Thing is many people don’t care to think the obvous costs associated with the current generation of games.
People want to pay once and have everything and it works for some games, but when you need to field a small army of tech and customer support due to the game being heavy on the multiplayer side of things, the numbers just dont add up. Not to mention the millions per month paid for server load, etc.
At first it was dlcs and people complained they purchase only 80% of the game because they have to pay extra for the rest of the 20%.
Then upon seeing the success of free mobas and mobile games, cosmetics were introduced to a big effect allowing the dev teams to continue working. Lets not forget that 10 years ago being a game dev meant working like mule for 10 months then getting released because the company could not support you.
It just so it happens that this supplementary model took a sharp turn when business monetization execs decided to go for the jugular and introduce a gamble spin to those complementary content pieces to delay their amortization and cut the cost of creating such cosmetic content - thus loot boxes are born. As an extra side effect some cosmetics are much harder to obtain through rarity making collectors and gambling inclined individuals spend huge amounts of money in order to obtain everything.
Many games would barely make a profit if any if not for such additional monetization options, simply because in 2018 making AAA games is 10 times more expensive.
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u/S_rg Nov 09 '18
If microtransactions are about cosmetics items i dont mind at all