Question Of The Week [July 17th 2024]

Microtransactions are the new bane of gaming, along with things like NFTs, Free to play, and Pay to win gaming. In the booming bleeding edge of 2006 we started seeing the Xbox 360’s Xbox Live Marketplace take shape and along with that came Downloadable Content, or better abbreviated as “DLC”. With fresh injection of DLC it could revitalize an older game with new levels, characters, weapons and other items and make the game seem new and exciting. But that DLC started to get shifted into a cheaper option to make it more enticing, yet seem odd somehow. Instead of buying a full expansion pack for $10 and be done with it. You now were getting 50 different options of items, weapons, levels and palette swaps for characters all at $0.99. But those “micro-transactions” were also making you shell out more money by thinking you are spending less, which allows your brain to think you are spending less than you really are.

It’s a classic retail move that tricks your brain by playing with numbers in a way that makes you think it is cheaper than it really is.

So, as time rolled on, Micro-Transactions became this crazy side hustle of the gaming industry to piece-meal gaming content out and make the player shell out more money for a more complete experience. Instead of spending $60 and having everything, you were spending $60 for the base game, and $10 for the first DLC, and then 15 different $0.99 charges for skins that would normally be just unlocked as you played through the game.

So is there anything that can be done to fix this? I think there is. Put a cap on the price. Let me explain what I mean.

Take a game that would have DLC, like let’s say Peggle. Peggle could be a free game or a paid game right? It could charge you $15 for the game up front, or let you play a handicapped version of it for free. If you decide to engage with the micro-transactions it could string you along and nickel and dime you until you reached the actual price you would have paid for the app in the first place. But with the way business goes, that wouldn’t be very appealing, so a compromise would be to let that go a bit further, to let's say getting all the DLC/Microtransactions would cost up to $25 dollars. So because you didn’t pay upfront, you ended up paying more in the long run.

Again, it’s not something I’d personally want, as I already do like just owning the game up front and not ever having to worry about paying more later on down the line. But, it is a compromise of letting the player not pay up front, and also choosing what and when they buy things. And it allows the business to get more for items that might be very easy to produce and make, and then charge more and get more income on the backend of the sale of the game, and in the long run.

The key thing is that it’s capped at some point. Where there is no dangling carrot on a stick, stringing along the player in perpetuity. No “whale” mechanics. Where you let players just continually be nickeled and dimed to the point where they can eventually end up spending hundreds, if not thousands on a free to play game and waste so much money and their lives on frivolous in-game single use digital items. That’s the bigger issue. So in the end, yes, Microtransactions suck. Yes they should be abolished all together, but that’s just not going to happen. Instead, let’s think of a way to make it both appealing for the customer and the business, and having the system tweaked to not only be more fair, but also honorable… I think that’s the golden ticket right there.