Predatory Video Game Practices: Pilfering Your Time and Money

Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Star Wars: Battlefront II, TMNT 2: BattleNexus. These are the games I remember most fondly from my childhood. I admit my nostalgia goggles work overtime for me regarding these titles. Yet, objectively, these games of yesteryear allowed the player to experience 100% of the content for one single price of entry. The games of today are different. They nickel and dime the player at every corner. Common practices in the gaming landscape today include live service games, battle passes, microtransactions, and endless grinding. These practices are not typically beneficial to the play experience, yet they keep happening. In this piece I will highlight some different ways that companies are trying to entice the player into spending more of their hard-earned dollars or into spending a higher proportion of their time engaging with the game.

If it's not fun, why bother?

-Reggie Fils-Aimé (former President of Nintendo of America)

Free-to-play games hit the market scene at the onset of smartphones. Applications would typically have a free version that was available to get a large player base. Cut-the-Rope, Angry Birds, Doodlejump, Jetpack Joyride, and Temple Run are just a few examples of this occurring. It was almost surreal that these well-regarded games would be put on the mobile storefronts for free. If you cannot tell how a company is making money off of a service or product, it is because you are the product. These games largely profited through ad revenue as the player would constantly be bombarded by them unless either they paid a fee to make the ads go away, or stopped playing the game altogether. Nowadays, some of these apps do not even have the option to purchase an ad-free experience as they now understand that your data and revenue generated by watching ads is far more valuable than the measly $1 to $5 you could normally give to banish the pop-ups. In my opinion, these ads can ruin an otherwise fun gaming experience and are definitely the reason I have stepped away from mobile gaming almost entirely. The Free-to-play model has definitely migrated over to console and PC gaming. Examples that come to mind are Fortnite, Valorant, Marvel Rivals, Rocket League, Fall Guys, and Hearthstone. While these games appear to be completely free at the start, they try to entice the player to buy cosmetics or passes. Players may not even realize how much money they are spending on these things until they have spent 2 or 3 times as much money on the game as compared to just buying a $60 title.

Some titles will seek to extract the maximum amount of value from players by giving them an explicit edge when they spend real-world money. Pokémon: Trading Card Game Pocket is a new app where players can open packs of digital Pokémon cards for the purposes of collecting, battling, and (to a lesser degree of success) trading cards. The app is free to download on every major mobile storefront, but behind the free entry lies a more insidious attempt to extract money from the player. Every 12 hours of real-world time the player is allowed to open one free pack of Pokémon cards. There is also an upgrade pass to be able to open a third pack of cards each day for $9.99 a month. In addition, one piece of Poké Gold can be spent in order to reduce the time until the next pack can be opened by two hours. Therefore, six Poké Gold can be spent in order to skip the full 12-hour cycle. The app has a disclaimer that a maximum of 720 Poké Gold can be spent reducing the timer per day. This means that a player who spends 720 Poké Gold would be able to open an additional 120 packs of Pokémon cards each day. At the time of writing, I could purchase 690 Poké Gold for the price of $99.99 USD. In addition, by completing daily missions you get a third of the resources needed to open another pack. Doing all the math, spending the maximum amount of money to open card packs, a player could spend $36,620 dollars a year to open 52.9x the number of card packs that a player could open freely (123.33333 packs vs. 2.33333 packs). This is a similar problem that the physical trading card game has, where players who can buy more cards can build better decks, but now even more predatory in my opinion. At least when you bought physical Pokémon cards you had something of actual value. These digital Pokémon cards are pretty much just NFTs that hold no value at the end of the day. The Pokémon Company has not had official TCG tournaments hosted on this app yet, but frankly its just a matter of time before awards and cash prizes are tied to battling over the app at which point the players who can fork over the dough will have a clear and obvious advantage.

Limited-time events encourage players to either spend time on a game during a specific date range. When a game signposts that there is a rapidly closing window of opportunity for a player to experience certain content in a game, the player will sink resources into completing that objective rather than other aspects of a game. Star Wars Outlaws had a story mission that was only available for a limited time. Once the time expired, the mission and rewards from that are lost into the æther. This compels the player to spend extra time and energy playing the game in order to ensure they do not miss out on any content, oftentimes with mundane rewards for completing the event anyway.

Microtransactions can lead to a pay-to-win scenario as described above, but other times they simply hold back content from the player.  These microtransactions are prevalent throughout the industry, from buying resources in Candy Crush, to buying extra character packs in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, these pesky cash grabs are everywhere. I oftentimes feel that the content is egregiously mispriced. If a full game is worth $60, a single cosmetic item should not be worth 1/3 to 1/4 of the total cost of the game ($15 to $20). The greed feels very obvious to me. Undoubtedly it costs the companies an absolute pittance to produce the cosmetic alterations, and it simply does not compute for me that 3 to 4 cosmetic items could equate to the value of a whole game no matter the circumstance. If these items cost $1 or $2, I still would be against microtransactions but at least the value of the purchase would make a bit more sense. The companies inflate the value of these cosmetic items because people are still buying them for one reason or another. 

A battle pass is an evolution of a limited-time event and a microtransaction. The player is asked to fork over some amount of currency typically with the promise of a return on investment. Should the player complete the entire battle pass (usually the level of time commitment requires playing the game daily or every other day), they will have recouped their initial investment in the paid currency of the game along with other skins, cosmetics, and goodies to show for their effort. Some major issues with the battle pass system include that the rewards granted from the pass feel less valuable as every player who completes the pass will get them. It feels oftentimes that buggy or less than polished games will have elaborate battle passes. It can be disheartening when a game remains in a broken state, yet the monetization routes are still at the forefront of the game. Another issue is the diminished return trend where a battle pass will only give you enough of the game’s paid currency to net even rather than profit. Fortnite’s battle passes (at least back in the day) would net you an extra 300 V-Bucks more than the pass cost. This meant that it was a profitable endeavor to finish each battle pass and while slowly, the player would gain V-Bucks over time and could buy a cosmetic of their choosing without having to expend any additional funds into the game. I have seen battle passes where the player nets even on the paid currency which just feels like the player is being nickeled and dimed.

Downloadable content or DLC is another advent of the modern gaming era. Before the wide swath of consoles that could connect to the internet, once a gaming company distributed a game, they had no way of modifying the game once it hit store shelves. This meant that an incomplete or broken game would remain that way indefinitely which no recourse for the player other than to try and sell or return the game. Today, over internet connection, console, mobile, and PC players can receive updates that will modify, fix, or create files present within the user’s storage drive. A consequence of this model is that games typically reach store shelves with a lack of polish. The companies will put out a game as quickly as possible and then patch and fix the game after the fact.

Companies can also target your time instead of targeting your wallet directly. Many of the methods mentioned above force the player to spend an unhealthy level of time engaging with a game in order to experience all of the content and ensure that all limited-time events are completed. By keeping the player invested in a game artificially, the player is more likely to spend money there rather than a competitor’s game. In this way, publicly traded companies have a fiduciary responsibility to uphold and will employ however many predatory practices are necessary to maximize profit margins.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 has somehow managed to do the impossible. It employs every garbage practice I have listed here. Yet, I find myself playing it an unhealthy amount because of the social factor. I get to play with my father and friends from all over the place. Having this element of community without an alternative that my cohort can agree upon leaves us trapped experiencing an inflated $70 entry point (unless subscribed to Xbox Game Pass), battle passes with limited return, endless griding of levels that seem to move slower and slower each day, expensive microtransactions (averaging around $20 per cosmetic pack) and limited time events that have lately required hours upon hours from the player to complete.

Nothing will change as long as the consumers decide to participate. So long as these predatory practices are profitable, they will remain. While I cannot control how people spend their own money, I mean to communicate that participating in this system is giving permission for these practices to continue. I also hope to educate folks to the ways in which these companies manipulate our decision making in search of profit. I have definitely been part of the problem much to my own chagrin. I put this information out not to shame those who participate, but to inform the consumer about how they have been enticed and why these practices will continue into the future. In my next series of pieces for this section of the website, I will be focusing on games that do not engage in these practices (or at least feel more palatable).

Consider picking up an indie game next time you are struggling to decide what to play. They are typically cheaper ($10-$20) and many of them put the big AAA games to shame. Who knows, you may enjoy some of my favorites, like Hollow Knight, Enter the Gungeon, Balatro, Golf Story, or Celeste. The point of this hobby is to have a fun experience. If you are struggling to find the fun in this hobby at times like I do, just remember that there are great games out there just waiting to be discovered if you have the courage to seek them out.