Games being p2w is nothing new. With the rise of mobile popularity and the expansion of the mobile loot box, gatcha game, able-to-buy-everything business model into traditional the console/pc gaming market, pay to win is definitely not going away. The topic for today, though, is how in most circles calling a game pay to win is one of the worst insults you can give. Bad graphics can be “retro” and buggy gameplay can be “early access”, but pay to win has no excuse… Or does it?
Context here is incredibly important. We’re going to reference our, relatively comprehensive, definition of pay to win. Hint: It’s more than just buying the absolute best gear and then “winning”. For this post, we’re going to discuss the various aspects of “pay to win” in gaming, if those aspects are “good” or “bad”, who exactly wins and loses, and if there are maybe more complications than we normally consider.
First, let’s cover the “Why”. Why do games have pay to win elements? The starting answer is obviously “money”. Companies want more things they can sell you. But these things aren’t one sided. For them to sell, someone has to buy. So, why do people buy? This has some varying reasons. If the game is selling something for cash that you could also earn, then usually someone is buying because they have more money than time and it makes sense to them to buy instead of grind. Also, in this scenario someone might buy to skip one aspect of a game in order to spend more time on the aspect they enjoy more. If the game is selling something unique to the cash shop, though, the player just wants that thing and finds spending money worthwhile.
So who does it benefit? Obviously the company selling the item and getting more money. Next most apparently, the person who wanted to buy the thing and got the thing. From there, many people outside of those two groups look at those people buying and selling as part of the problem. But, is it a real problem or a just solution that no one wants? For free to play games, some pay to win aspects are essentially always present. No developer is making their game for free, someone is paying for it. If you aren’t, then someone else is picking up your tab. Many games, such as League of Legends, fund their game almost exclusively through cosmetics. Others, such as mobile games, however, tend to sell absolutely everything. However, neither would be free without pay to win. Keep in mind, based on our definition linked above, pay to win includes pay for cosmetics, pay for convenience, pay for advantage, and pay for power. LoL sells cosmetics and a tiny amount of convenience, Legendary: Game of Heroes (a mobile game) sells the absolute most powerful items AND all of the convenience. I could see LGOH and similar phone games not even existing, without microtransactions because people tend to not want to pay for mobile games. League, however, would likely have a monthly subscription. I don’t see them being satisfied with a single box purchase, so without microtransactions, there would be almost no other way to make it similar. Is that…better?
If you’re someone who plays a free to play game and don’t spend, would you rather have to buy it? For some, sure. There have been games that I wish I could have paid $10 on my phone and remove any pay to win, so I could do and earn everything without feeling like I could/should spend more, but there’s many others I’d never have spent money on and therefore wouldn’t even have played without them selling other people stuff. A game like League would be similar for me, I’d never play it if I had to subscribe, because I don’t play it enough to warrant it. Sure, if I could have bought it once years ago, but it would certainly not be getting maintained the same way if they got a box sale a decade ago and nothing more. So… for someone who says “pay to win” like it’s an insult… does pay to win benefit me? Well… yeah… Except when it doesn’t. I’ve been playing a lot of Raid: Shadow Legends recently. A person could easily spend hundreds of dollars a month on the game if they wanted to top all of the charts. No amount of effort, skill, coordination, research or time can trump money in many of their events. I’d totally drop $20 or something to just buy the game and be able to efficiently earn everything at a rate equal to anyone else. Instead, $20 gets more energy or shards that have a random chance at something good but a high chance at something worthless.
Let’s do a quick summary so far:
Pay to Win is good for:
- Companies wanting more sales
- Players wanting to save time/skip content
- Players wanting exclusive items
It’s bad for:
- Players with more time than money
- Players wanting fair competition for content or progression
Of course, I did say that it gets more complicated, right? Since pay to win isn’t as simple as pay money and “win”. Is paying for cosmetics “bad”? Does it hurt the game? Most would argue it wouldn’t, but… take World of Warcraft as an example. It isn’t uncommon to see complaints on the forums from people who paid for the box (and each expansion going forward), pays monthly, but still finds there’s cosmetics that they have to buy and cannot earn. If it feels bad, then… it’s kinda bad. So… if there was no microtransactions would anyone feel bad? Probably not. And if someone had negative feelings about not a game not having inherently cash based mechanics… well… they probably want a casino and not a video game.
One of the other major concerns for players is that having microtransactions means the developers focus on developing those cash shop items and NOT developing the game. This to me seems incredibly unlikely. The whole reason for microtransactions is that they earn more money per development cost than anything else. If developing an entire game gets you a 60 dollar sale, but developing one fancy looking sword gets you $10… then 10 dollar sword makes more money per time. This doesn’t necessarily mean that development time is taken away from other aspects of the game. With these microtransactions, the game, in theory, has a larger budget for every other aspect. Again, do we really imagine League of Legends would still be getting active maintenance after so many years without their skin sales? Also consider how World of Warcraft has not raised their subscription fee, ever, after more than 15 years. Can you think of many other things that don’t cost more now than in 2004? While this is speculation, it makes sense to consider that their cash shop is helping keep the prices down. Are those boosts and cosmetics bad for the game now?
Unfortunately, there are different arguments going on here. Many players would argue that they’d rather pay more for a game if it meant there was no pay to win, no microtransactions. Others would be entirely pushed out of a game if it became more expensive. Final Fantasy 7 cost 40 million to produce when it was released in 1997. Counting for inflation (according to this calculator) that would be 70 million now. Final Fantasy 15 cost an estimated 300 million to make. We can take from this a roughly 4x increase in gaming development costs over the past 25 years. FF7 cost $50 in 1997 when it released… FF15 cost $60. 4x the development cost and 1.2x the sale price. How do companies do it? By designing games that have more things to sell after they release. DLC are generally more favored than cash shops, but the developer logic is similar. DLC are more profitable than the original release because they are able to reuse their engine, assets, etc.
This, though, brings us to the main negative aspect. In my last paragraph “by designing games that have more things to sell”. So… yes. Games are being designed, in advance, with strong consideration for how to monetize them further after the initial purchase. Be it subscriptions, DLC, expansions, or microtransactions. Does this hurt the games? It’s really impossible to say, but it’s hard to believe it doesn’t. Games are being designed, often, with holes in them. Developers artificially create pain points that can be skipped via boosts. Instead of seeing “oh… most people don’t enjoy leveling alts in our game, let’s make leveling better”, they see an opportunity for sales. Even if that 10 dollar sword didn’t directly take away from developing something else, it was still an idea and design that someone had and didn’t make it into the game naturally.
It’s easy to see the harm in a game when the pay to win goes full tilt with pay for power and heavy pay for advantage, but even pay for convenience and cosmetics can cause some players to feel bad about it while not bringing anyone else any joy that they wouldn’t get from shopping. And selling extra character slots, or bag space, or experience boosts might not hurt the competitive gameplay for most games… if your game feels better with more bag space or character slots or quicker leveling then isn’t the base game objectively worse without those cash shop purchases? So, I have to say… yes, pay to win is bad. Pay to win hurts game development… all the way from buying a pretty outfit to level boosts to buying the strongest gear. It adds an extra element of haves and have nots. It encourages artificial time gating, gear drought, and other unnecessary pain points in a game.
However… while pay to win is certainly bad. It may be better than the alternative. I don’t want most of my stupid mobile games to have a $40 dollar cost to download. I don’t want League of Legends to have a monthly subscription. I don’t want World of Warcrafts sub to cost $60 dollars a month. And how many players would struggle to buy any video games if the cost was proportional to where it was in 1997 considering todays development cost. A game now costs 4x more to develop. 4x 50 dollars is a 200 dollar purchase price. How small would our game libraries be if games cost that much each? How many more people would be forced to wait years for prices to drop? While it’s frustrating that I’ve yet to earn, through gameplay, a skin for my favorite LoL champ, it’s better than removing the game for me as an option to casually pick up and play. So, while pay to win, in all it’s forms, is almost certainly harmful to game development and the player base, paying several times more money per game or having games with exclusively small budgets, is probably worse.
TL:DR
The short of it, pay to win, be it cosmetics or pure power, is somewhat negative for the players and game quality. How much this hurts the game and player experience depends on the kind of game, the target audience, and the scope of the p2w. However, given that these additional microtransactions are likely keeping the costs of games down relative to inflation and increasing development costs, they may be a necessary evil to ensure that there are many games that a variety of players with different budgets can play.