Loot boxes: a great reason not to buy Star Wars: Battlefront 2

The Game Room
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So for those not in the know, the beta for Star Wars: Battlefront 2 launched not too long ago, and a big part of the game’s mechanics revolves around crafting and building loadouts. These loadouts are not earned through the single-player campaign, or drip-fed through experience gain, or unlocked from the start; no, instead, they are unlocked via loot boxes.

Loot boxes you can buy.

And these loadouts are not small effects. You need multiple levels of each “star card” for each class, and the higher the level, the stronger the effects. For example, a level 1 star card in Boba Fett’s rocket pack gives him 50% damage reduction while firing rockets from his jetpack; level 4 gives you 100% damage reduction. These are really substantial differences in power level. And of course, there are a ton of different loadouts, tons of different characters to toy with, and all the while the game makes it quite clear to you, on the opening menu no less, that you can buy more loot boxes. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, cosmetic items are mixed in as well, to ensure that occasionally instead of that power upgrade you need to keep up with the people with bottomless wallets, you get a pretty little end-game animation instead.

This is not particularly dissimilar to the business model found in the pretty damn good first person shooter Loadout. Except Loadout was a free-to-play title that cost you nothing up front. And not as random. Remember, the primary purpose of a loot box system is to entice you to spend money on it. Furthermore, either the game is balanced around buying loot boxes, in which case not buying loot boxes leaves you with a frustrating slog (as many are reporting on the final chapter of Shadow of War), or the game isn’t balanced around buying loot boxes, in which case buying loot boxes is either a complete waste of time and money (which the producer wouldn’t want) or grants you a massive advantage. That’s sort of the problem with microtransactions - they pit the game against your patience. That’s how the business model works. It has no business being in full-priced games.

I’m gonna be honest here, I’m hoping this game bombs. That the consumer reaction to this is outraged boycott. They are selling power in a primarily multiplayer game via free-to-pay-esque loot boxes - at some point, the straw that breaks the camel’s back has to come, right? I mean, it’s probably not going to happen - this is a star wars game, after all - but man would it be nice if we could collectively tell the games industry that this shit ain’t kosher. We already failed with season passes, to the point where every capcom fighter now works on a “season” concept, meaning you have to drop another $30 every few months to keep competitive. Let’s not let pay-to-win gambling in full-priced AAA multiplayer games become a thing.

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It’s not going to happen because the alternative is games costing several hundred dollars right of the bat like they should. Developers will continue to find creative ways to monetize games because we somehow collectively decided that video games should not increase in price over the past 30 years no matter how much longer and expensive they are to make. Shadow of War works exactly the same way as this and somehow I’m still enjoying the hell out of it, and while i haven’t spent any extra money on it yet if i continue to enjoy it I probably will kick in a few extra bucks.

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…I guess? I mean, I’m not sure I asked for Square Enix to make a brand new graphics engine with every single game they make. Or for Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite to include a honking big story mode (with writing on the level of terrible slash fiction without any of the buttsex to improve it) or a graphics engine with double the polys of Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 in exchange for paying twice as much for the full roster. Yeah, things like graphical fidelity matter, but let’s be honest here - I’ve got more hours on The Binding Of Isaac and Path of Exile than on any AAA game in my steam library.

And it’s not exactly like CD Project Red is struggling, despite The Witcher 3 being huge and extremely high quality and having no microtransactions, free DLC updates, and only very limited paid DLC (and the paid DLC was of insane quality to boot!). How come they can do it with a game whose predecessor sold around 2 million units in the first year, but Battlefront 2, a title all but guaranteed to push ten million+ units in the first year, can’t?

What about From Software? Why can they handle selling Dark Souls with minimal DLC and no microtransactions and no loot boxes? Maybe it has to do with the same reason that 2 million units was a success for Dark Souls, and 3.4 million units was a failure for Tomb Raider.

I don’t think this is a good argument. If the price I have to pay to spend 50 bucks on a game instead of 90 bucks on a game is that my 2D fighter looks like this instead of like this… That’s a price I’ll pay.

Maybe I’m just weird. Maybe the game-buying public is absolutely clamoring for this mess, and is willing to pay the (absurd) premium to get games which are that 10% better, graphically. But even then, the question remains: why can From Software and CD Project Red make amazing, wonderfully-crafted masterpieces without fucking the consumer six ways from Sunday?

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We’ve made quite a jump from “It makes sense to have a $60 game with $25 season pass because games should cost closer to $80-$100” to “Games should cost several hundred dollars so locking content behind gambling on random loot crates is okay”.

I’m receptive to the first idea, not so much to the second.

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I’m certainly not clamoring for it but i do understand it and I am no bothered in the least by it. I don’t mind spending money on games i spend a lot of time on, compared to absolutely everything else I do for entertainment it is still by far way more bang for the buck. It is pretty ridiculous that we are paying the same for videogames today than we did in 1990.

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Lots of things are relatively cheaper now than in 1990, no reason why video games should be exempt from that.

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This is true. It also seems to come down a lot to scope, marketing, and management. How is it that Dark Souls was a success, and Tomb Raider was a failure, when Tomb Raider shipped 1.5x the units? You could build Star Wars Battlefront to need 10 million shipped units at an average of 90 bucks a pop (indeed, that seems like what they did), but is it so hard to imagine that you could build it to need 5 million units shipped at 60 bucks a pop? That you could build a really good version of Star Wars: Battlefront for what it cost to make, I dunno, Path of Exile (which is still Free to Play with almost no pay-to-win elements and still substantially better than its closest competitor, Diablo 3)?

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Many customers, presumably the same type who go to those samey action/superhero movies that all blend into each other, want media which is simple in its substance but highly produced e.g.: lots of static geometry and photorealistic texture maps in many large, crowded, furnished venues with lots of scripting. That takes a lot labor. Those games and movies are largely competing on the basis of their production values which leads to ever higher production costs which also drives marketing costs.

The increase in production/marketing costs seems to be less than the increase in the number of potential customers so price has to go up at some point.

The good games should remain largely unaffected. If you play more Devolver Digital-type games than EA, it won’t affect you much. If you do play more EA than DD, it’s those choices which drive the current state of AAA games.

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I wish I could agree… But this shit trickles down to… let’s call it the “AA” industry. Niche titles based on gameplay that nonetheless have professional values. I bought MVCI a month ago, and already it wants another 30 bucks from me. Who the fuck thought that was a good idea?! MVCI is a 2D fighter, and a very complex one at that. It’s definitely one of the harder ones to just pick up and play. It’s not something you sell to the unshaved masses who are just looking for more polys. It has its audience.

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There is plenty of reason, video games are way more complicated, cost a hell of a lot more to make and take way longer than they used to.

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BPC, you’re right, I thought when typing about the trickling down and should have said it would most strongly apply to AAA games but not be limited to them.

MVCI= Marvel? If it belongs to a major media corp, they might have adopted the CoD/Marvel Movies strategy of pumping out as many units as they can, grabbing as much cash as quickly as they can until the husk is empty.

DigitalC,

I wonder what the breakdown is in the cost growth when comparing modeling, texture work, animation etc. Some games may very well cost less than they used to as tools get easier to use but the AAA tier seems to be going in the same direction as blockbuster movies.

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Patent that pushes microtransactions through multiplayer granted to Activision

This kind of thing is really ugly and really effective. Several years ago video poker machine manufacturers implemented a system of “non-random losers” wherein once the player had chosen which cards to draw and the machine had determined that the game was a loss, the machine would then show a losing hand that was one card off a royal flush instead of the losing hand that was actually drawn. The effect was a quick emotional gut-punch, even to players who knew what was going on. The gaming board in Nevada pretty quickly put a stop to this kind of programming – machines which depict things like cards and dice must now operate in a manner identical to the way an actual physical deck of cards would work … none of this crap where the results of card draws are not actually random, but are manipulated by the software to manipulate the emotions of the players to encourage additional play.

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There’s really two questions here, one of which is much more important than the other:

(a) Do games cost considerably more in adjusted dollars and are they being priced correctly based on their costs?
-and-
(b) Is charging customers for a random chance at getting game-changing gear in a competitive game a fair or proper way of recouping those costs?

Question (A) is interesting enough on the surface and, as I said, I’m sympathetic to the notion that games some value of X more than they used to. I’m skeptical that this value should give the games a price tag of several hundred dollars versus the current norm of a $50-$60 game with a $30-$50 DLC pack. And, of course, there’s a ton of examples so everyone can cherry pick a game where the developers obviously stripped the base game down and released half a product or examples where the base game was a solid experience and the DLC was well-made and a good value. Likewise, costs different for a single player indie retro-platformer versus a realistically modeled online game involving bunches of players, server costs, etc.

However, with it comes to (B), I feel confident saying that recouping costs by forcing your players to play a slot machine in order to remain competitive is bullshit and there’s better ways to make buck. Cosmetic/Vanity DLC, Map packs, DLC characters – honestly, just about any DLC option that doesn’t rely on “Spin the wheel and pray that you get the result that’ll give you a competitive edge. Oh, too bad… so close. Spin again? Just another couple bucks…” Hell, straight up “Pay 2 Win” microtransaction elements are better than this which is more “Gamble 2 Maybe Win One Time In Fifty”

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Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite. It’s really frustrating. I want to love this game, but the deluxe edition with the core content DLC (characters in a fighting game are core content) that came out not a month after release already cost 80 bucks, and now they want another 30 for costume DLC, and it’s like… Seriously?! Are they taking the fucking piss?!

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Really? you think those costumes just grew on trees or something? I simply do not understand what your problem with this is, if you don’t want costumes or extra characters simply don’t buy them.

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My problem? That it’s pretty obvious that they’re chopping up a full game and selling it to us piecemeal at a higher rate. That features that used to be core are held back as DLC. That out of a roster of 30 characters, only 6 aren’t characters that were in the last title (the last title in the series had a roster of 50), and for the characters who are returning, almost every animation is the same (seriously, just for example, Dormammu has like three new body animations and a handful of new particle effects).

I’m mostly okay with cosmetic DLC. My issue there is that I remember when “ultimate edition” and “season pass” meant you got all the DLC. But the characters are crazy pricy, and again, this is core content sold piecemeal at a pretty high price point just a month after the release of a game that was already pretty expensive.

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Or maybe he wants them but doesn’t think that they are fairly priced. And then is, you know, talking about it in a thread about microtransactions.

You can buy complete quality games for $30 – don’t go pretending that some costume skin DLC is thirty bucks because that’s what it cost. It’s a mechanism designed to boost profits. And making money is fine as well but let’s at least be honest about what’s happening.

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That’s where we disagree, games are a bargain at 60 bucks and if you wait a few months they are practically free.

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:dubious:

Okay let’s do a quick comparison. In my steam Library, here are the games I have spent the most time on:

  • Marvel Puzzle Quest (Free to play): over 3000 hours. Okay this one isn’t quite fair, there’s a lot of idle time in there.
  • Path of Exile (Free to play): 719 hours
  • The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth (15€ at launch): 215 hours.
  • Street Fighter V (60€ at launch, plus by now at least 30€ in character DLC): 112 hours.
  • Undertale (10-15€? at launch): 101 hours

You don’t need a billion dollar budget to make a good game. Or even a great 3D open world game with amazing aesthetics (Dark Souls). Or even a great 3D game with solid graphics and no upfront cost (Path of Exile).

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The most popular game in Steam’s history is a $30 title with no direct DLC and cosmetic microtransactions through the Steam market.