class. Characters like Yoda, Darth Vader, Rey, Darth Maul, etç. are a part of this class. Obviously, the strongest class in the game that you can unlock through grinding or paying for them. Other pieces of content had the same system to be unlocked. The issue is: someone made the math and it would take roughly 4500 hours to unlock everything in the game... EA?? Are you sane??? So you would have to either play the game for 4000+ hours or pay $2100 to get the full content.

Now, recently, they disabled the whole microtransaction system temporarily, which is good, we got something out of all the complaining and the industry is starting to feel the backlash. But we won the battle, not the war, folks.

MrMattyPlays talked about this issue brilliantly, so, if you're interested, I highly recommend you search him out on youtube.

My point being (TL;DR):

Microtransactions ARE a problem, and I'm super glad that this is finally starting to be shown. The community is being somewhat listened to. I've never agreed to them and I don't think I ever will. Buying the game should already be enough to support the creators.

If you want more money then make a good game and then make merch for it, or something around that area, just don't mess with the game itself.

What do you guys think?

Also, on a small note, I released my first Game Demo on Newgrounds! Leave a review and let me know what you think of it: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/702511