Research Results: Predatory Monetisation in Games

The whole idea that Montetisation is evil is driving this industry towards self-destruction. They have to pay their people. They have to pay rent. There are costs. There are investors demanding a share of the profit. The whole discussion is based on asking disgruntled consumers what they think. No bias there!

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PoE is quite literally one of the worst offenders in terms of MTX pricing I have ever encountered.

Not only does PoE *ON PURPOSE* never drop what would be considered 'cool looking gear', they make their 'end game' gear look so hideous the average player is going to want to spend money JUST to not look so fuckin' ridiculous.

I've been there. I've spent hundreds upon hundreds over the years JUST to have my character that I spent 1k hours on look 'cool', but you don't have to.

If you're reading this now, you need to know that PoE has completely morphed the 'gotcha' game mode. Yep, it's free to play. But guess what? You're paying hand over fist for ANY of the quality-of-life tabs, and they fucking charge FULL GAME PRICE for a simple pair of wings!

If the game itself was actually good I wouldn't be complaining. But they've managed to not only be the game with some of the most expensive MTX I've ever seen, but they've ALSO managed to completely ruin the core pillar of ANY arpg; the Loot. The actual loot from the mobs you spend hundreds of hours killing is horrendous, and the entire game is balanced around you just trying to trade for any actually good gear.

Stay away from this mess. Stay far away.

you must be joking, right?

Buy one freaking supporter-pack in a season, take the coins to set up your stash tabs, done.
You can equip/uniquep the supporter-pack armours in like 10 seconds if you are swapping chars, total cost like 30 bucks.

Not going to mention even, that mtx is just visuals, nothing else - while in other games you pay literally to be stronger/better. Ridiculous claim, and I really wonder how you ask others to stay away from the game while you have 13 rewards in the current challenge league. Double-standards much?

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Bleu42 wrote:

PoE is quite literally one of the worst offenders in terms of MTX pricing I have ever encountered.

You didn't play much then. Try Genshin Impact, or World of Tanks, or Call of Duty... tons of games have mtx that are more overpriced or more predatory than POE.

There are better games than POE when it comes to monetization (but no guarantee they won't go down that rabbit hole later), but POE is defo not "the worst".

PoE MTX are expensive but you don't need MTX, in a way its predatory but in reality its one of the cheapest games/hr in existence and how you gauge it depends on which crowd you fall in.

You can't really put PoE in with like... Raid for example, expensive skins and lootboxes isn't a drop in the water compared to lootboxes for power with horrendous weighted odds and an economist on staff to ensure maximum squeeze per whale with an aggressive advertising approach to borderline pressure sell.

Ok this isnt about P2W vs f2p.

You can still fall short in your monetization ethics regardless of the games model.

Let's not forget about GGG's gamble boxes, which a law had to be passed before they would even post drop rates, and they still have no duplicate protection in even the remotest sense.

Also please cry me a river regarding costs when we are talking about $72 armor sets...gtfo.

Finally they should toss the term "supporter pack" right out the window. The days of supporting the small indie developer ship sailed when one of the largest publishers in the world purchased them. If they need support for ongoing development, China-Daddy should have their back, not their customers.

Now I'm as big a capitalist as there is. GGG should be doing everything they can to maximize dollars. That doesnt mean they have carte blanche to extort the players. They really should be careful designing leagues with more and more currency tab requirements, or making normal armor look absurd, just to cash in those few extra dollars. (Gamble predatory boxes aside)

I'm guess I'm saying let's pump the brakes on GGG being a beacon of F2P monetization.

It's not.

We should not be conflating price point with functional necessity.

A lot of games save their art department's best efforts for premium fare.

GGG's happen to be priced at a point where you will balk unless you can find it on "sale" - never more than about 30% discounted - and going to the trouble to set up notifications means you're probably invested.

I'm more of a function type than a form type. Idc what kind of hilarious bad fashion statement my toon is camping hideout in. In that respect, GGG is far far far from the worst offender.

The big elephant in the room, of course, is stash/inventory.

--It's strictly p2w during leagues where you must store a lot of full size items for later improvement (synthesizer queue, leo slams, items to upgrade using turbo charged harbinger scrolls, pages of white items to throw reforges at in harvest).

--It's p2QoL in pretty much every other situation.

There's no easy way to get around this. One suggestion is to live by the old F2P code of chivalry, which says "every item in the mtx shop should be obtainable through grinding as well". This is a cool ideal that originally intended to help keep minors invested in games that cost real money. Idk that GGG wants to cater to people without credit cards to the extent that some all-ages games will. They also have to correct for the increased sophistication of bots, which means there's some items you can't get for any amount of grinding.

Have maven drop the occasional premium tab? sure, why not. But before 24 hours is up, someone will have scripted a bot that efficiently farms maven for weeks on end, amassing huge numbers of tabs across swaths of accounts. If you thought the battle against rmt was all uphill, try directly handing the keys to the store to the bot farms.

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DarthSki44 wrote:

Ok this isnt about P2W vs f2p.

You can still fall short in your monetization ethics regardless of the games model.

I'm guess I'm saying let's pump the brakes on GGG being a beacon of F2P monetization.

It's not.

Pretty sure they aren't considered that and my point is you can't not make it about p2w vs f2p, there is a substantial different between the ability of a product to pressure the consumer for cosmetics vs power.

Cosmetics can't be predatory because the customer has to have extremely poor impulse control for it to qualify and qualifying the predation by the most vulnerable instead of the average already labels practically everything as predatory.

That isn't to say that MTX boxes aren't shady shit to sell people things they don't want in pursuit of what they do but GGG are no more predatory than any other shop selling optional tat for those with disposable income.

Monetisation is often lumped together as a grand overarching scheme also but its really an expectation of what we will spend, that changes drastically from customer to customer.

Their monetisation isn't predatory in my circumstance for example its suicidal they'd be out of business in a month. When you weigh this metric of what a customer is expected to spend you'll quickly discover which are the most predatory and none of them will be MTX only except maybe scams like star citizen etc.

tldr:

GGG put very little effort into making us buy MTX, they showcase them and that's it. If your idea of predatory is being shown something digitally pretty and you just have to buy it its very dangerous for you to be allowed online at all :p

Its the equivalent of a fat lazy lion with its mouth wide open, is the lion predatory if you have to wander up stick your head in its mouth and close its jaws or are you just dumb.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

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DarthSki44 wrote:

Ok this isnt about P2W vs f2p.

You can still fall short in your monetization ethics regardless of the games model.

I'm guess I'm saying let's pump the brakes on GGG being a beacon of F2P monetization.

It's not.

Pretty sure they aren't considered that and my point is you can't not make it about p2w vs f2p, there is a substantial different between the ability of a product to pressure the consumer for cosmetics vs power.

Cosmetics can't be predatory because the customer has to have extremely poor impulse control for it to qualify and qualifying the predation by the most vulnerable instead of the average already labels practically everything as predatory.

That isn't to say that MTX boxes aren't shady shit to sell people things they don't want in pursuit of what they do but GGG are no more predatory than any other shop selling optional tat for those with disposable income.

Monetisation is often lumped together as a grand overarching scheme also but its really an expectation of what we will spend, that changes drastically from customer to customer.

Their monetisation isn't predatory in my circumstance for example its suicidal they'd be out of business in a month. When you weigh this metric of what a customer is expected to spend you'll quickly discover which are the most predatory and none of them will be MTX only except maybe scams like star citizen etc.

tldr:

GGG put very little effort into making us buy MTX, they showcase them and that's it. If your idea of predatory is being shown something digitally pretty and you just have to buy it its very dangerous for you to be allowed online at all :p

Its the equivalent of a fat lazy lion with its mouth wide open, is the lion predatory if you have to wander up stick your head in its mouth and close its jaws or are you just dumb.

Lmfao at least you get it. This "Scholarly" article is nothing but a 'feeling' by players derived from a survey in an attempt to catalogue feelings and opinions. It's not a study of how to fix that feeling, or even limited to actual predatory practices.

I knew that when I saw one of the listed practices was "re-releasing a product" without any context whatsoever about why or how that happens.

The only MTX concern I have is the garbage loot box random surprise thing. Everything else is perfectly fine. You know exactly what you are getting and what you are paying for.

Loot/mystery boxes should be banned globally and good riddance!

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rekikyo wrote:

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Bleu42 wrote:

PoE is quite literally one of the worst offenders in terms of MTX pricing I have ever encountered.

Not only does PoE *ON PURPOSE* never drop what would be considered 'cool looking gear', they make their 'end game' gear look so hideous the average player is going to want to spend money JUST to not look so fuckin' ridiculous.

I've been there. I've spent hundreds upon hundreds over the years JUST to have my character that I spent 1k hours on look 'cool', but you don't have to.

If you're reading this now, you need to know that PoE has completely morphed the 'gotcha' game mode. Yep, it's free to play. But guess what? You're paying hand over fist for ANY of the quality-of-life tabs, and they fucking charge FULL GAME PRICE for a simple pair of wings!

If the game itself was actually good I wouldn't be complaining. But they've managed to not only be the game with some of the most expensive MTX I've ever seen, but they've ALSO managed to completely ruin the core pillar of ANY arpg; the Loot. The actual loot from the mobs you spend hundreds of hours killing is horrendous, and the entire game is balanced around you just trying to trade for any actually good gear.

Stay away from this mess. Stay far away.

I'm sorry but if you think POE is the worst offender, you've been living in a hole.

I just paid $100 yesterday to not even get the TFT Little Legends I wanted from riot for 21 Eggs. Every skin in LoL is about $12-$20, and I've owned almost 90% of them on 8 accounts over time.

A sexy swimsuit in Scarlet Blade (shut down Nudity based combat MMO that Aeria Hosted) cost $100 and was structured into tiers.

Perfect World Cost $40 for a Mount.
Forsaken World Cost upwards of $30 for a dress.

Black Desert Minimum Pearl purchase was $150, which would translate into 2-3 MTX.

Tera would charge you $30 for PVP runes and $20 for custom dyes for your costumes.

I haven't even gotten into P2W costs.

Shaiya cost $150-$300 for an enchant service to enchant gear/weapons (which you needed to outdps other players)

Archeage cost 4000 credits ($40) for a single Red Regrade Stone (used to enchant weapons over (6), and the fail chance was high and there was never any sales on them.

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POE:
There's kind of a reason your characters/gear looks ugly: THE GAME IS OLD. SO OLD THAT THE ORIGINAL CONCEPT WAS STILL POLYGONAL AND Lacking in ALL environment detail. It was also BEGAN as a crowd funded donor game, not a game that had a principal investor or any original subscriptions.

You don't have to rebuy stashes. You don't have to buy all MTX. It's probably the cheapest game I've ever played.

Go try Archeage. You can actually full 3-D fly in that game.

To your entire first part of your response; You apparently didn't actually read what was written. I said "ONE OF the worst offenders, not THE worst. If you had just understood the nuance there, then you could have saved yourself some time listing a few games that ARE worse. Which you also immediately seppuku said list by adding in "You don't have to buy all MTX". Yea no kidding.

To your second point; You are absolutely incorrect. 100% incorrect. Firstly, the game is only 8 years old. No reason to go full caps on how 'old' the game is, because it isn't.

Secondly, they've been releasing actually cool looking gear in the form of MTX for almost as long.

Thirdly, I'm not talking about the lack of environmental-sub-space-light-scattering-RTX-ON-nvidia-hair-reflections for gear. I'm stating that the overwhelming majority of gear looks awful, and it's on purpose. Unless you like to cossplay your god killing character in a bird cage for a helmet, you have to pay up. THAT'S my point. Not the amount of polygons, the shape they're in.