The thing with microtransactions is that people actually buy it. And it makes gobs of money. We don’t deserve full games.
Whales buy it. For every 1,000 fans upset by this decision there is 1 fan who is rich enough that spending $1,000 on the game is nothing. A lot of these aggressive monetization schemes aren’t meant to make money on the average player.
It’s not that this monetization isn’t meant to target the average player specifically, it’s made to entice singular one-time purchases in a similar fashion to how places like Walmart work. Yes, they have the data that shows a few whales will make those transactions worth it, at the same time they are counting on catching the occasional non-whale slacking. Trick enough minnows into a net and you have the same mass as a whale.
I know this is a small difference in context, to a business it can mean millions of additional dollars. So remember: They know whales will pay. At the same time they are expecting to catch more than a few smaller fish in the process.
It’s up to us to prove them wrong where we can.
Yes, they have the data that shows a few whales will make those transactions worth it, at the same time they are counting on catching the occasional non-whale slacking. Trick enough minnows into a net and you have the same mass as a whale.
You’re actually thinking much more intelligently than they do. I was in games for almost two decades, left a couple years ago. The vast, vast, vast, vast majority of money made is from whales, it’s not even close. I’ve worked on games where we had to speak to banks in both Canada and the UAE to allow a man to make six figure purchases per week. He and one other whale were over 75% of our revenue.
Now the intelligent thing to do to make money here would be, as you said, getting minnows to spend – but that takes too long and the people who run these things want it now.
So rather than selling each armour colour or whatever for 50 cents each, they’ll charge 20 bucks for all of it, pricing out 90% of users*, and barely making money on it, instead of a million people buying it making them a tonne of money. (*this is a personal experience tale, this did happen, these numbers are unaltered.)
The sad part is, those preyed upon aren’t always necessarily well off enough to afford it.
It’s one of those situations where either the microtransactions are in fact small, so the low costs add up over time before the victims realize it, or they’re set up to pressure people into multiple rapid transactions, and so they either exploit some people’s poor impulse control or gambling addictions, or more often than not, both.
