I'm inclined to believe that publishers are the ones calling the shots with these decisions and developers tend to be silent accomplices, in part due to having no other choice. So why do developers and publishers do this? Remarkable system but ultimately made insignificant by GamersFirst's pay to win policies. Sooner or later, the player base catches up to these malpractices and simply leaves for another game.ĪPB: Reloaded - Literally everything you see on this character and the car is customizable. I'm pretty sure I have just described blackmail. If we don't keep throwing our money at the game, the developers will cripple our gameplay by forcing us to grind for hundreds of hours before we can be on equal footing with the rest of the players. This is just a poor excuse for forcing the players to throw additional money at their games. They can enforce the pay to win behaviour by giving players the illusion of choice, claiming that microtransactions are just a shortcut for players who cannot invest enough time due to their real life obligations such as studies, work or children.
Not all players will be willing to pay for the mentioned advantage at first and the small amount of those who pay for it is at first negligible. This is typically followed by the game's developers and/or publishers trying to force more and more players into the paying group. This sentence is a red flag you should never ignore, as in all cases up to this point it literally translated into ''you will either cough up the money or spend hundreds of hours grinding and still be at a disadvantage compared to someone who bought progression''. Their developers and publishers will claim that ''players can either invest their time or their money in order to unlock items or progress through the game''. Games that have the pay to win system incorporated usually try to obfuscate this trait by allowing players unlock everything by in-game means. Prime examples of pay to win games that lost their players are APB: Reloaded and Star Wars: Battlefront II. Video games that thrive on such a system are frowned upon by gamers and as a consequence, they lose their playerbase very quickly. Pay to win in video games is generally defined as a video game ecosystem where players can gain an advantage over their opponents by spending real life currency.
First of all, in order to understand the pay to win basics, we need a definition.