Cognition Dissemination: Our Microtransactions Hell Is Just Getting Hotter

It’s extremely bad that so many games these days come with microtransactions, where virtual goods can be purchased with real money. It’s worse that the gaming audience has come to expect them. Everyone was justifiably up in arms when Xbox One launch games published by Microsoft like Ryse: Son of Rome, Forza 5, and Crimson Dragon included them in 2013, with GamesRadar’s Hollander Cooper going as far as to say they foreshadowed our dystopian future. Now, new games are expected to include them, and the number of players who flinch whenever they hear about a game including them has significantly dwindled.

Almost everyone who plays or writes about games is sadly guilty here. Heck, I forgot to note the presence of microtransactions in Devil May Cry V when I posted my review last week, and we absolutely don’t need for anyone in the gaming press to say they aren’t worth getting mad about in a game like Wolfenstein: Youngblood. Of course, anyone who’s purchased them is the guiltiest among us, which applies to a lot of people considering companies have continued to site their good sales to shareholders.

This all means the fight against microtransactions has failed, and they’ve been sufficiently normalized — especially with live service games updated over several years. Some publishers have a larger tendency to engage in predatory behavior compared to others, and they’re now taking the implementation of microtransactions to a new level. They feel comfortable with releasing games so they can be positively reviewed by critics and purchased by the general audience, only to add microtransactions after the games have garnered a good audience.

The newest example here is Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled, where Activision subtly confirmed that microtransactions are coming in a lengthy blog post about the content coming in the next update on August 2nd. The game lets players earn Wumpa Coins to unlock in-game content, which can be obtained through completing a number of tasks, but mostly through winning races. But this newest update will let anyone, as they put it, “fast-track their Wumpa Coin collection if they like” by purchasing them right from their game consoles. They didn’t specifically call them “microtransactions,” and worded it as if this will simply be another option among several others. But that’s what makes this frighteningly, let’s say, nefarious.

This is an insidious move because several players have criticized the unlocking system for pushing players to grind for Wumpa Coins to obtain characters and cosmetic items, thanks to high in-game prices. Players can get the highest amount of Coins through winning offline races with the AI, and especially online races; but the methods to determine how many a player can obtain for specific tasks is complicated. Up to 40 Coins can be acquired at a time for winning offline races, but that can occasionally go as high as over 500 Coins for online races. It will be much easier to earn them with the added temptation to just fork over real money.

What makes this worse is how several reviews and articles around the time of release praised the game for not having microtransactions. In fairness, some were cautious enough to say there were “currently” no microtransactions, from writers aware of what game Activision is playing. It was Activision’s strategy to release this game so it could garner positivity, only for them to drop this as part of a larger content package. Some sites will likely edit their reviews, but not all of them will; it will also take time for the cached versions to be altered in Google searches.

Even worse, it’s also a way to dodge the ESRB’s mandate to include a label showing that a game includes microtransactions on the cover, just to further highlight how scummy this is. Not that it’s too useful in the first place.

The act of adding microtransactions well after the game releases isn’t new — even for Activision. They’ve been doing so in post-release updates to Call of Duty games for years, which started with Black Ops II in 2013 and continued from there. They were also added to Destiny after its release, and after its reviews. (Activision and Bungie didn’t want critics to review Destiny too early when it released.) Expect this trend to repeat itself with the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare semi-reboot, which might even give players more options for war crimes.

This trend has gone under the radar of most gaming types because Activision doesn’t release many games these days, and the majority of those are CoD games they may not pay attention to. If they actually go through with green lighting the development of new Crash Bandicoot and Spyro games after the success of their remastered trilogies, the same could happen to them. Well, that, or they’ll only include a portion of the data on the disc/card and make you download the rest, like the Spyro Reignited Trilogy.

Given how well microtransactions have sold in several games, there’s sadly a good chance Activision will get away with this. The outrage about how they’ve done this with nearly every CoD game since BOII was very muted, after all. I wish I could end this on a more positive note, but microtransactions have become too accepted in games for me to do so. Don’t buy them if you can avoid it, and if they’re in a premium-priced game where they can’t be avoided, avoid the game too. It’s the best we can do.