Microtransactions sound innocent. Small exchanges — like candy that you’d give a child when you want to stop them from asking questions that you can’t answer. Like buying tomato seeds from the pop-up shop in Farmville with the digital Farmville currency.
When you upgrade to new weapons and armour in Assassins’ Creed, paying for them in ancient Roman coins after some stealthy looting. When you pay for that haircut in GTA that gives you more hair. Microtransactions have always been around in videogames, giving you a sense of realism through its weird virtual economy.
But suddenly they’ve gone too far — you now need to play 10 hours or acquire 15,000 in-game credits to unlock Darth Vader. “The new `6000 Star Wars Battlefront game without Darth Vader?”, you ask, “Unbelievable”, you say. I mean, you don’t get a Star Wars game to play as Jabba or an ewok — you want to be the greatest Sith Lord.
The anger against microtransactions was just bubbling to the surface when “Middle Earth: Shadow of War” released, with multiple criticisms by gamers on that count. But it was forgiven, LotR fans are a unique variety who are satisfied with Orc bashing and a good Nemesis system.
Things went out of hand last week as EA failed to rationalise the indiscriminate in-game costs in Star Wars Battlefront (check the most down-voted comment in Reddit history). The reaction was such that EA turned off all in-game purchases temporarily. Fellow gamers, this is but a small victory in the war against microtransactions. Too long have I stood (almost 200 hours) playing the Windows 10 Solitaire which urges me to upgrade to premium every 5 minutes.
The disease is spreading to mobile games too! This is unwarranted punishment to those who pay for the full versions of videogames, and don’t even skip ads. It’s like they are testing us, pushing us to go to the dark side of piracy with thesehigh markups. But the internet Force needs to be used for good. Big franchises could learn from indie developers who bring in more than just loot boxes with “a sense of pride and accomplishment”
Anusha Ganapathi
Twitter @quaffle_waffle
(This economics graduate spends her leisure time preparing for the zombie apocalypse)