It seems with the latest batch of released and soon to be released AAA title games everyone wants to get on board the “lets monetize as much as possible” bandwagon.
Metal Gear Solid V’s online portion plans to make money on selling “insurance” for your Mother Base which seems like a paid cheat. Though it’s for an online portion… Then I read about plans for Rise of the Tomb Raider having 300 optional microtransactions that can shape the game to the players’ liking. Since that title is debuting on XBox One we can at least glance at it from afar and see what we can expect when it does roll over to the other platforms. But still seems rather weird considering to my knowledge it’s a single player game.
I can understand Free to Play type games doing this, like TF2. Maybe even CS:GO despite the fact that it’s not an F2P. But we’re talking games that cost $59.99 and above at launch and they expect people to pay for perks? Is this going to become the norm? I imagine this being a pain for people who have an interest in a wide variety of games. Then again this might not bother people too much. People seem to have no problem buying $900 spaceships for Star Citizen. Which if you haven’t heard of it yet, hasn’t even left the alpha stage after what… 3 years? But that’s a topic for another time. And while not a game, Microsoft has jumped on the bandwagon with their app store. I still can’t wrap my head around having to pay to remove ads in Solitare. Solitare! One of those games Microsoft threw in for free to keep office workers pretending to be productive.
But yeah, I don’t mind paying for DLC, but microtransactions to change the your play style? I don’t know…
I fear this already is the norm, until they can either realize that nobody really ways microtransactions out until they think of a better way to milk the cash cow.