Microtransactions

This topic has been discussed quite extensively, but I feel that it hasn't been nearly enough. Especially when I just learned, that one of my favorite franchises is getting the MTX (microtransaction) treatment.

The game I'm talking about is Devil May Cry 5. A single player game, with a small (co-op?) multiplayer part in it. The news broke about 2 weeks ago, when Gamespot got to test the game. I really like the Devil May Cry series, but my excitement dropped to near zero when I read the news. Since then, Angry Joe, ScreenRant and others (GameCrate, Destructoid, etc.) also discussed it.

Let me start by saying this: MTX has no place whatsoever in single player games! In triple A titles even less! Fortunately (for now) not many single player games have MTX, but the trend is worrying. Just look at Shadow of War. Or Devil May Cry 4 for that matter.

MTX has been accepted - sadly - in multiplayer games over time. And the greed of the publishers only grew. Everybody remembers last years mess: Star Wars Battlefront II. A four-and-a-half-thousand hour grind required to unlock everything. This is completely unacceptable and the fans made their voices heard, which prompted EA to rethink their position. But it looks like that wasn't enough. At E3 this year EA gave us the worst press conference of all times, completely aimed at investors, talking about paid services (Origin Access Premier) and fully ignoring gamers. That's how you destroy your company. And let's not even get into the ridiculous censorship of the Battlefield V beta chat. "White man" and "DLC" are censored, while "free DLC" is not? Come on! I hope EA dies a slow and painful death. But this is not a rant about EA, it's about MTX (which they use more than enough).

Some people argue, that paying for skins, etc. is fine unless it gives you and advantage in the game. I say it's not. Are people really so vain, that they need to have that purple Hello Kitty skin for their AK-47 in Battlefield? Do you really need to stand out by having lime green hat in Team Fortress 2? As soon as people started accepting these kinds of MTX, the other kind started to creep itself into games. The kind where you are given an advantage over other players for money. Or as ScreenRant put it in the case of Devil May Cry 5 (and Shadow of War): you get less game for more money. Why? Because you can skip the grind. The games are designed around making people grind (or pay) for the items/skills/units/whatever. People with more time might do it, but people who have a family and a 9-to-5 job can't grind for 40 hours and are more likely to pay for that "jump". The grind is calculated into game time. While we had "shorter" games previously, now we have a "short" game plus grind to make a longer game. You can pay to skip the grind and get the game how it was supposed to be in the first place.

And what about the stuff you can't even grind for? Like another save slot in Metal Gear Survive. Let's say you finished the game. Now you want to start over with a different character, different playstyle or whatever reason. Oh, you don't have a second save slot. You have to buy one! BUY A FREAKING SAVE SLOT! Wake up people, they are selling you your free space on your own hard drive!

The PR department of these games says obviously that they are giving players a "choice" - which is complete bullshit. On the surface you might have a choice (grind for hours or pay up), but that just the design they went with. Like a mugger telling you that you have a choice: give them your wallet or get stabbed...

So what does this mean for Devil May Cry 5? IGN wrote: "The orbs, which traditionally are never abundant enough to unlock absolutely everything, are used to purchase upgrades to weapons, new moves and one-off consumables." Will the orbs be even more rare to get you to pay up? Will it be (im)possible to unlock everything without paying? How many hours of additional grind are added to the game which wouldn't be there if there were no MTX?

Series director Hideaki Itsuno even contradicts himself while talking about the topic. On the one hand he says: "[T]he stuff that’s going to be harder to use and master, we make that more expensive. [...] [G]etting the thing that has a lot of application but you’ll have to spend time learning and perfecting." But on the other hand he goes on and says: "If they want to save time and just want to get all the stuff at once, those people can do that." Which is it now? You make the harder stuff more expensive (in terms of orbs), so it takes time to learn and perfect. That makes sense. But at the same time you give people the option to buy the skill without learning and perfecting it? So people buy it without learning and perfecting the technique and then they can't even properly use it, because they skipped the learning curve? Or will these skills be different in the pay version (like the easy fatalities in Mortal Kombat X) versus the grind-for-it version?

This is a fucking mess.

I sincerely hope that I'm just overreacting, but this trend to MTX everywhere is more than worrying. I accepted MTX in free-to-play mobile games up to a point. Since I didn't pay for the game itself it was okay to have to pay for something. Coincidentally the time I stopped was also a game made by EA: Need for Speed No Limits. Which was - against the title - the most limited F2P game I've ever tried. The weekly challenges were simply impossible to do. And believe me, I have tried. I even got up at night to play when my in-game "fuel" was recharged to not lose too many opportunities at racing. But it was clear that it's impossible to beat the races, even with non-stop play (only waiting for the recharges). That's when I stopped playing anything made by EA. But I digress, again. Some F2P mobile games are actually pretty good and manageable (Star Trek Timelines is my current favorite).

In conclusion I just want to highlight the following:

• Microtransactions are NOT okay. NEVER. Not in single player games, not in triple A games. I would even go as far as saying that they are not acceptable in MMOs either.
• Never pre-order! NEVER. You don't know what you'll get. The Metal Gear Survive save slot wasn't known until people bought the game. We don't know what the extent of MTX will be in Devil May Cry 5, so don't pre-order.

The gaming industry is in a pretty sad state and I really hope that the next video game crash happens soon, so people will realize that we are moving the wrong way.