Loot Boxes in 2018: is it really worth it?

Amid news of EA Games bringing microtransactions back to Star Wars Battlefront 2, a move that had long been promised, the question has to be asked: are loot boxes even worth the negative press they’ll generate among consumers in 2018?

Gamers made a significant stand over the issue in the back end of 2017. The backlash over the implementation of loot boxes in Battlefront 2 was so powerful that even the corporate overlords of Disney were forced to take notice and step in to tighten the leash on EA’s executives. This was even enough to force microtransactions to be pulled from the game entirely for a while.

The handling of the fallout from the loot box scandal on EA’s part was just as disastrous; gamers rightfully mocked and ridiculed EA’s statement that loot boxes were supposed to give ‘a sense of pride and accomplishment’, and EA have even achieved the dubious honour of having one of Reddit’s most downvoted comments of all time. Goodwill was just about exhausted when EA stated to shareholders that the decision to remove microtransactions wouldn’t affect profit estimates. This made the situation even worse as it all but outright implied that the use of loot boxes on EA’s part was just a cynical cash grab, not, as had been claimed, an unfortunate necessity to be able to fund the spiralling cost of modern games development. In one fell swoop, practically every justification for microtransactions in full-priced games was dismantled, leaving a smouldering ruin of gambling regulations and unhappy customers.

Battlefront 2, then, is not a game on a good standing in any way. In the months after release for any FPS things get difficult: care has to be taken to keep gamers coming back for more. This all begs the question: was it even worth it to bring back microtransactions to Battlefront 2 considering the inevitable PR issues it would cause?

Imagine the goodwill that EA could have recovered for their IP if instead they listened to gamers and announced that microtransactions would be removed from the game entirely? While many of the more cynical amongst us would claim to see through such an act, many would find such a move to be a positive step. In fact, arguably now would be the best time to make such an announcement, with Battlefront 2 being a few months old surely it would be in desperate need of the good PR that would be generated to revive its player base. Dropping microtransactions would be the shot in the arm to help the game continue to survive as a multiplayer FPS.

Instead, however, we have a sad, predictable and cynical move from a corporation that feels increasingly disconnected from its customers, with many gamers commenting that they will now leave the game alongside the calls of ‘told you so’ from cynics the world over. The poor PR generated from the move must be costing millions, and will undoubtedly have a knock-on effect with player engagement and could cost the company any profit generated from the game in the coming months.

So why would any game company in 2018 continue to be associated with such a maligned practice as loot boxes? Surely any short term revenue boost through such cynical means will be miniscule compared to the loss of goodwill from customers in the long run. In 2018 is it really going to be worth it for any mainstream game to implement loot boxes, knowing that with 2017’s end the microtransaction bubble has burst? Surely by now any loot box announcement will be met with such cynicism and vitriol that any small amount of revenue squeezed from such a move would be insignificant compared to the unsustainable loss of customer goodwill.

No. The ship has sailed on loot boxes and the damage is done. Gamers have proven that they will not take such moves blindly. Surely now, it is time to put the final nail into the loot box’s coffin and accept that whatever measly, cynical cash that can be grudgingly squeezed from consumer’s fingers is not worth the unsustainable loss of goodwill that will soon put AAA gaming’s future in the balance. Loot boxes are dead, it’s time to move on.

Gaming in 2017: A Review

Given that the year is ending, many websites will be dishing out their awards ceremonies and naming their favourite games in any genre. There will be much debate about the ‘Game of the Year’ with shoe-in favourites such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Horizon: Zero Dawn and Call of Duty WW2 duking it out over critics’ favour.

I don’t want to do such an awards ceremony, but now is a great time to reflect on some of the lessons we’ve learned through the year. This was the year we saw controversies over loot-boxes, review scoring and the release of a new console. It is a very interesting time to be a gamer. 

2017’s gaming year truly got started with Resident Evil 7. Its survival gameplay was sublime and subtle, a much more understated affair than previous titles in the series and it all worked to the game’s benefit. As fans had been demanding, for the first time in many years we had authentic and atmospheric horror that brought Resident Evil back into the fold as one of the premier titles in its genre. It both pulled the series back and pushed it forward in the exact ways that it needed, critically turning around a franchise much in need of rejuvenation.

 It wasn’t long after this that we saw the release of the Nintendo Switch. As a concept, the console showed a lot of promise; the actual realisation of gaming-on-the-go as many gamers envisioned from the moment they picked up a Game Boy. This proved to be a major draw for customers as well, turning Nintendo into a name synonymous with success once again and putting an end to the dark days of the Wii U.

Of course, when the Switch came out, it was almost overshadowed by one of its own games: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was a masterwork of open world design, that brought the Zelda Promise to fruition. For the first time, gamers held in their hands a true adventure title worthy of the original’s ambition, and despite a few rainy cliffsides, many gamers fell in love with the title.

Controversy surrounded this game’s review scoring thanks to Jim Sterling of the Jimquisition. While I disagreed with his review on a few points, his take on Breath of the Wild, giving it a ‘mere’ 7/10 score resulted in a major backlash from die-hard Zelda fans. This backlash showed an uglier side to the gaming community. It was around this time that ‘meta-bombing’ became a word in gaming vocabulary, referring to the practice of overwhelming a game’s page on Metacritic with negative user reviews. These were just two of many strange, toxic gamer trends that occurred in 2017.

By the time summer had arrived, however, gaming was back in full swing. The release of Crash N’Sane Trilogy brought a sudden mainstream attention on early 3D mascot platformers. Crash was a game with a lot of nostalgic goodwill and this surely helped the PlayStation brand, practically sealing the deal for future HD re-releases. The game’s difficulty was also a popular talking point: who doesn’t remember the cringe-worthy ‘it’s just like Dark Souls!’ type reviews gamers were exposed to at that time? It was discussed how central difficulty was to a game’s overall experience, and the summer of 2017 certainly had gamers everywhere screaming ‘f*ck the High Road!’

As we drew into autumn and winter and big blockbuster releases came out, gaming started to show a little fatigue in the mainstream space. While fan-favourite indie titles such as Oxygen Not Included certainly entertained, lots of gamers were placing their attention on other, more nefarious industry trends. 

This was the time of the Loot Box. With the release of Middle-Earth: Shadow of War, we saw the beginnings of a coming tsunami of Loot Box controversy. Gamers bemoaned the end-game, with good reason; it was purely set up to be a slog to encourage gamers to buy microtransactions, in the form of Loot Boxes.

What came after this was a colossal breakdown in mainstream gaming. While Call of Duty: WW2 released to critical acclaim, attention turned to Star Wars Battlefront 2. The game itself was meant to be an apology for EA’s first crack at the series, which many gamers deemed to be a cynical cash-grab. However, thanks to terrible consumer practices, Battlefront 2 became the symbol of everything wrong in the industry.

There was a massive backlash to the Loot Box practice in Battlefront 2, such that EA’s stock drastically fell. Even the Disney corporation themselves had to step in to help pick up the pieces.

The Loot Box system, as seen in Shadow of War and Overwatch before now, was a gambling-based microtransaction economy where players paid not for items, but for a chance to receive an item they may want (most of the time they would get junk). This was totally exploitative, if not gambling. Indeed, a few courts even stepped in with their own rulings that yes, Loot Boxes were gambling and should be regulated as such. 

Many would see this as a bad time for gamers. On the other hand, this controversy represents the power of gamers as a consumer group. It is amazing that after years of exploitation by big players entering a now-mainstream industry, gamers still have power to change things for the better. EA were forced to swiftly backtrack and their stock was badly damaged for this mis-step. This proved that gamers don’t have to silently stand by and watch the gaming industry go downhill; they can instead step in and kick-ass. If anything, Lootgate represents that the gaming community can still change the course of where videogames are going.

2017 was a strange year with a lot of major news items. My review of the year isn’t exhaustive by any means; I can’t go through all the year’s events and cover it all in the detail it deserves. I left out the release of the Xbox One X and Cuphead, for example. 

But I think that as far as the lessons we have learned from this last year, I can say that 2017 has been most informative; franchises can be re-thought with success, gaming’s community still has major toxicity issues to work out, older series can be brought back to life with a triumphant bang, and gamers aren’t going to just sit down and take bad consumer practices.

2018 will be an interesting year. I’m looking forward to seeing announcements on some big franchises. It may be too soon, but I hope to see the beginnings of a new Halo, and hopefully an actual sequel to some game franchises that are stagnating (a new Elder Scrolls? Or even a new Grand Theft Auto announcement?). 

In more concrete terms, however, what I am most looking forward to next year is the full release of Subnautica. In its current state, the game is well worth playing and is an extremely interesting take on the survival genre, with some beautiful underwater scenery to boot. If it gets a proper performance boost and a full release, I will be very happy.

Thank you for reading my blog over this past year, and I hope you will have a wonderful rest of 2017 and an even better 2018!

-Stev3 L

Why Shadow of War's Loot Crates are not okay

I was initially very excited for the new Middle-Earth: Shadow of War game coming out. I loved Shadow of Mordor, especially its Nemesis system and its fluid, Arkham Asylum-styled combat. I loved the idea that a sequel was going to come out and that it would iterate on the system in a way that delivered on the initial promise. I can’t wait to fully experience a fleshed out enemy system where I can manipulate an army’s loyalties for my own bidding.

But then I heard about the micro-transactions that will be soiling the game, and I decided that for a full-priced retail product, I’m just not going to buy it. This is because Micro-transactions overall sully the experience and are an anti-consumer practice that ultimately shows the flawed value of AAA videogames.

Firstly, there’s the issue that having micro-transactions, even ones as tiny as cosmetic upgrades or those not required to beat the game, imprint a psychological barrier into the mind of anyone that’s playing the game. Gamers aren’t getting the ‘full experience’, they’re getting something where content was taken out to be sold back to them. Even if they are there purely for cosmetic reasons, micro-transactions have a reputation for being linked with shadier practices. On some level, I will always associate micro-transactions with poor-quality mobile phone games, because this is where the practice was born.

The use of any kind of micro-transaction in a game came from a need for smaller developers to make money out of something where the initial outlay was nowhere near enough to recoup cost, and while this worked for many developers there is no denying that the use of the practice has become synonymous with a kind of ‘dirty’ experience. Any kind of in-game purchase carries with it the weight of Candy Crush.

Then there is the statement that companies are making when they use micro-transactions. When implementing such systems in Shadow of War, WB Games are ultimately saying that as a gamer, your £42 is not enough. That in some way you aren’t paying enough for the privilege of playing their game. They are saying that they value gamers so little that they will ask them to pay for something that should be free. This shows the kind of psyche behind these anti-consumer decisions; ultimately each customer is nothing but a collection of transactions to be exploited and mined through any means necessary, and even if it’s not, if the company tries to convince you that this is not the case because such items are only an added bonus, that they’re not needed, then why at all should you ever consider paying the outlay for a microtransaction if they’re not needed? If they were as small as an added bonus, surely it would be easy to implement cheat codes as a sign of goodwill toward gamers, but no, they’re selling it.

Such a practice may be justified by some by looking to other companies, such as Overwatch. But let me be clear here; just because another game did it does not make the practice okay. I hate that Overwatch, as a full-retail priced game, still has micro-transactions and loot crates. It never was okay in the first place, no matter how great the underlying game is.

All of this would be bad enough, if it was not for the nature of the micro-transactions themselves. When loot crates are implemented with randomised loot, you aren’t paying for an item. You’re paying for a chance at an item. This means that you may not even get what you want from the purchase at all. This means that as a practice it ultimately is no better than gambling. Don’t tell me that any kind of value mindset was considered when this was implemented in Shadow of War, because if it was, we’d have full-sized DLC, and not the shitty consumer practices implemented in the product as it is.

It is scant justification that Shadow of War is too expensive a project to be paid for by full retail price; if so, it is WB that should suffer the punishment for being overzealous on production value, not the consumer. Make better, more efficient decisions. Not only that, but are we really saying that such a massive, hyped and clearly in-demand product that benefits from the huge license power of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth and the gamer goodwill that came from Shadow of Mordor won’t generate enough revenue to meet cost? If not, then it is clearly a failing of the corporation’s production and not in the pricing.

As an aside, does this show that AAA gaming is quickly becoming unsustainable in the modern market? Clearly, the drive for bigger and bigger blockbuster games is top-heavy and expensive and if a company can’t make a profit on a AAA title with any kind of reasonable pricing system in place, then that is surely a problem with the typical practice used in developing AAA games. Perhaps this is a sign that the gaming industry at large, at least the blockbuster one, is showing some fatigue.

Ultimately, when any company makes the decision to engage with microtransactions in their product, they are making a judgement call on how much they value their audience, and how much they value the nature of their product. If they believe that their product is not good enough to stand on its own without a shady, anti-consumer practice powering the gears, then why should we, as gamers, believe that such a product is worth our full retail bucks? If the full RRP of a game isn’t enough, either raise the RRP or look at the costings before passing on shady practices to the customers.

Here, instead WB Games has decided to say that their customers aren’t good enough, and are sullying the name of their franchise to do so. Not only this, they are also lowering the perception of their product and creating a poor brand image. Saying that such transactions are optional only begs the question of why they are included at all, and why should consumers foot the bill by continuing to put up with the shitty practices of a top-heavy industry that is showing signs of bloat and fatigue?

Is DLC a good or a bad thing?

Downloadable Content in video games is a bit of a mixed bag for myself, and for the gaming industry as a whole. The topic has polarised gamers since the advent of online connectivity in game consoles. For some, it stands as a great way to deliver game expansions that continue to make videogames interesting past their typical lifespans, and to deliver new ways to interact with the content on offer. For others, it is a cynical exercise in money making that serves only to exploit. As with most arguments, the true answer probably lies somewhere in the middle of the two viewpoints.

My viewpoint on DLC, therefore, is rather mixed. I think that for a DLC to work as a value proposition to me, it has to offer significant content. Microtransactions, in that case, offer little to me as a gamer. I feel turned off by how such content tends to treat the underlying game as a patchwork of mix-and-match content, leaving me feeling like I am being delivered an incomplete experience. On the other hand, I think the best DLCs are those that offer multiple hours of gameplay.

In my opinion, DLC that changes the fundamental ‘feel’ of the game is usually a bad thing. I much prefer to play games as originally intended, like it or not. It is an issue that I often feel like I am not getting the ‘genuine’ experience when I can play the game in a different way, or when DLC allows something that is story-breaking such as silly costumes. While unlockables have always been among my favourite rewards in gaming, as a purchase I feel like I am somehow undermining my own story experience, which is a strange and hypocritical kind of view.

What is the worst practice in DLC, however, is that of ‘horse armour’ (made infamous as a poor offering on Oblivion). Transactions that offer little to no value in gameplay terms to the consumer. While I am typically on the positive side of DLC if it extends story and game value beyond the original purchase, ‘just’ downloading superficial items such as armour or costumes as a paid practice runs dangerously close to the more cynical view of offering downloadable content; a poor, no-effort modification that offers no real value that is worth paying for.

As such, my preferred DLC is the variety that delivers story-based content. Perhaps a few hours of optional side-missions or even an extension to the campaign in its entirety. One example that I loved was Fallout 3’s Broken Steel add-on which allowed the storyline to be extended past the endgame, which was a boon to players like myself that felt like they wanted to be able to freely-roam the Capital Wasteland after the story was concluded. It also fixed a major glaring plothole in the original story’s ending which, without going into spoiler territory, made little to no real sense.

Multiplayer map-packs generally offer no value to me as a gamer that doesn’t generally play online in a massive capacity. However, it is of my opinion that such a practice is generally cynical; such a practice splits the playerbase into categories that either have the DLC or don’t. Not being able to play certain gametypes because one hasn’t purchased the corresponding multiplayer pack that has no offline value whatsoever in extending gameplay seems like a shady practice in my opinion.

The worst kinds of DLC are, however, widespread and well-known. ‘Day One DLC’, and ‘On-Disk DLC’, which ultimately come down to the definition of paying extra to unlock or activate content that was already shipped as part of the game’s final retail release. It is difficult to separate some of these kinds of DLC as an actual case of content being held back that was intended for release at retail, but the practice is infamous and prevalent, with core gameplay features being reduced to marketing fodder to boost pre-orders.

This kind of practice is abhorrent and is what has given DLC a bad name. On the whole, the market for downloadable expansions has become a minefield to navigate. Between microtransactions, low-value propositions and even day-one content, it has become impossible to separate poor business practice from a concept that has been developed with the best of intentions.

There needs to be better policing of DLC in the future, but as the main source of any change in the gaming industry is capitalism and marketing, then the future seems bleak as to whether DLC will be seen as an innovation or a money-grab. It is too early to call, but perhaps with the right pressure from player groups, we can start to shift the path to make it the former rather than the latter.