Complete games. They are called complete games.
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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This is because we feel we paid for something that expects nothing in return.
When you pay for a game that includes add ons and microtransactions, all of a sudden we‘re back to being a marketing target, and we implicitly know we‘re pushed to spend money.
We play games to escape the real world…
I think it is okay to have a dlc IF it is fairly priced, there is proper content included and the base wasn't gutted for it.
Positiv example would be Factorio. Negative example is Stellaris.
I've been wanting to spend more money towards the development of Factorio. I've played around 1500 hours before the DLC and they have very limited merch. While I am usually sceptical towards DLC in general, it was a no-brainer in this case.
They should sell some more merch though.
I feel like owlcat has done a good job with this in their games. They feel complete and if you like the game there are DLCs with decent amounts of extra content. Also really like that the DLCs are integrated into the game (usually) and not just an extra chunk tacked on
Agreed, Owlcat has always earned my money and then some, I think. Especially with the new rogue trader DLCs, which are all connected to the main story somehow and playable in a new playthrough.
I feel like RimWorld has also done well with this
Tend to agree about DLC - Some times the Devs have too many ideas - DLC is way to manage costs. But only if it expands the game
More than that. When you buy a game with microtransactions in it, you're volunteering to be a marketing target and paying for the privilege. Publishers aren't trying to get everyone to buy mtx, only the people who bought the game. You're giving them money and saying, "yes, I want to be targeted, please."
There’s a difference between a game made with passion and a game by EA/Ubisoft.
He's right
I started playing warframe recently. Yes it's free to play, yes there's monetization, but I feel it's one of those games you really don't need to buy anything for. you can pretty much obtain everything via grinding. I can see how that wouldn't appeal to a lot of people today but I used to play everquest and anarchy online etc so I know about the grind and I don't mind it.
The thing about Warframe is it tempts you but doesn't force you to buy. You can sell your time to people who paid actual money, and then buy things you want for that money. The only issue with Warframe is the fomo - them locking warframes behind relics that are "deprecated". Sometimes they unearth them again, but it's an artificial attempt at "I need to buy this or it is gone".
Also the process of getting parts is 100% gambling on low odds. You can get lucky immediately or have to "reroll" by running the same relic over and over and over again. It sucks if you want a very specific thing and often leads to people just buying it outright.
The community is very open about warframe.market existing though. Like an auction house for player trading across all servers. So if your relics drop bad items. Sell them on the market until you can eventually buy the one you want.
Other games do thinks like soulbound/account bound stuff. Not everything in WF is tradable, but most things are
There is very little FOMO in warframe. The unsealing you speak of is a rotation due to the game having over a thousand of things to unlock so farming specific weapon part when you need 5 parts would be very difficult. It's there to limit the pool. If you want something specific? That's what trade is for.
Relic system is quite fair but you do need to somewhat understand the full system to see it.
The one thing that WF does fairly annoyingly are weapon slots. You have to buy them off the market with platinum so either you buy it at 75% discount or trade prime parts to get it. A single gold part will be worth more than the 2 weapon slot but it's the one example that makes you "spend money".
I'm playing since closed beta and have thousands of hours, got my wife and son into it. I must've spent maybe £300 in total (maybe more) to show my support, but I could've easily just done trading and bought all the cosmetics I wanted that way too.
WF makes you spend money on things you want to, not need to. No bullshit paid for battle pass or battle pass paid for skips etc.
Sealing / unsealing is 100% FOMO and I have seen people go "Ivara Prime is out now I need to play Warframe". You can easily setup a system where you choose a rotation to go for when choosing a mission. It wouldn't even split the playerbase since it only affects the rewards at the end. But they don't, they do this song and dance about removing and bringing back specific weapons and warframes.
You're right that you can't personally farm them, but you can still end up getting them from publics. The old relics are still operable. I have hundreds of old relics that I open as fodder, as do other regular players. And ofc trading. The surplus of old relics helps keep down trade prices because they're still trickling into the market, albeit slower.
A better example is prime accessories. These are real-money only, and can only be bought from Prime Access (when a Prime is released) or a Prime Resurgence (Prime temporarily back for sale a year or so later). Stuff like Octavia Prime's shawzin/sitar being $35 or gone for (effecively) forever.
They already split it in 4 ways with lith neo meso and axi.
I see your point, but missing out and the fear of it? I'm not sure. But maybe it's because I've played for longer than some of these players have been alive for... There's just so much that the whole "OMG I need this specific thing!!!" Doesn't add up as there's just so much good stuff in there and power creep has been insane prioritising new things or ever green items.
There are various warframes that work completely different when they are prime. And yeah, you spending so much time with the game makes it that the things that it does bad seem normal to you.
I love the game, but I'd like to point out that baldur's gate 3 does have a single microtransaction, it gives you a custom dice skin, a tie in item from divinity original sin and a bunch of low level potions. It costs 12CAD.
I will point out that this is mainly just a way to get the free preorder bonus though, and has no real gameplay effects. The dlc also contains a digital artbook, digital soundtrack and some character sheets. I feel like that is quite a bit more than the normal micro transactions, though I still somewhat see your point
Let's not forget about the two extra bard songs, which was the only reason I got it lol.
Thing is, I've seen funbucks stuffed into various single player games over the years. The first was probably Mass Effect 3, but some of the Assassin's Creed games have it too.
But who are they for? Who buys them? They've never really felt like anything that would be useful. It's usually just some crappy cosmetics, or something you can get through normal play. It's like they've been stuffed in at the request of management, but also like nobody has ever checked up on what they actually put in, or whether anybody bought it...
Who buys them?
- People who dont game buying a present who just go "oh deluxe version, not that much more expensive, lets treat them"
- wealthy people that just pick the priciest option
- people with completitionist tendencies
- streamers and wannabe streamers for whom the extra cost is a trivial operating expense
- children and others that dont understand the value of a dollar
- people whose primary draw to the game is the photomode
- "i like game, I want more game therefore I pay more" (yes this logic is terrible when applied to microtransactions)
The type of monetisation that especially confuses me as a guy brought up on pre-internet era gaming is any kind of pay to win. You're buying a game then paying extra money so you don't have to then go through the tedious task of actually playing the game.
I've had a few games come with a handful of items for some reason, and very quickly learned to never use them.
Pre order now and ruin the game!
The same thing has always confused me about CCGs. Why spend hundreds of dollars to be able to play them at all, when you can just get Dominion and know that the game is both fair and varied?
The game industry was assaulted by the MBAs long ago. They have this financial concept of leaving money on the table. That if you aren't skinning your customers alive for all they have then you are losing money.
Then there was that infamous power point slide that got leaked where, basically, the plan is to use games to bring in audiences then use gambling techniques to hook on whales then cash them for eternity. Thus "live services games" were born.
It feels like uncreative, predatory shit because it is. It's a finance people idea, not a creative game developer idea.
I think the last few years has left them struggling with the reality that landlords and supermarkets also have that concept, and when it's a choice between having a roof, food, or entertainment, then they're way down the list.
Who buys them?
Play Nice by Jason Schreier mentions that the "Pay to Win" style of monetization is very popular in Chinese markets.
I'd wager that, since other markets strongly oppose that, public companies focused on profits over player sentiment needed to find a middle ground. (That dichotomy is the main focus of the last half of the book)
We revolted when Battlefront 2 had loot boxes at the center of game progression, so companies hoping to make the most money in both markets need to make the purchasable items either purely cosmetic or only helpful in early game progression (starter packs).
Gamers reward good games
Unfortunately, they also reward bad games.
Exactly. You make good MMORPG and money will come in droves too. Same for RPG or fuck it, even poker game on crack. Just make good games, but it's not as easy as it sounds... No one just clicks "make game bad" and often the Microtransactions are dictated by whatever publishing deal they have.
I don't buy single player games with other monetization. You want another $30 you add another 30 hours of good content.
Wish granted, but it's just 30 dlcs each around a full-game price and you gotta wait til they go on sale for $1 once every year at a random time.
So, I've got steam wishlist items going into the third grade this year. I can wait.
I wish you were less evil.
CDPR get this, at least. Phantom Liberty, Hearts of Stone, Blood and Wine. All well worth it.
Absolutely!
Games as a service is a scam.
I mean, MMOs were supposed to be continuously supported and developed during the enrollment period. Earlier iterations of the model had live DMs running encounters, active continuous releases to expand the game world and advance the storyline, and robust customer support to address the bugs and defects. Also, just maintaining the servers necessary to support that much data processing was hella-expensive on its face.
Games as a service don't need to be a scam.
But eventually, the studios figured out they can do the MMO business model on any game. Justifying a fee for Everquest was a lot more reasonable than justifying it for a glorified Team Fortress knock off. Or a freaking platformer.
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I appreciate the sentiment but the (very shitty) reality is single player games don't come any where near the profitability of these multiplayer games in the current climate. Like no where even remotely close in terms of effort to profit. You can straight up clone call of duty every year, or add a few maps to fortnite, or add a new operator to siege, and monetize every tiny fraction of the game thru micro transactions and people will keep on playing and keep on paying.
Single player games operate pretty much the opposite. You buy it once. Play thru it. Beat it. And generally never touch it again unless maybe some dlc comes out and you might add a few more hours to it and then never think about it again.
I say this as a giant fan of single narrative games, it's just a much smarter business move to pump out shitty online multiplayer games.
Fortnite was released in 2017, last year it netted almost $6 billion.
Call of duty has been dog water for like a decade. Its been the best selling game every single year since 2009 unless Rockstar releases a game (and Hogwarts legacy randomly dominating one year).
World of Warcraft came out in 2004. Last year they announced they had over 7 million active subscribers... Over two decades later.
Apex legends came out in 2019, last year it made over $3 billion.
The list goes on and on and on. You just can't compete with weirdos obsessed with showing off a wizard hat on their character in an online game or busting open a loot box to get a new weapon skin or something.
Reading the article, where did you get "audience rewards" == "maximal extraction of cash from the audience"?
IMO having a very profitable game that will comfortably fund your studio for the next 5-10 years AND that has universal critical acclaim and a devoted fanbase is reward enough. You didn't lose because you didn't make the most money out of all your competitors.
Different games have different audiences. Some people want arcade slop and slot machines to play with friends, they were never going to play BG3 or E33 anyway.
Important to the conversation as well is the fact that plenty of live-service games have recently failed spectacularly. Remember Concord? Within the industry, that is a clear signal that very high budget online slop isn't as risk-free as previously assumed, which makes ambitious narrative-driven single player games an interesting diversification strategy for studios.
It's not either or. Executives could spend 100M€ on "nearly guaranteed" online slop, or 80M€ on online slop and 20M€ on a good narrative game. And the critical and commercial success of games like BG3 and E33 are definitely moving the needle.
Especially when micro-economically, there are diminish returns when scaling dev teams. It's kind of obvious but the first million euros does a lot more for a project than the 100th million. That further strengthens the case for a move away for big players from ONLY funding live-service slop.
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