Microtransactions aren’t so micro anymore

Today, Mike Adebajo (@L1keMike), a Sony employee who works with PSN, tweeted about a new DLC for Spartacus Legends he was adding to the store.

And I’m going to go out on a limb and say that no, it’s probably not that good. £120 is an exorbitant amount of money for something as disposable as ingame currency. I’m not one to dictate what people spend money on, but it seems like game studios have started to take more and more advantage of people’s will to shell out for the quick route to advancing in a game.

DLC’s has gotten a lot of heat in the past, with costly day 1 DLC’s for AAA titles like Mass Effect. But as little as you and I might like them, at least those feature content. And that’s the least you could expect from a DLC. Ingame currencies and disposables aren’t content, they’re merely shortcuts to what you’d probably end up achieving anyway if you would just invest some time.

There’s another problem with DLC’s like this, especially in games with multiplayer (like Spartacus Legends), where you buy your way to in-game items that improve the character more quickly  than you would have been able to otherwise. This makes PvP very unbalanced, and a person who chooses to go the route of pure free play will have a hard time beating someone who throws money at the game. But on the other hand, this probably is a very successful business model, since people will just end up buying more coins to improve their characters. It’s all about supply and demand, but in this case the demand is artificially created.

The whole DLC business is heading in a very icky direction, but micro transactions are here to stay and we can only hope most game studios realise the problem of emptying players’ wallets to give them that quick fix. I guess we need to come up with a new word for them soon though, because £120 surely isn’t “micro” anything.