Randy Pitchford has taken advantage of the new update for Twitter that lets you use more characters than before. Well, it looks like for some reason he wanted to stress his opinion to himself on Twitter what he thinks about the growing epidemic of microtransactions, DLC and loot-boxes.
A lot of people are both weary and wary of new titles and for good reasons, too. At one point publishers and developers found that you could manipulate people with on-disc DLC with content already on a disc and have them pay for it. Devs also found that you could split up content to bring relevance to a badly made game.
The problem that a lot of publishers and developers found with DLC is that it splits up the community and not everyone pays for the content when released. So they moved on to something more direct and that keeps players together and “engaged” and that happens to be microtransactions.
The best part about these things called microtransactions is that you can tie them to things like loot-boxes in a shallow game that could mechanically be made on a 1996 workstation, like the trend of empty arena shooters with mediocre graphics.
As more titles with premium loot boxes take the games industry by storm, every publisher and developer seems to be commenting on this very situation, which includes Randy Pitchford, the president of Gearbox Software.
Here’s what Pitchford had to say about the current trend of “monetization” in games via his 12 posts on Twitter:
/2 Evidence of my position is that we never sold Golden Keys (an arguably consumable good) in the Borderlands game. We had non-trivial levels of demand from customers to do so, but we did not relent. We chose to only give Golden Keys away via social media and partner relations.
— Randy Pitchford (@DuvalMagic) November 10, 2017
/4 I do, however, object to some of the arguments and language being used to fight against the predatory monetization schemes I have just derided in the first post in this thread.
— Randy Pitchford (@DuvalMagic) November 10, 2017
/6 Also, I have seen arguments against consumable goods that are for customers who want to speed up progress along these lines: "Grinding sucks, I shouldn't have to pay to avoid grinding." I have an issue with this kind of argument…
— Randy Pitchford (@DuvalMagic) November 10, 2017
/8 If the "grinding" is the game and the game is not fun, the rational choice is to play other games that are fun. If playing the game is fun, it should be a reward, not an obstacle to play the damn thing.
— Randy Pitchford (@DuvalMagic) November 10, 2017
/10 I realize that there are some people who want the status of having beaten a game or having achieved a certain degree of progress in a game and are willing to pay in order to achieve that. Those are precisely the sorts of minds those kinds of games are for.
— Randy Pitchford (@DuvalMagic) November 10, 2017
/12 I love games. I love playing them. I love creating them. As a customer, I am very happy making sure that I am helping to finance the efforts of artists who entertainment. As a customer, I can make free choices about where my time and moneys goes. So should you! /thread
— Randy Pitchford (@DuvalMagic) November 10, 2017
I think after reading all of the above tweets and after hearing what Take-Two CEO, Strauss Zelnick, thinks of future titles including some form of engaging microtransactions, it seems to speak loudly as to what you can expect from Borderlands 3.
As of now, there’s no telling whether or not other future Gearbox games will have microtransactions or some other form of monetization to engage players to keep them coming back for more, but it seems obvious what direction they’re going in.
