EA Alters the Deal

for the community to express approval or disapproval. A recent post by games publisher e A smashed the record for most down votes. At the time of this recording, there are more than six hundred seventy seven thousand down votes. Previously the record was about twenty four thousand. Now a lot of those may come from bots and not real people, but still an astounding number. Gamers were angry about, well,

a lot of stuff. Gamers are always angry, but in particular, they were angry in the way e A had structured rewards in the new game Battlefront two, which is set in the Star Wars universe. A critical point was that when you first launched the game, you cannot just jump into any of the iconic characters from the series. You have to earn that ability, either by grinding away in the game for forty hours or more just to play as your favorite character, or by coughing up some cash

to purchase the privilege of playing those characters. And this is on top of paying the full price for the game itself. Many players felt that this is unfair. It's as if e A had published a game, charged sixty dollars for it, and then locked away the most fun aspects of that game until you pay them more money to access it. And if you take a look at the economics behind the modern approach to video game publishing, you realize that's pretty much what's going on. There are

different terms for it in the industry. The company Woulbisoft calls it player recurring investment or p r I. Publisher Take Two calls it recurrent consumer spending or r c S. But whatever you call it, it's all about creating an environment in which players will continue to spend money playing

your game after the initial purchase. That might include micro transactions, supplemental downloadable content that adds more gameplay elements such as additional story or levels, cosmetic changes, to an existing game, or various types of player awards that may or may not affect gameplay, and it's a big business. Let's take Ubisoft,

for example. During the company's midyear shareholder call, the company revealed that player recurring investment contributed fifty one of all digital revenue in the first half of That means the company made more from these ongoing purchases than from selling digital copies of the games themselves. With that sort of financial performance, you can expect to see a lot more games include some form of incentive to encourage players to

continue pouring money into a title after it launches. Depending upon the implementation, players may not care so much with downloadable content or DLC. You might get new chapters of a game's story or new levels to play. If you really enjoyed playing a game, you may feel that another purchase is perfectly fine to get more of what you like. Many players are also fine with the concept of cosmetic purchases, either buying specific assets outright or through what are called lootboxes,

which represent a random assortment of digital items. Many players aren't so crazy about games that allow you to purchase items that actually affect gameplay. The dismissive term among gamers for such practice is pay to win, meaning a player doesn't need to develop any skill or expertise with a game, but instead pay extra to get access to high powered items that give him or her an advantage within the game itself. Typically, these games allow you to earn rewards

through actual gameplay, but at a very deliberate pace. There's a delicate science to this. A game developer wants to make a game that's compelling enough to convince people to play, but reserve just enough interesting content to convince a percentage of that game's audience to shell out some bucks to

get that content early. However, if you reserve too much, players may feel like the base game isn't worth playing, or that you're extorting them for cash, or that you're sending the message that the game is only fun if you're willing to keep paying for it, and if the stuff you reserve has a big effect on how the game plays, players will resent either having to pay extra to avoid being left behind by less skilled players with more disposable income, or dealing with a game where they're

constantly at a distinct disadvantage because they refuse to engage in this economy. Meanwhile, as this drama unfolds between game companies and their customers, other concerns are popping up. In Belgium, a gaming commission is investigating whether lootboxes are a form

of gambling. If the commission decides that loot boxes count as gambling, then companies that incorporate that mechanic in their games would first have to pay a fine for any existing games being sold in Belgium that have that mechanic, and then secure a permit for any future implementations. The crux of the matter is this, in these games, players can earn or purchase a chance to get some supplemental

materials for a video game. Typically it might be a new costume or prop that has little to no effect on gameplay, but some games will also include new items or weapons that have in game advantages. Game developers will frequently compare this feature to trading card games like Magic. The Gathering Magic players are used to buying booster packs of cards to supplement their decks. You aren't guaranteed to find anything particularly useful or rare in any given booster pack.

You might look out, or you might draw a bunch of Dud's lootboxes, argue video game developers are pretty much the same thing, and if you don't designate trading card games as gambling, why would a video game version be any different. Whether the Belgian Gaming Commission feels the same way remains to be seen, but one thing really isn't a gamble unless gamers stopped buying supplemental content entirely, we can expect these practices to be the norm moving forward.

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