Yesterday I was reading my activity feed on Steam as I usually do when I’m not reading my RSS subscription to the internet, and found quite a few people complaining about Payday 2 joining the “Lets do micro transactions on top of DLC” club. I’m not entirely sure if it’s terrible or not or if it’s something like CS:GO, but if I played copious amounts of Payday 2 I imagine I’d be a little ticked off right about now, especially if you take into consideration that the developers said they would never introduce microtransactions on multiple occasions.
Developer Overkill has added microtransactions to Payday 2, after stating, on multiple occasions, that it wouldn’t. They’re part of the Black Market update, which allows players to crack open safes to claim random loot drops. You’ll need to microtransact £1.60 of real money, to buy consumable drills that will be able to bust them open.
I own the game, but haven’t invested any time into it so I really don’t have a dog in this fight. I kinda got discouraged after they kept introducing DLC after DLC after DLC etc etc, that and I hear it’s a game best played with friends, and I’m usually on at odd hours anyway. This kind of microtransaction though doesn’t sound too horrible though since it’s just cosmetics for the most part.
Now, onto Steam themselves. Despite the fiasco that took place when Skyrim had a paywall for mods, Steam wants to take another jab at it. They seem to want to take a more careful approach this time though as they really screwed up last time.
As I’ve said before I don’t mind modders being paid for their work, at the same time though you can’t do what Steam/Bethesda did the last time around and introduce a paywall on a game that has an established community. To compare buying mods and buying hats and skins from other games is like comparing an apple to Cthulhu. Yes someone took their time and passion to make something great to share with their community, but hats and skins don’t require dependencies and won’t break a game later on if there are any patches and updates, whereas with modding (especially in a game like Skyrim) you have some mods that depend on other mods to work properly, or might break your game/stopped being supported. If Valve or some other game company want their idea of helping modders to make money to become a reality then they can’t do it with an already established game community.
They need to do something new, or find a friendlier way of presenting their idea to a currently existing game.