What is Pay To Win?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 1 ต.ค. 2024
- Josh Strife Hayes Youtooz Plushy! :
youtooz.com/pr...
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What actually is 'pay to win', can we define it, is your understanding the same as mine?
Or is it a sliding scale of design where money can effect a game more and more?
let's find out.
A big Thank you as usual to the supporters on Patreon and Twitch who keep the channel alive.
Look I'm using FOMO to make you buy me:
youtooz.com/products/josh-strife-hayes-plush-9-inch
OK I gotta say this here. DD2 DOESN'T have fast travel behind a paywall... all that portcrystal does is give you one extra waypoint you could theoretically get to. But there are TEN of them in game, and you CANT buy the fast travel consumables. And it isn't like its an early game advantage either, because Ferrystones (the consumables) are rare and expensive. As a brand new player, having an extra place you *can't actually port to* because its too expensive, is... meaningless.
Everything but the music pack can be found in the first few hours of gameplay (or is just... irrelevant) Yes Capcom is doing their usual bullshit, but none of what you can find in those MTX is actually a power increase of any kind, or different from what can be found in-game. (I suppose the tent cosmetics... so yeah that counts from the second tier I guess)
Josh please redo your part on dd2 having paid fast travel. You get the items to fast travel very quickly. It falls in your level 3. At no point is any of it free. The item ferry crystal is the item to actually travel and can only be obtained in-game. A port crystal is located at cities and can only get 10. Please love your stuff just do a bit more research.
Yeah kinda disappointed with the dd2 section, i was hoping he would go more in depth and go over the nuance but it seems he just bought into the hate mob
@@artemis6658This!
when it comes to pay to win people never consider whether or not they actually need to pay to win for example when yugioh master duel launched players ranted that it was pay to win because they chased the meta what those players failed to notice is that yugioh is a game of synergy meaning that any F2P deck built the right way can crush any paid deck
Josh has DLCed his likeness. First he was a free youtuber, then he was a free streamer, then he introduced Twitch Subs so we could get badges. Now we have a plush of Josh so we can have him in house. Josh is pay to win.
Josh got popular from Asmon, so Josh actually went Lose to Win somehow.
@@ThisisCitrus Really?
@@ThisisCitrus Can't confirm. I learned about Asmon from Josh.
@@ThisisCitrusThis isn't even true
While it may have aided in his success, Josh has always been made of win. He has already been a driven quality youtuber for a while. I watched some of Josh his vids way before Asmongold ever touched them.
If it wasn't Bethesda with the horse armor it would have been someone else, but God damn it Tod.
I respect this sentiment 😂
Horse armor was just a Western company doing what was pretty common in the East for some time. You want a patient zero, look to Korean MMOs.
@@mrbigglezworth42 This. Some people (like Josh too) never do any proper deep dive analytical research...
Exactly, western companies would've got there either way, because Nexon was already selling all kinds of predatory crap in Maple Story and making absolute bank.
@@mrbigglezworth42 While this is true in a technical sense, the horse armor DLC has a couple factors that make it one of the prime examples that people tend to use:
1. It was paid DLC for an offline, single-player game, which also had a box price.
2. It was one of the first paid DLCs for a primarily-Western-audience game.
3. Many online games that had DLC being sold were F2P - not all of them, but potentially a large majority.
4. Many of the MMOs based in the East Asian regions weren't available to be played outside of those areas, or had such low player counts outside of those area (due to things like terrible ping, overall poor connections, lack of translations, etc.) that they didn't really affect Western audiences whatsoever.
So while it might not have been the *first* example of paid DLC, it was one of the first examples of paid DLC that Western gamers - and more importantly, game companies - experienced.
"FIFA is just Genshin Impact for people who like middle aged millionaires" is my favourite sentence of the year so far.
What's worse than pay to win are RNG Loot Boxes and gambling gatchas 💸
"I am 9 inches, which is also the size of this plushie"
Ayo 😂
Not sure how I feel about that lol
Don't forget: he's European. He meant to say 9 centimeters 😂😂😂
@@coreywilson3493 9cm flubby Wiener could be pretty impressive though 😂
@@zerobahamut03I know how, and there is no shame in that ;)
Either way, he's on sale right now.
When the footage of "Clash of Whatever" started playing at 10:00 my monkey brain automatically started looking for the skip ad button..
Just get sponsorblock and adblock
Sponsor block is a thing? @@WwZa7
@@WwZa7Yeah Fuck content creators, they don't deserve anything
@@WwZa7sponsorblock, ublock origin + firefox
Clash of ship craft
I feel this video could be shorter... Can I pay to get it shorter?
Real Life is the greatest P2W game ever made that nobody can sadly opt out...
but in real life, every money is basically in game currency tho.
Well people have opted out. It's just tragic to do so
Some times life feels like a Call of Duty lobby where I’m killing everyone and grabbing all the tags and my teammates are just fucking around camo grinding.
@@nepunepu5894 true...
@@lolly9804 not really. Being dead is a completely different state from being alive...
"What is pay to win?"
*Metin2 and Maplestory show up in the background*
And that's all the MapleStory Josh will ever give us lol
See this is silly bc there is no win in maplestory.
There is a saying that playing in Metin 2's public servers is pure stupidity
@@indrickboreale7381why’s that?
maplestory is pay 2 lose. people lost 500M not knowing their rate stat was 0%
There's a certain aspect of P2W that I do like, and it's when as a F2P player, you beat a P2W player. It's one of the best feelings.
i've been playing a crappy game called mighty party for 5 years. i hope i didn't make anyone spend (any more)money on it just because they can't beat me after their 1-3 years of playing or hundreds spent
Yeah, but that's bad game design. Preferably, free-to-play always loses to avoid customer dissatisfaction.
@@mojus2890 Actual skill issue.
@@BoneWalker I agree not being able to spend 30,000 dollars on a game is a skill issue.
Being given a choice is ok - Either Grind for a reasonable amount of time or just pay for it. Hope Josh makes a video about 3on3freestyle - it's a good example of gatcha's and gambling exploitation that steals money from players.
The option to pay to bypass an inconvenience... completely shatters the authenticity of that inconvenience.
For me, that was the most important takeaway from this video.
I think the truth is harsher: It encourages inconvenience.
If an MMO has a level skip, why would they ever put resources into making the leveling experience better instead of worse, when they are getting paid based on how bad it is?
If a game has cosmetics, why would they put good-looking items into the game when people buy more cosmetics if the in-game items look worse?
Any kind of MTX disincentivises making the best game you can, because you are getting paid for doing the opposite.
If your game is F2P then that's just the transaction the customer makes, but for anything else...
@@Wyzai pretty sure you are correct there. Sad, but obviously accurate
@@drewt1717I think it's been like that for quite some time. Then again, I just avoid AAA titles and play indie games. Those people actually need to produce good games to become succesful. You can buy their games easily, until they CD-Project-Red themselves.
@@Wyzai This guy is right one the money. This is why "just don't buy them" doesn't work. If the MTXs weren't there, they would've designed or balanced the game differently. They would've done it better. That's the real reason microtransactions (and all F2P games) suck.
@@poika22 then CS:GO (or CS2) wouldn't exist (or top 1 games on steam in playercount) without Arm Deals update which introduce loot boxes (and agents that although purely cosmetics, can team ruin recognition). Counter Strikes need that system to live or be at the same state when it launched which is poorly received and seen as only to divide the Counter Strikes player base instead unite. So it's more like a person (player that is millionaire and oblivious or doesn't care to the P2W issues) give money in the wrong person (CEO of that game and that games's gambling sites owners) instead right person (developers that actually create games that doesn't suck) and the right person sometimes doesn't even have funds to do start creating games.
I remember when WoW brought out "Sparkly Pony". Somebody on the boards said, "This is the first step down a road, which has serious consequences." (Or words to that effect). Oh, if they only could see WoW now.
I remember those arguments. I was on the side of "cosmetics only" because nothing was going to stop them with a shop but I at least wanted it to not affect the gameplay. And to me the best looking armors and mounts were already in the game. Personal opinion there.
I hoped that was where it would stop but alas I knew it wasn't. And I was right.
it's been a while since I've played. what's it like now?
@@20x20 you can straight up just buy the in game currency and they started selling starter sets of gear
You could already pay for in-game money and use in-game money to buy virtually every cosmetic in the game, as well as a lot of stat increasing gear. Even if it isn't through the company, it was still available, for those with more money than sense.
You know all the time I'll see companies do something scummy but it's minor, minute, or just something that is just barely offensive to the customer, and it always has a bandwagon of those willing to defend it. A great example is something like how a few months back XBox decided to put a CoD ad when you booted your console. There were so many people saying, "This isn't that big of a deal...", "It's just one ad...", "Just push one button to get rid of it dumbass...", "You're blowing this out of proportion...", and while all of those were still fair points they missed the bigger picture. I remember when TH-cam had 'one ad' before every few videos.
Josh said it really well early in the video, I don't want to scrub through the whole thing so I'll quote, but it was something like, "Older games have more pay to win mechanics because they have been around long enough to keep adding more and more of them.", and that right there is the point. They always begin with one small step, something that won't truly shake the foundations of their game. They do so to numb the players toward where the game is headed, that way they can do another, and another. It's always just the first of many stones used to pave a road to Hell...
It is a tried and true method to have a business lose money at first, and video games are no exception. You have to spend a lot of money to create a restaurant, right? You have to buy plates, utensils, licenses, a building, etc., but more importantly you need enough time to get a good reputation. You'll typically lose money before you gain it. For video games they love giving out a great product at first, getting players hooked and milking those players until they run dry just to do it again and again with new games.
At least Genshin impact is one game, fifa comes out with a new game wiping all your past progress.
Its live service its pretty much the same thing people will pay as long at it release new characters (the only reason play gacha btw)
Same tactics same scam same crap
@@DOGEELLL Genshin is free and most of the characters are easy to get with mindful wishing. Fifa demands you pay for the game yearly for copy paste assets. At least genshin has some level quality.
They might fall both under live service but one is much worse than the other.
@@zukodude487987 ACTUALY IF I D0 KN0W-BETAR GENSHIN-PLAYERS D0 EXBIRE IF D0NT BUY S00N ENUF (DID DABLED BUT WASNT EVER SERIUS THUS I CANT CLAIM-DEFINEITIVELY)
**REMEMBER (KN0W)*
Does fifa even have rates up banners?
And Games Like genshin are Not Directly competitive anyway so the p2w Does Not matter
As a sound technician, I’m marvelling at your coffee mug mic suspension. My hero.
Nothin' like a steaming hot cup of mic!
I didn't even notice until you said something. That is freaking hilarious
I was there. I was there 3000 years ago, when the horse armor was released.
We all pointed and laughed. "Surely no-one would buy that," we told ourselves.
Little did we know what horrors it would unleash.
Unfortunately many many people did buy it.
I was there too. I was absolutely disgusted and refused to buy it. I did, however like the idea of Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles. It seemed fair to pay for extra stories, quests, characters and equipment. But oh how it’s gone from there.
@@mikoto7693 Yeah, I bought Nights of the Nine and Shivering Isles. Expansion packs were usually good value back in the day. A shame DLC doesn't follow that model very often these days...
@@michaelcalvin42 Maybe I’m showing my age here, but it’s just about the only kind of additional purchase beyond the game itself that I’m okay with. At least so long as it’s adding *additional and optional content* such as more quests, npcs, items ect. I’m not cool with DLC that means basically that the true ending or something is locked behind paid DLC.
Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles being good examples. You can defeat Mehrunes Dagon and end the Oblivion crisis without them. They just add more stuff for you to do. As for the Wizard’s Tower, Fighter’s Keep ect, I was fine with that too so long as the pricing was fair.
Oh what a sweet summer child I was. I had no idea what was about to be unleashed.
the portal was opened and now we are flooded with demons and hellspawn
bro the microphone in the mug...lmao genius.
Stage 8 is a very apt description of my struggle with card games and why I had to give them up, booster packs are the OG loot boxes.
Did you played lor? I heard that its very generous in a level that its losing money instead of gaining
@@yuurifanclub Problem with LoR for me personally is that they are moving away from PvP to PvE. Since, PvP is what I love about TCG/CCGs, it's hard to recommend to other people like me, despite LoR's economy being one of the best out of all Digital CCGs.
Have you tried Living Card Games?
Which is an idea they stole from trading cards. If getting all the cards is the win condition, then baseball cards have been "Pay-to-win" for over 100 years.
Play draft nights only. You'll come ahead on cards you want over time. Or just straight buy the cards you want. Never buy boosters.
"You should never grade evils, for if one is the worst, you might be tempted to kinship with the least." - Victor Saltzpyre
HOLY SIGMAR, BLESS THIS RAVAGED QUOTE!
That sounds like politics to me, maybe its because I live in the US but I was also convinced that politicians are usually the best of the worst people in society. Not everyone who is best for the job applies because not everyone wants to hang their entire life story out like laundry for everyone to see.
@@hsanrb Oh, honey, considering how wrong you are about politicians, since they're the worst of the worst, you can't fault us for outright ignoring what you said about the quote. Also, the quote is about principles and sticking to them. We'd be hard pressed to find someone like that in the USA. You are, after all, just british living in a different place, and they're known for being some of the worst people in the universe.
Nah, sometimes you need to be able to recognise a lesser evil due to a lack of options.
@@Eira_99 Gaming certainly isn't such a case, if we permit that they exist in the first place.
Regarding the coohcarnage tweet, we did get two examples where devs did balance the game around the cash shop; both the second shadows of mordor game an the second battlefront game had major overhauls to the game loot balance after the shops was removed/decreased.
15:00 Horse armor WASN'T just cosmetic! It also increased the health of whichever horse you purchased it for, it gave you one free armored horse (if you didn't have one), and it technically made the best horse in the game weaker due to an oversight by making an immortal horse killable.
The point was Bethesda opened the door for western gaming companies to start parsing out content that used to be in base game, dlc, or community creations. It was the first roach into the kitchen. It got crushed pretty quickly but we are overrun now and way too many people are engaging in sunk cost coping.
Yeah, from a pedantic pov, you are right, but the point Josh was making still stands, and it doesn't change the turning point the fucking horse armour was.
I don't know what you're talking about, every horse I put that armor on was killed by a random encounter on the road out of town, Umbra a couple times, but usually a troll or bandits. I never noticed any increase in health or defense for my horses.
@@UlshaRS *Loud incorrect buzzer sound* Oooh so sorry that credit actually belongs to Korean MMOs but for the west I'd place the blame on Second Life as that was getting huge media attention and was making millions off of microtransactions every year BEFORE Oblivion was even announced.
@@xsanguine8it replaces the original horse with a armored variant that has doubled the hp, up to 750 being the maximum.
So likely a lot of your horses didn't have a lot of hp to begin with? Or it might have to do with difficulty and/or character level.
I used to play Apex Legends and i spend unhealthy amount of money for skins and stuff. I often regretted that yet i still did it again, so i stopped playing and it was fine, until i found another game and did it again. I just couldn't help it.
Those games just also exploit time limitation and other stuff to make you do hasty and regrettable decision.
Now before i pay i take a day and really think if i really need that stuff and usually i decide not to buy it.
I've fallen into this trap too mate, these games are designed to prey upon our mental.. It's crazy how effective this shit is.. stay strong
Waiting for a bit before buying avoids a lot of bad purchasing decisions in general. Which is of course why companies like Google find it so important to get you to the "get the money out of your payment card" as soon as possible, with as little hassle as possible. And why you get those "incredible" first-timer discounts, to get you to "unlock" that card for further payments and make the next one even easier to do.
It's nothing new, really... but it's scary how _efficient_ those companies became at extracting that "revenue". And that's before you realize how much of that money flows from "the whales", who are brutally exploited to make the whole system "work". Morally abhorrent.
nail on the head. i've bought stuff before, and immediately afterwards i was like, "shit, that was actually a really stupid purchase."
I am this way with Path of Exile, for some reason I can't stop buying their MTX. However I realized how insanely good P2W is on this game. For reference if a player is lucky they MIGHT find 1-5 divines in a 10 hour period. The divines however are .08-17 cents a pop. This means, I can get about 10 divine for ONE dollar. 10$? with a coupon I can get over 100 divines EASILY. Now the odd part is, no matter how many times I report their accounts for RMT (which is ironic bc im the one buying lmao) Nothing ever happens. Furthmore the games creators were found to run RMT shops as well. Imo some games are designed in every way to funnel a player in to MTX/RMT. Whether it's power or efficiency. A buddy of mine had over 56 Hours of /played (10 of it on campaign). And a total of 7 divines to show for it. Now tell me, would you farm for 40+hours to see maybe a dozen divine? Or upload your CC and have more divines for 10$ then most players see in an entire league? And then have 39 hours to actually play your build?
Lmao 😂 just say you have no self control and your irresponsible with your money
35:20 35 minutes of well researched content on the subject, structured narrative, well delivered lines that likely took many takes, and then the guy just explodes to light Todd Howard’s ass on fire once again. Love it.
"well researched" there is blatant misinformation 19 mins into the video. the rest of it may be good but that was not well researched at all.
@@CodedGamingCan you please point to the specific example you are talking about? You just made a bold allegation without even saying what the allegation is.
@@Brixster the allegation is in regards to DD2's MTX situation. Fast Travel has been noted by Josh in this video to be a MTX but the item in question is not in that list shown and is only obtainable in game. the item that seems like a fast travel item (due to Port being the name) is not a Fast travel item
Edit: fixing the end of my comment to be more coherent
@@Keifeto crickets. these people wont even acknowledge that they have been corrected
@@alexw5042 I'd like to propose that there is a non-zero probability that "these people" do not check their TH-cam notifications every day. I'd also like to suggest that they didn't even get a notification because TH-cam sometimes doesn't do that (for replies to one's reply) and there would be very little reason to revisit this video and scroll down to the comments and see the list of replies to this comment, 1 day later.
Addiction runs in my family, so there are several games that I will never start for fear of getting addicted.
Not a gene btw. But your environment seems to encourage addictive behaviour. But good on you for being mindful about it!
@@Gloriankithsanustechnically yes there is no exact gene that causes addiction. However there are genes that can factor to addiction. Yes the bigger factors are usually environmental and cultural but there are genes that can influence one’s proneness to having addictions such as stuff with the frontal lobe, levels of serotonin and dopamine and etc.
@@rosalindcormier4384For example, both ADHD and Autism have an above-average correlation with addiction and both conditions do have genetic components. Correlation may not mean causation, but that does not mean you can ignore it.
yes good idea so you still can game without putting yourself at risk by making sure its not a game that has alot of micro transactions with something like gambling in the form of loot boxes and gacha or cosmetic collecting or whatever else and youll be alright and still able to enjoy certain games so thats whats up. Only thing that sux with that is the large majority of online game or games with an online component have some form of mtx so i guess you gotta stick to single player or some games that arent as extreme with the mtx like that
Unresolved trauma is a big part of addiction. I've been addicted all my life. From food, gaming to cannabis etc. Always thought, "oh, I have an addictive personality". Now I know it was a way to not have to feel emotions and pain from the CPTSD and abuse.
Trauma can jump in generations when not resolved. Do you think maybe this could be the case?
For anyone unfamiliar with Trauma and trauma work. "Trauma is anything our body doesn't have the capacity to deal with. It then shuts down and internalizes what happened". To heal it, we need to safely feel and connect in community with others. Be seen while we experience our emotions. Which is scary when we've hidden our entire lives. Talk therapy can help, but it won't heal it. Somatic and parts work is way more effective. Or other modalities which are bottom up. Reliving it just retriggers and makes it worse for most people. I like somatic and parts best, but CRM and the likes work great too. Journaling and exploring our emotions can also be useful, though I didn't know about my blocked traumatic memories until I made my body feel safe. Which I never had felt prior to somatic work. Always anxious.
Glad to see you mentioned Path of Exile. As someone with more than 2k hours in the game I'm still stunned to see people say that stash tabs aren't pay to win. They absolutely are.
Yes, you CAN beat the end game by only ever using your inventory, or even using the stash tabs you start with, but it is by far the least efficient, least fun, and hardest way to play the game. Paying for convenience, speed, and the ability to trade entire tabs full of rares for currency that can be used to enhance maps and craft items is absolutely a form of pay to win. Hell that's without even considering the massive amount of knowledge and preparation required to play to the very end game with that kind of limited storage space.
Truth is you can't realistically sell items without stash tabs anymore. Might be some software out there but they require you to put in information which puts your account at risk, and they aren't being worked on/developed. So not being able to sell items in a game with an active economy, massive P2W. Imagine if the G.E in runescape had a $5 paywall behind it, that's what PoE has.
They need to add a single premiums stash tab upgrade behind some ingame achievement like act 10 kitava.
The defense to that is: PoE isn't so much P2W as it is "pay to try". If you consider the entire campaign and maybe some of the first tiers of maps a "demo", the 4 stash tabs can carry you through that part. But once you start really getting into the swing of things, then buying a currency, map, fragment, and one premium tab on a stash tab sale is most likely a reasonable price for a game as high quality as PoE.
@@MyNameIsSalo I would probably say well before then, because of how powerful leveling uniques or tabula rasa can be for some builds. A player with a premium tab can buy goldrim, tabby, and a pair of movespeed boots that will last them to white maps all before hitting level 20 if they drop something worth selling. That can put them hours or days ahead if both are casual players. It's part of the FOMO and actually a huge reason why they'll never offer premium tabs for free. If you want to keep up with your friends you made playing path of exile, you have to pay for stash tabs or premium tabs.
I count PoE as a buy to play game, with a say $50ish AUD price tag. It does however have the most complete free trial of any game on the market. You -can- play the entirety of the game without spending money. Will it be a pain in the ass? Sure. The "buy to play" price tag gets you pretty much all the stash tabs you'll ever need, including for trade and the fancy ones like currency/map tabs etc.
I've been playing for 12ish years now, bit over that I think, and I've never used free to play with anyone because realistically it isn't. It has about the same price tag as Last Epoch, or half the price tag of Diablo IV, if we're comparing current equivalent ARPGs. Just the price tag is after you play the game for a while. One of my mates is newer, and only bought stash tabs when he was farming t16's, he did have to spend a bit longer doing some inventory tetris and that was the "f2p" cost.
@@taronzgaming7739 This sounds more accurate. "Pay to win" to me sounds like it's scalable, and you can keep paying to keep winning. In actuality, you can realistically buy just the currency tab, the map tab and 2 large premium tabs and be perfectly fine with that ~15$ investment.
Where would you put content DLCs that contain powerful items, but you have to earn them in the game, and they're not intentionally made easier to obtain than it should be?
Your point about fashion relating to pay to win is very good. I find it an acceptable developer practice, to some extent, but it did make me more aware of my tendency to pay for 'cosmetic power' and now I can budget that better. Great vid
Lot's of games selling $20 for a single helmet and you don't realise it because it says "2000 silver" as the cost. That abstraction from real money to ingame helps justify the ridicious prices
Helps to me mentally convert.
In Path of Exile, you get about 10 points for 1€. So those measly 50 points cosmetics actually cost 5 bucks. Which is the price of a beer or a sandwich. It's not nothing, but it's not very far either.
Now when I see the fabled 100 points helmet, or some 400 points armor, I seriously ponder my desire for them. They are priced as high as a full game, so they better transform my whole playing experience.
@@oneoranotaYeah the supporter packs are pretty aight though if you wanted the points you get the points + a set of armor and some cool things like a turtle hideout this coming league.
@@MyNameIsSalo yes the price is high for some cosemtics in games but its not someting that needs to be bought to comptete with other players and i think thats where josh is missing the point , now if you were buy cosemtic and it makes your character stronger then that would be differnt story and defently be pay to win , you could even compare LoL skin shop some skins that are 30$ or even more with loot boxes for there value , but do you need the skins to comptete and play vs people no because all the stats are the same even with skins it just looks cooler, you could even talk about PoE montization system which i think is really well done but even so you can defentily spend alot on the loot boxes just trying to get a cosmetic you want which i think is fine because its optional and dosent require you to purchase to comptete and play with other players.
i hate it when games only give you access to really boring, shitty reskins/recolours for cosmetics, and all the actually cool-looking stuff you gotta pay for. a game that comes to mind is probably darktide.
There is another aspect here:
If a game is designed to have any after-purchase payment for content, then the company might have a very strong incentive to make modding as hard as possible so the community doesn't just make better content for the game themselves.
It currently looks like the classic DLCs don't trigger that incentive. But it might be a good idea to watch carefully what Bethesda or CD Project Red do next.
SkyrimSE updates don't break Creation Club mods, or do they?
:P I won't worry to much about Bethesda or CD project RED, but greedy stupid companies like EA, and the fossilised FAT CAT in japanese companies like KOEI, CAPCOM, SEGA etc.
@@fus132all the time yes
@@fus132 Lol of course not. Not only because that would literally directly hurt Bethesda's profits. But also because Creation Club mods are literally forbidden from depending on anything than the base game with dlcs (so no SKSE stuff) and can't contain DLLs.
Bethesda has been trying to do that for a decade already
No no, portal is pay to win cause you have to buy the game in order to beat it. (Edit): DAMN IT, I GOT CALLED OUT FOR MY JOKE
I like the scale that you put in place.
15 years ago, I was seriously playing Ogame (an web based online competitive strategy game) and the only advantages you could buy was a few premium functions. It was between lvl 4 and 6. There was a bit of power and a bit of practicity, but overall it was in check and barely noticeable.
I was the leader of the first alliance of the server, and we barely used these premium functions. Same for other top rated players.
Then, the game created new microtransactions that would allow you to skip all waiting time... in a strategy game. No cap anymore. Straight to lvl 7. You could become 1st of any server any time you wanted by just throwing enough cash at your screen. I quit the game instantly and never looked back.
Oh I remember this like it’s yesterday. When the first pay to win mechanic appeared, I stopped playing and cried over videos of people crashing their entire fleets they worked months and years on into each other. (Granted I was like 14)
Are you serious? Dark Matter was insidious!
Instant materials of ether metal, crystal, or deuterium.
Paying for time in construction or research.
Paying for moon creation!
Paying for the command staff that buffs production in every aspect and enhanced combat odds!
OGame was really fun for what it was tbh.
About the "never going pro" bit it's not really about that.
1 In a competitive PVP game seeing everyone who has made it to X rank has spent money makes it inherently feel unfair and makes you question if you lost because you're bad or because you're broke.
Even if just casually competitive not being able to feel you're improving sucks.
2 it's also just the principle of not supporting that kind of system.
It wouldn't be a problem if matchmaking wouldn't be rigged to purposefully match nonpaying weaker players with paying slightly stronger players.
It isn't just you. You actually are matched with stronger players who win. It's on purpose to grind you down until you try the cash shop.
I had this conversation about #1 with someone on reddit, who used to pay for cheats, get banned, and then repeat the process in a bunch of online games. When you are convinced that everyone who reached X rank has cheated to get there, you are almost willing to cheat because you believe that to be the ONLY way to get there. The entire rank that's supposed to be prestigious, is now falsely labeled for being full of cheaters. When the entire community starts to believe that, just inspires third party ladders to replace the official one and the cheating problem never actually goes away... just you have a second company to filter out the real cheats.
I mean, if sometime I'll wish to become pro at one game, I shouldn't be preoccupied that the top 10/100/1000 or more are hold by whales. If I have natural talent in a game with a leaderboard, then I should climb without being put behind by the system who wants me to use irl money
@@Oktokolo This has made me quit so many multiplayer games I initially liked. Josh alluded to this with paying players getting handed a win after payment. Sometimes I would end a brutal loss and think "The outcome would have been the same if I played the best I have ever played or if I set my controller down for the entire match."
@@Oktokolo ... Did not a game dev publisher just do that... was it activation (COD I think or a COD competitive) filled out a pattern for just this thing.
(note when I say none payer here I mean someone that just bought the game and maybe expansions but no cash shop item).
a pattern that was littarly a system that would make it so that the game would match a none paying player against some one that had paid for a new powerful gun.
the none payer would then naturally lose and then after they lost be offered a special deal in the cash shop for a powerful gun.
if they bought it there the game would then force match the player against a much weaker (rated) player that had not paid so that they would then win the next round.
so yes if you bought a pay to win item the game would match you against weaker players. if you did not pay you would be matched against pay to win player to make sure you lost.
The designers prey on the fact that at time purchase / install users are unaware of what systems they will be subjected to.
I think it would be an interesting project for someone to make a website where players (or a reviewer) can use these levels to evaluate games and people can lookup games they are interested in before buying them. It could be possible to even give games a kind of "pay2win score" based on how bad these things are, or at least let users filter based on how reasonable these things are to them.
I want this scale on every Steam or store page in general. Wonderful video again, Mr. Hayes!
So I had a hard time collecting my thoughts to evaluate my preferred games just by watching the video so I compiled the list of levels to make it easier, if anyone wants to use it or correct it please respond with the game and what boxes it ticks, of course after watching the entire video, it's very well fundamented and I dont make it justice here
Level 1 : Can't pay to Win at All, there is no way to give the Game Money beyond original Purchase.
Level 2 : Cosmetic Purchases, where they are pay to win because content design changes to make the best looking things get behind a paywall as you dont "win" until you look the best possible way.
Level 3 : Early Game Boost that is overclassed quickly, basically time saver type of pay to win.
Level 4 : System based adventage that makes the game easier to play, basically quality of Life behind a paywall like inventory slots or an update with balances (DLC).
Level 5 : Skip "un-fun" parts of the game like Level Boosts or Grinding requirements to reach the "fun" content immediately.
Level 6 : Money CAN directly buy Power, but the power achievable this way has a ceiling or is capped, there's only so much you can pay and non-paying players can still reach it.
Level 7 : Money directly buys power, and the power achievable this way has no ceiling nor is capped, you can buy as much power as you want but non-paying players can still THEORETICALLY reach it.
Level 8 : Money can buy power AT A CHANCE, essentially gambling for Power where you may not see your money's worth or have it overflow, Psychological theory comes to play in the game design (addiction elements/sunk cost fallacy) to keep a Player on it even if they dont spend anymore.
Level 9 : Money can buy power either at a Chance or Directly that non-paying players have NO WAY of achieving, essentially dividing the game in two completely different experiences and the hard wall is eventually hit by either side.
Level 10 : Subjectivity, what you want from the game is the only important thing, if that is locked behind a paywall it is pay to win to you.
So for the Game I wanted to evalute is Elsword, as I have almost 10 years running on it here's what I think it falls into
Level(s) 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 and 9.
It doesnt make it to Level 10 for me because what I want from it is the gameplay and im absolutely getting it for free, only reason why I still play it.
Timestamps for each,
Level 1: 13:41
Level 2: 14:21
Level 3: 15:50
Level 4: 17:45
Level 5: 19:59
Level 6: 21:45
Level 7: 24:31
Level 8: 27:06
Level 9: 29:42
Level 10: 31:37
For FFXIV,
2 (Self explanatory),
3 (Friendship circlet gives 30% xp boost under lvl 30 if you put in someones friend code after buying the game, pre order earrings give 30% xp boost up to previous expansion's level cap),
4 (Buy more retainers, the game's version of both bank space and slots for selling things on the market board)
5 (Level skips, story skips)
Doesn't hit 10 for me because I enjoy the process of leveling and playing the story in it (That and you only need to story quest once, because you can play all classes on one character), have no troubles with bank space, and use the game's thousands of other non-cash-shop cosmetics
To compare with Warframe:
2) Only Tennogen on PC requires a direct monetary purchase as they're community-made skins, which receive a portion of the funds for every purchase. Everything else DE makes is purchased using the premium currency (Platinum).
3) They recently added a couple packs for relatively little money. Still, none of the items would've taken, at most, a few hours.
4) To keep as much equipment as you want at one time, you have to purchase inventory slots. Also, quite a few upgrades can be bought with platinum; however, upgrades are obtainable in the game at varying rates.
6) To skip the grind, purchase different equipment from the market for premium currency. However, only the base version of equipment is sold; if you want to get a prime version, you get it via other means (which point 10 will be touched on). The only exception is the 'Prime Access', where you can instantly get the new Prime warframe, weapons and cosmetic accessories.
7) Yes, you can get some common resources for platinum, but the exchange rates are so bad that it would be faster to get the resource in mission than to whip out your credit card. They've also had a history of **removing** these kinds of systems.
10) The game doesn't FEEL p2w because of trading; every new account starts with 50p (platinum) and excludes pop-ups. Now, what are the trading requirements? You have 2FA on your account, and the account is named Mastery Rank (MR) 2. Players can trade (almost) anything in their inventory, including prime parts, mods and platinum. If you want to trade platinum, the only condition is that the platinum traded has to be bought by SOMEONE at SOME POINT. Notice the wording; the person giving or receiving platinum didn't have to buy it themselves to make a deal; the person giving platinum had to have received it from someone who had initially purchased it. Any individual piece of platinum can also be traded infinitely. This means you can have everything in the game completely maxed out and equipable anytime for free! Also, due to the very few exceptions, if there is a grind you don't like but want the reward, you can do something else you like in the game and get the reward you initially wanted from trading. The only thing you can not get for free (as long as you're playing on PC) is the Tennogen skins I mentioned in the first point, as they are made by the community, not DE.
As someone who tried to get into the game in January 2015 (PS4) and successfully got into it in November 2016 (PC), I have only purchased platinum once because I got it on a 70% discount (received from the daily log-ins) and well after 1000 hrs because I WANTED to support the game. I had already gotten almost every warframe and most weapons in my inventory simultaneously (I'm a hoarder and worked for it, ok!). The game is about the grind and feeling that you have earned the power fantasy. As great as the story has gotten, you play it because the gameplay is so fluid and fun. Getting to that point takes an initial time investment, but it's worth it from my point of view.
Only playing the game can give you the best gear. The gear from exclusively in the market may allow you to enter Steel Path and high-level content, but not comfortably.
Side notes:
- Noclip has a documentary series on warframe that goes through not only the game's production up to that point but also their attitude towards monetisation. Even though it's about 6 years old, it's still very relevant today.
- DE was apprehensive about adding a story skip, so they asked the community in a dev stream if they would be interested in the latest patch (Whispers in the Wall), as it would take well over 100 hours for a brand-new player to catch up to the main story content. Most players didn't support the idea, so it wasn't included.
If you have any questions about the game, don't be afraid to ask!
Level 2.5 Cosmetic purchases that in theory are only cosmetic but provide a real advantage to the player by hiding what the player is about to do or making it harder to see what they are doing (some League of Legends skins for example) or making them harder to see than anything a free to play player can get in a game where that is relevant.
Arcade games aren't pay to win. (ignoring vs arcade for a moment) Not every arcade game allows you to simply credit feed through the game, loads of them limit the amount of credits you can put in before it just throws you to the start regardless. On top of that the VAST majority also reset your score which is one of the fundamental parts of arcade gaming as arcade game push for mastery not simply "reach the end to win". The "reach the end to win" design is very much a home release thing and even at that questionable game design fundamentally (as it functions more like a puzzle than a game proper. Getting a king checkmated to end the game isn't the goal of chess, it's wining by checkmating the opponents king).
Credit feeding in arcade games to "get to the end" or play multiple cycles is akin to claiming you've run a long distance Triathlon because you've in your life you've bicycled 120km, ran 30km and swam 4km in total. I have done all those things in my life if you'd add them all together, but I'd hardly call riding my bike to school as a kid part of running and finishing a triathlon. If you treat games as "get to the end" then credit feeding is taking a full refresh to ignore mastery and endurance in a system that's build on showing endurance and mastery. Because the goal of a given arcade game isn't to get to the end, it's to get a score ideally higher than your own previous and those of others, this is also why arcade game throw you back in level 1 (often with a higher difficulty) after reaching the "end". Arcade games are fundamentally indirect competitions, you win by getting a higher score than all others, including your own previous scores. putting in a credit to continue nearly always resets your score back to 0, losing all your progress to start anew in a different section of the game.
Or to put it simply a player needs to actively ignore the goal of the arcade game to "win" by getting to the end of a cycle (often due to pre-existing bias due to how most "at home" games are set up). It's extremely rare for an arcade game to actually "finish", it normally just throws you back to level 1 (often on a bit harder level). Rather an arcade game only ends normally when the player can't continue anymore when their mastery and endurance have failed them. At which point their score is displayed, which is the goal of arcade games, the score. Something which is removed by putting in more credits.
I'd also argue the whole mastery/lifestyle argument is flipped, at least when it comes to arcade games. Most western gamers would happily just credit feed their pocket empty to finish a game with no score to speak of while in the east scores matter much more and disincentives credit feeding. This is also why western and eastern "arcade style" games are quite different and western ones tend to be significantly easier. You only really see this idea to happily pay for power by eastern games in what I can best describe as "lifestyle games", MMO's, casual games, etc.
Also keeping certain progression boost/abilities boosts/etc. behind a paywall doesn't mean it's good for the game or would make the game better, it simply make certain things quicker or easier. Players will happily roll all over hyrule field because it makes them slightly faster but that adding a tiny bit of speed to the walk or roll slower doesn't make Ocarina of time a worse or better game, players happily optimise the fun out of a game and this can also be applied to paying for progression. Faster progression doesn't require a removal or lowering of fun, granted often with more extreme cases the fun in hindered to incentives payment.
"Fifa is just Genshin Impact for people who like middle-aged millionaires." is possibly the best quote to ever come out of a gaming channel.
You know, there's a big advantage to getting older. Because eventually, you end up with both money AND time constraints, and then, those "It's totally reasonable, you just have to play the game for 10 hours a day if you don't want to pay extra!"-types of games start to look about as appealing as week-old roadkill when you're deciding on what to have for dinner.
'Cause indeed, if a game asks you to choose between your money or your time, you tell that game to sod off while you get on with more worthwhile things. Possibly taxes. Possibly a better game made by people with some respect for their customers.
1:58 Josh: i am 9 inches... demonetization
Thanks I corrected the time.. Maybe that was the time I paused the video lol. Well Josh 9 inches thing will become a meme.
Huh. I always thought he was taller.
Pay to win is an evil mechanic and I have been screwed so many times I said “F this I am out” I don’t touch free to play games. Because at that point. Free to play isn’t free to play anymore. Time is money. And money makes things go faster It’s so frustrating. Time is very valuable I find more enjoyment in single purchase games because at least then I get the full experience.
You're doing a great job mate, plenty of us love what you do and wish you well regardless of sometimes being human and not doing something 100% every single time. Thanks for your youtubeyness entertainment, hope you're having a nice weekend.
When Activision started putting map packs on call of duty and it kept telling you to buy the map packs whenever you got put into a game with those maps I knew how bad things were gonna get.
People hate not having the full version of things and it's exactly why season passes are part of most games.
Map packs existed before Activision tough. A lot of Boom-shoots had Map packs which you could buy to get more game-hours of content from your game.
@@diamondhamster4320kinda, but not really - it was much easier to mod around them and there wasn't matchmaking that segregated players' abilities to play with each other based on DLC ownership. most map packs were also just compilations of community maps with no DRM or copy protection, although there were some expansion packs with multiplayer content. the CoD-style map packs that broke the community up were a newer idea.
@@g3intel which as you yourself mentioned was build up on the foundation of that old idea
I remember people upset that Activision had their grubby fingers all over Destiny 2, then Bungie took the IP with them and effectively changed nothing and doubled down on pushing in game FOMO ads.
The fact it shows up on digital storefronts as 'free to play' ought to be investigated by trade standards. It's no more free to play than any MMO that gives you the first few character levels for free then expects you to subscribe.
@diamondhamster4320 Map packs aren't the problem in this scenario.
It's matchmaking sorting you into a match being played on a map the game knows you don't have and asking you for money to continue.
I remember a similar problem made me stop playing Gears of War 2 back in the day.
Whoa, thank you very much for this video! this answers the confusion and debate you've mentioned in your previous video about Pay to win. Now I can see, observe, and judge different levels of pay2win games might have.
what confusion about what debate did you learn of? I want to know too lol
I eagerly await Asmon watching this and agreeing with everything Josh says.
what you live on youtube or something?
@@gangsterHOTLINEIt's a joke about lazy "reaction" videos. Many well-known UTubers, Asmon being one, won't actually watch a popular video to see whether they have anything to say about it. Instead they'll watch it once while "reacting". But since they didn't prepare all they do is say "uh, huh", "oh, that's true", "great point".
I think even JSH has talked about this -- how it takes two full days to make a well-thought-out-and-researched 30-minute video. But then a bugger UTuber can takes just an hour, a fraction of the time, to watch it with 20 minutes of off-the-cuff "reacting", and they often get more views, basically stealing content.
@@owenreynolds8718 to be fair to asmingold he can be an annoying reactionary twat but not having an opinion on the stuff he watches is not one of his failings for better or worse
correct@@CrispAndBurned
@@CrispAndBurned it is though, you're just lying.
I've always seen paying in games as 3 categories (all of which are bad to differing degrees):
*Pay for cosmetics - no power or useful items, only visual changes
*Pay for progression/ease - everything purchasable is reasonably available in game, but buying them allows people to skip the grind
*Pay for power (aka pay to win) - purchasable items make you inherently stronger than other players who didn't purchase anything, either because the items aren't available in game or the grind is so insane that it's not feasible to earn normally.
cosmetics are a form of progression, at leats in certain games/genres, and to certain people.
the argument that visual-only MTX has no bearing on a game is misguided at best. Especially if a game has any sort of social mechanic, where players can see each other, cosmetic MTX _are_ degrading the quality and quantity of content that you get in the base game.
Pay for progression/ease should be pay for efficiency. Skill makes you more efficient at a game. If someone with the same amount of skill progress farther than you because they paid, they paid to be more efficient than you.
Yeah.. but that's smart and a lotta people make things complicated and find ways to disagree with this.
Pay for progression/ease creates a perverse incentive for developers to make the grind as tedious as possible in order to ensure purchases (ala assassins creed)
@@no-bark4112 please don't get me wrong, I think all these levels are terrible (especially as a person who does see visuals as an endgame). But I understand that, kind of as Josh points out in lvl 10, that's a more unique idea of winning to certain individuals. The only true p2w to me is one the majority of players would recognize as winning, which is power in game.
Tomb Raider PS1
All Weapons L1, Triangle, R2, L2, L2, R2, Circle, L1
Stage Skip L2, R2, L1, Circle, Triangle, L1, R2, L2
Next Tomb Raider
All Weapons $19.99
Stage Skip $9.99 800% value
Josh, per your update video, I really appreciate your commitment to integrity, transparency, and the effort you put into all of your videos. It's impossible to get everything 100% right 100% of the time. This goes for anyone everywhere all the time - we all simply do our best, and that's honestly all we can ask of one another.
So for those folks in your DMs with unnecessarily aggressive diction, please don't forget there's the causal andys out here like myself that really appreciate the effort and time you put into these videos. Thank you for being some of the best second monitor content out there.
Lol if he didn't sound so weird, he would of got less hate.
@@CristanioPeweyyy "didn't sound so weird." What? British? Brother look at a world map some time.
@@RoraxPlays lol im brit. He sounds like Ai bro.
@@CristanioPeweyyy you sound like AI bro
I respect you continuing to use the same font for the last X years
Now I am wondering what scale Grand Theft Auto Online falls on. You can only buy currency, but you can buy it as much as you want/can. People who only bought the base game can get access to the same currency, and practically everything is bought using said currency. You can buy the most powerful vehicles, weapons, properties,... Even certain "cosmetic" items give an advantage (helmets negate headshot multiplier damage). But there's also limits. You cannot possibly own every single vehicle in the game, because there's a limit on how many storage spaces you can buy, and that limit is smaller than the amount of vehicles for example. However, on the other hand, there's also the new subscription, GTA+, which not only grants you a certain sum of in-game money and discounts that others don't have access to, it also grants you access to a specific storage space with an enormous amount of vehicle slots, allowing you to store far more vehicles. And ontop of that, the most powerful weapon in the game, the "Orbital Cannon" is literally in the purest form, "pay to win." You pay a ridiculous in-game price, and you win. The player it's aimed at dies and you gain a point on the scoreboard. And this can be repeated infinitely, even though there is a time limit between uses.
I really appreciate how you dive into the incentives and trade offs. Even the cosmetic only creates an incentive to make fully in game earnable cosmetics not as cool. For things you can get in game it gives incentives to make the process of getting them longer than it needs to via low drop rates or a lot of in game currency.
There is always a trade off when you implement any system, when it comes to mtx the trade off is to the detriment of non-mtx player experience in some way.
I think the way FFXIV does in game vs paid cosmetics is the best personally.
In game cosmetics sometimes just look WAY COOLER than purchased cosmetics. Purchased cosmetics are more likely than not gimmicks or previous event items so that people who weren’t around when those events were around can still obtain the item.
Most things are attainable in game with minimal grind, and the things that need the maximum grind are purely cosmetic with no benefit to the game (and also aren’t nearly quite as grindy as other MMOs in general, given the genre)
@@maxoweenie same with WoW, atleast when I last really played. They had mounts you could buy but honestly they didn't look great. Also there are so many good looking mounts in game so it was almost like they were looked down on for using a cash shop mount instead of doing what it takes to get a nice mount you have to earn.
I know wows since gotten worse about mtx with stuff like blizzard tokens but thats after my time.
There were once MMOs where you could buy pieces of equipment from the item shop that were better than anything you could drop from the raids. At what level would you put those?
Paid gear with advantages over any in game gear would go in the same category as premium bag slots (3, 4) unless the power gap or toxic community was so bad that you are barred from participating without whaling. (in which case paid for high end gear is level 7+)
If you’re wondering why I say whale weapons/armors can be similar to paid inventory, it’s because of my experience in Phantasy Star Online 2. It had 30 minute events and an intentionally bad inventory UI. In chapter 6 of the game (right before it went to maintenance mode), they made the content barf out 100+ drops per run. Players with at least 2 premium inventory bags/bank could achieve three back to back runs in an event but people with the free or first level of subscription inventory had to mess with the UI for 10 minutes after the first run, so either they ignore / trash the drops or could only do 1 or 2 runs in the 30 minute timeframe.
With that game mode, inventory saved more time than increased gear DPS 😂
@@studiesinflux1304 whit bank space im going to add in this caviar.
how much space does a player need and how much bank space does the player get for free (minus in game gold).
Like I remember in wow when I played Classic untill Wrath. as a Roleplayer (meaning my bank was full of useless Clothing item the the Grayson's Torch a quest reward from the The Coastal Menace a level 18ish westfall quest (because it was a easy to get Lit Torch item) level 80 max level in Wrath still had it in my bank.
and even whit that I did not really have Bank space problem.
Now if there was a "pay to win" option for an additional row of Bank slot spaces would it matter... no... I did not have a problem before what probably happen is that my bank space would be easier to manadge (not me spending 15 min looking for that pair of boots I know I have somewhere but darn if I can find it amongst my Box of Saronite Bomb, the Firework or my weeding dress (was some lev 30ish tailor pattern item that was not the easiest item to get the drop of the pattern and the fact not many tailors had it or made it did not help)....
that said Bank alts was a thing so maybe there would been a limited market for that but... naa.
Level 9 (29:42) is power that non-paying players have no way of achieving, so unless the item shop can be purchased from without $$, yea.
@@studiesinflux1304 You would put Path of Exile at the same tier as a game like Path of Exile where you can buy end game gear instantaneously that's best in slot? Nah mate, that isn't the same.
@@iPuls3path of exile being on the same tier as path of exile sounds about right
As much as I love Dungeon Fighter Online, I'll admit it's got a bit of pay to win in it. You could grind and buy the cash shop items with gold but it's so much quicker to just straight up buy and/or sell those items for gold yourself.
People will get angry with you if you point out that this makes the game pay to win in some ways. It's kinda sad how hostile people are towards you when you point out a flaw that the greedy game devs themselves implemented.
Again, the base game is pretty good and I play the game free to play myself but the gold advantage you get while paying is kinda annoying.
my definition of "pay to win" only works in multiplayer. dont get me wrong paying for power in a singleplayer game is also very bad but its not quite pay 2 win at least in my mind. to me in a multiplayer setting anything that gives me an objective advantage against other players is pay to win no matter how minimal the advantage is. this also means a level skip is imo also pay to win because you get to do certain activities before other players giving you more experience. a headstart is also pay to win. in a singleplayer game anything that has a shop is already weird to me. dlc that adds more content makes sense but being stronger? giving me an advantage? that doesnt make any sense imo
No game is single player. You talk to your friend about it, talk about boss fights, how strong you are, what secrets/content youve unlocked etc. There are entire communities for single player games. If your friend spends an extra $20 on a deluxe edition and brags about how nice some features are and how smooth the gameplay is, and you've got your base edition then you start feeling bad. You feel like you are missing out on something important. That feeling is by design, the developer intentionally made that base edition worse so that you feel the need to spend money.
By extension, this applies to content DLCs too. The DLC could have dropped as a free content update to get more people to buy the game. But they charge for it. They are demanding more money so you don't feel like you are missing out.
A game designed to pull more money out of you, that is pay to win. Every single game nowadays is P2W to some degree. The "win" is enjoying the game, the more you enjoy it the more you win. Games designed to be boring or tedious unless you spend money, is P2W. It has nothing to do with being competitive vs other players, but it has to do with how much fun you think you should be getting.
@@MyNameIsSaloI get where you're getting from, but about your point regarding FOMO for gaming just by interacting with people normally, I feel like you've to be pretty much plugged into the community to be affected by that. Like, kids spent a lot of money on Fortnite skin because all of their classmates do, and the skins themselves have become status symbols on the playground. It's different if you just play Fortnite and don't talk to anyone about that. Final Fantasy, Mario, Sonic, and Pokemon are the closest single-player games to reach the monoculture status, and yet you can still just play them and go on with your lives without being assaulted by FOMO from the markerters and other fans alike.
Ironically, the best advice you can give someone is just enjoy their own thing and keep the engagement to the community to a minimum. And if you in the first place intentionally seek out the community of any particular game, that means you've already been deeply hooked by the game regardless of all the things the devs implement to extract more money from you.
As for your point about releasing DLC for free to entice more people to buy the game, yeah, it just won't work. Paid games make most of their profit during the first few weeks of its release. Gaming marketing also works best in the few months leading to the game's debut. When the DLC hits, people have already made up their minds about whether they would buy the game. Those who want it have already got it. What you said only applied to a very small percentage of people who insist on only buying and playing the GOTY or "definitive version" of the game. More content, even if comes freely, does not make a game that much more appealing in the eyes of the undecided buyer. That is why developers have to bill the DLC and expansion packs separately, else they just won't make it back enough for all the effort they have spent on making the extra content.
Team Kirby Clash Deluxe:"Does that mean I am not pay to win?"
@@MyNameIsSalo god damn please stop playing games you are depressed.
So glad Josh gets it. Not enough people talk about battle passes as part of the problem.
Battle passes are a whole extra line added to this scale. It is a very easy way for new games to open up essentially mtx though because everyone has a battle pass so why shouldn't they? The only passes I can tolerate are those that cost in game currency and spit out at least enough currency that you can essentially continuously buy the next pass without spending real money. Smite is a good example of this, I've never spent money on a battle pass in that game but I've been able to afford every one of them with a normal level of playtime
@johnathonabbott1774 They do operate off FOMO very heavily, though, and a lot of the rewards are on the "paid track" if I recall correctly. (I quit Smite around season 8 and only came back for a bit each season). I remember when you could just buy skins you wanted, then they went to loot box chests and those stupid odyssey events.
@BasedChadman Yes skin chests are pretty bad, personally never bought one and you do slowly get some over time(not any premium ones). In terms of battle passes though I think they're actually on the better end. The paid track is what I was referring to. It's 800 gems or $15 if you wanted to buy the gems. You can earn gems just from playing though which is what I did and it's not a ridiculous feat. The passes give gems back at certain levels, and combined with the daily logins/grind to finish the pass you pretty easily come out even on gems.
@@ALittleMessi That's good, at least. Big step up from how things used to be.
@@ALittleMessi I have a burning hatred for Hirez after the realm royale and now Smite 2 fiascos, especially after what they did to Tribes.
Same with Stunlock and their abandonment of Battlerite
Am I having a series of strokes here!? What is everyone talking about he never brings up dragon's dogma 2 after saying we'll talk about it later... I've gone through hundreds of comments I've clicked on every time stamp I've watched it all the way through twice what the fuck...
Ironically on the point at 5:03 I think Dragon's Dogma 2 is one of those clear examples of the designers not making the things worth your money to buy. It's the game that kicked off this current discourse and it's also the game with the clearest indicators that the microtransaction team developed their little cash shop entirely separately from the game designers. It's like the weapon upgrade tickets for RE4R, they're noob traps. It's one of the times when you can legitimately say "you can ignore them" and mean it. Not to say that I think people should ignore the creeping infection of these things in every game. I also think that it's good that Capcom is getting called out on the sillier side of the mtx debate. However I think the convo has gotten a bit absurd with how people are reacting to DD2's cash shop. Cohh Carnage has a great point in his tweet but it just can't be applied to the nonsense on sale for DD2. It is quite literally a waste of money to pay 2$ for something you can get in game for a couple minutes of effort.
I think people are getting way too angry about WHAT these items do when, from reading all kinds of comments, they generally do nothing you can't get ingame anyway. The real problem with these is more the fact that a Singleplayer game just shouldn't have this kind of stuff in general as it sets another bad example and the fact these got introduced after the review copies were out.
It's really not what the do as they can be completely ignored without losing anything it's really about HOW they were done here.
Haven't played the game myself because i'm waiting for some performance patches first but the way they were done just really put a bad taste in peoples mouths.
Not to mention, just seeing those on the store page before you even buy the game just really hurts the desire to buy it.
If it’s a waste of money then why is it for sale? Just makes the game worse for no reason.
@@shinrailp1416 its not even a fact. its a consistency- the items included in the deluxe version were made available for purchase after the deluxe preorder expired- upon release. a better example would be like Tekken 8 introducing a cash shop after release. DD2 didnt have these items available before release because listing additional items available in the preorder bonus separately, before release would be stupid
Its also funny to me, because for being the biggest controversy in a while, DD2's mtx are actually legitimately MICROtransactions.
Most games have Mtx that's referred to as such because that's just what we called them, even though the purchases could reach the hundreds of dollars at times.
The Mtx in DD2 are also less in your face and predatory than even Helldivers 2, yet I know im pissing off people by saying that.
I think its silly that DD2 is the focal point of the anger, but personally, my opinion is something synonymous with like: 'It's about damn time we got this angry over mtx, sucks it had to be this otherwise pretty decent game, but the outrage is HIGHLY justified, mtx should probably just be illegal flat out. Companies have proven they cannot implement them responsibly. Capcom getting singled out should just be the start, after they rip their mtx out we should be going to the next battlefield.'
Of course, Capcom isn't going to remove their mtx, and neither is any other company. This news cycle is going to blow over because gamers have no resolve as a cohort, and the slippery slope is just going to keep on sloping.
Bonds were not a very good example in ruinscape because it is very much a not theoretical that you can earn them through gameplay. And when you use them from membership you can buy them infinitly through gameplay. Also Runescape does have level caps.
Also, you're paying for gold in game. Which while very useful, is not a way to get free xp on its own. Even with this money you still need to skill in order to actually turn it into xp, which still takes time regardless.
Josh uses weird teabags
The thing about DD2 though is that I would argue that the purchasable items are not really desirable unless you’re the laziest of lazy type of gamer who doesn't mind missing the majority of the game so long as they get that clear. Buying rift crystals so you can keep hiring high level pawns to carry you or ferry stones so you can fast travel at all times are good ways to ruin the game for yourself and, if you’re tempted to do that, you probably deserve to get fleeced.
I hate the belief that cosmetics are ok. This is how it all started. The egregious example i've seen in this so far was Blood Bowl 3. The normal models in the game were very bland. They designed these models to sell armor parts. Each model also had several slots to add different pieces. But here is the kicker: Each cosmetic was single use only. Each team can have up to 16 players. You can see where this is going. You want matching helmets? That will be $80, please. Dear god. It's been a long time since I refunded a game. Not only that, but I will never buy another product from Cyanide as long as I live, and even longer. Since you really can't alter much in Blood Bowl by offering other stuff besides cosmetics, they really bend you over here. Pay to win is a soft and fluffy phrase to make this appear to be less nasty than what it really is. The correct phrase is "Screw the consumer".
I say pay to win is pretty literal like if someone spends 5 bucks to get a costume on say final fantasy 14 im not seeing the issue as opposed to Overwatch 2 locking some characters behind paywalls essentially
But for someone like me who LOVES glamor, a costume behind a 5 dollar pay wall is still pay to win.
Doubly so when the previous game had the entire roster for free, so it's a double whammy of paying to get less then you had before and having to pay again to get the rest of it back.
@@mrbigglezworth42 With OW it is much worse than just having the entire roster for free, since the motivation to scrap it was due to adding "campaign", "skilltrees" and a bunch of other lies.
Real reason: The system in "OW1" was not hostile to customers enough, so let´s rename it and put a considerably more predatory one in place.
@@alexhobbs1208I feel like optional cosmetics are whatever for FF14 - they don’t make it so that “only cool stuff” is locked behind money, they make a concerted effort to make the coolest stuff in game.
Especially when I know that all the money from the mogstation goes towards development, I’ll shell out $5 here and there to support continued development.
@@mrbigglezworth42 OW2 was also a reminder that the skins that were in the base OW and you could earn without paying a cent, were then made exclusively purchased. For all intents and purposes, Blizzard was a restaurant that took your plate away halfway through your meal after youd paid, and told you if you wanted the rest you had to pay bite by bite.
Yah, your ''prophecy'' is the dumbest thing I've heard. I usually like your stuff, but you could have profited for doing 30 seconds of research about it.
And you can profit from leaving the basement and not taking a mistake about a video game so seriously. Kind of sad, really.
People complaining about pay t owin usuall dont ahve a clue what pay to win is. Having the option to pay for expereince boost or different skins is not pay to win. Pay to win would be like having the option to pay for an overpowered weapon that you can only gain access to with paying for it, or having enchanced stats but only with paying for it etc..
Josh, you did an amazing amazing work!
Please keep up the good work. Love the great content you're putting out!
I wish you much more success and great videos to come!
TH-cam didn't notify me of this video.
Only saw it after the apology came into my feed
"Fifa is genshin if people liked middle aged millionaires" lmao 😂😂😂😂😂😂
Having a mic within a mug that has your cartoon-ifyed face on it is a level of chad-ness that has me questioning things about myself.
Was nice to hear your take on things here, and to see that we have similar mind-sets on this. I can't tell you how big of a headache I got when DD2 launched the other day. I think the "Pay for stuff you can find in game" is stupid, but mostly because the people who do that are actually worsening the experience for themselves by cutting exploration out - since the main content is exploring the world. Which makes it sort of the bass ackwards version of this, since it's technically "Pay to miss out" - which could be its own topic.
Still wish that cash shops would be removed from games we already paid for. F2P, whatever - they gotta make money somehow, or they shut down. But paid games, and especially subscription games need to get rid of the microtransactions. And, the only way that would have ever happened... Is long past at this point. We didn't stand against it when it started prior to 2010, and now - unfortunately - we sort of just have to learn to live with it, while becoming more picky. Because it's going to get worse, with how gacha games are now the norm.
Yeah, this is what I had been thinking about DD2. Anyone who actually buys those mtx are either inexperienced with Dragons Dogma, and don't understand how easy the stuff is to get, or they're not actually interested in playing DD2 and are just rushing through the game on easy mode for some reason.
There's basically no reason for them to be bought, unless you have something against playing the game as designed.
6:40 Not really. Because you already paid for the game, expecting to have a good time, and are probably using this as a last resort without paying any MORE money.
I don't like the idea of a developer intentionally designing a game with "defects" just to sell us the solution to the problem they built into the game. That is probably my biggest gripe with P2W. It feels like a conscious choice to inconvenience the gamers. Or trying to sell us something that SHOULD have been part of the game. For example character customization tokens in a single player game. Either allow it, or don't. Don't sell us the tokens for it. Or promote your game as having no fast travel as a design choice because the journey from point A to point B is fun and integral to the game. Then sell fast travel points.
DD2 has fast travel it's just limited to items and travel between major city (with risk of ambush). The fast travel point sold in the shop is obtainable in game, and you won't have any use for the port crystal before reaching the location where you get the port crystal so the incentive for purchasing it through the shop is extremely low.
There isn't anything that indicate DD2 was designed in a way that incentive the player to purchase items though the shop.
@@ni9274Then they wouldn't have put them for sale. But they did, because they expect for people to have incentives to buy them.
My current and easiest definition for pay to win is “if someone were to speed run this game. Would an additional purchase make it faster?”
If yes. It’s pay-to-win.
>everyone mad at josh for DD2 misinformation 😡
>me mad at josh because he left out canada in his comment about who cares about P2W 😡
small correction on Dragon's Dogma 2: there is fast travel in it, the same as there was in the original. You can gather ferrystones (the items used to teleport) in-game and every cycle has several riftcrystals (items you can place somewhere to act as a fast travel point to) you can collect. You don't pay to be able to fast travel, you pay to have more of the items to fast travel. In fact almost all of the paid DLC currently on offer (besides the explorer's camping kit, though there are plentiful other camping kits in-game) can be gotten in-game and very easily at that.
Honestly I don't know why they decided easy loot like this was worth putting a price tag on
granular pricing schema. If a whale will pay more, why not take more?
Stop lying and being disingenuous. No ,these items are not "very easy" to get. They purposefully made these items more difficult to get than in the FIRST GAME. Liftstones cost 10k, the barber costs 10k, the wakestones cost 10k. That is VERY expensive and requires HOURS of grinding mobs or bosses to obtain just ONE. They purposefully do this to edge players to getting the MTX. And i played the game for 40 HOURs and only came across ONE port crystal stashed away in some obscure part of the map. Stop lying. Stop gaslighting. Stop being disingenuous. This is scummy.
@@jase276 lel ok buddy. If you keep playing you'll be swimming in cash. Most high level weapons will run you 50k at the very least. No one sane uses the barber, ferry AND wakestones can be found by just exploring, the first one is extremely common in the second half. I managed to get two portcrystals in my first run and that's about the same as the first game gives you.
You clearly have rose tinted goggles towards DD1 and yes it is a great game but you're clearly lying because you just want to seethe over the microtransactions. Are they scummy? Yes, absolutely, but the things ARE just as easy to get as in the first game. Hell, you can get an eternal wakestone already by playing. Ferrystones were 9k to 20k in the original game. Dark Arisen changed their price and introduced the eternal ferrystone.
You've clearly only ever played DA. If you don't believe me then look it up, cause I did.
@@jase276 You can't buy ferrystones with real money, you can't use the barbershop with real money, you can buy 1 (ONE) wakestone. Wakestones are absolutely plentiful and I had like 30 of them by the time I got to postgame. 10k is also a pittance by late game, which is when the game expects you to start using these a lot. There's also like 6 portcrystals per NG cycle, one of which you literally can't miss because you get it for doing the MAIN QUESTLINE. Stop spreading misinformation.
Aside from the dragons dogma thing which you corrected and apologized for, this is an incredible video. Youre one of my inspirations for making videos. Please keep up the incredible work.
The only MMORPG I can think of not Pay to Win is MU Online. Mu Online is pure grind. I am talking about The PC one released 2 decades ago and not the mobile MUs of today.
There was SSX Tricky footage, i'm happy
1:58 "I am 9 inches... which is also the height of this plushie"
MY ACHING HEART WHY ARE WE STILL HERE JUST TO SUFFER. This is definitely the most I think a youtuber has ever made me blush x.x
Touch grass
I don't understand it. Without the carefully shaped beard he'd look like a young Peter Gabriel at best.
I will say that the example of WoW tokens is not directly the same as some mobile games, because you can't buy the best things with money and you'll still need to learn the raids etc. to get the best gear. Now you will absolutely have a huge advantage over players who didn't buy a token, and it is pay to win. You can even buy boosts so you're carried through the raids, but at that point it's similar than the first example you gave of just buying your way straight to the finishing screen, which I don't think people think of as P2W as much as Pay Not To Play.
I think the WoW token is closer to the step 6 categorization than step 7, as you are "capped" on the power you can buy, unless you buy boosts, which is like paying for someone to play the game for you, and not why most people play games. Still shitty p2w, but it just felt wrong to lump it together with clash of shit etc.
You must not play wow 😂 thousands upon thousands of players cheat and use it to buy raid runs cheating months of content
@@jtowensbyiii6018 No I aknowledged it. But it's like the first scenario in the video, where people are basically paying for not playing the game.
Still scummy and completely stupid that it's allowed and sanctioned by Blizzard, just not quite as scummy as the mobile games where you can buy unlimited power straight from the shop.
I think horse armour actually added health to horses (not armour value ironically) so it wasn't even purely cosmetic
I've been trying to explain level 10 P2W for years, and you did it perfectly. Cosmetics are my win condition in some games, due to this a game one person says isn't P2W seems heavily P2W to me.
Guild wars 2 is especially egregious at this.
I HAVE to be able to save the world fashonably. nobody is going to take me seriously if look like i came from 3 games 30 years apart.
GW2 isn't too bad because cosmetics IS the endgame. There is no infinite scaling power slider like any other MMO. You hit lvl 80 and get full ascended and your power is fully capped out, you can get more dps only through skill and gear optimisation, you can't get better gear/power. So the entire endgame is a cosmetic grind for a lot of people, like legendary weapons are a cosmetic thing more than QoL.
Which is why it may seem like the P2W cosmetics are egregious. Because it is the endgame for most players. So they spend their hard earned gold on cosmetics, inflating the prices. This is more of a consequence of gold being a buyable resource (as is tradition in every mmo to counter gold sellers) rather than cosmetics being sold.
Cosmetics are my Level 10 P2W also.
I don't care if people play money or cheat to beat me. If I lose, it must be a fashionable loss, or I'm not playing.
Same which is why ironically games like Lost Ark which are "very pay to win" don't matter to me since I can buy shop cosmetics with ingame currency, which is actually not that common. I don't care about minmaxing my character for a few extra zeros damage, but i do want all the pets.
It’s interesting you mention GW2 because it’s the one I was thinking about as the true exception.
You can play the game for free and endlessly convert gold to the premium currency. Nothing is locked behind cash, and the gold to gems conversion is actually entirely reasonable.
A 400ish gem cosmetic-pretty standard for all weapons and armor-is about 200g as of this posting. That’s maybe 7-8 hours of Fractal 42 farming, or ~15 days of an organized “what to do when I log in” plan that avoids dedicated farming.
Every account upgrade, even delux editions for expansions, living world, etc can be acquired at reasonable rates on a F2P account.
Plus, the gem store rotates/returns. Items come back.
There is no indicator at all for if a player convert gold to gems or used cash, there are no items exclusive to an out of client cash shop, etc.
I'm a huge Diablo fan, and played them all for years since the 90s. But not Diablo Immoral, never even downloaded it. There's no way I'm installing CCP 3rd party facial recognition spyware that Blizzard "accidentally forgot" to remove. Then it's also toxic P2W to top it off.
Someone made a Diablo Immortal Gem simulator to play for free. Better play that than to be milked by Blizzard or be shamed by whales.
Another great video Mr. Second Monitor Man!
The problem with gacha for me is that it seriously hooked in to my brain. The fear of missing out or not getting the most out of the free stuff they offer. My brain loves the sense of making the most I can out of the free to play offerings they have. Very rarely do I actually give them money because I NEED or WANT the next thing, its more just that I am enjoying the game and I want to be more efficient.
yeah but how dare you get an otherwise inconspicuous part of your psyche taken advantage of by a carefully constructed sequence of hooks
(/j, blame the company/manipulator, not the victims. it's not hard)
People often focus mostly on the gambling aspect while overlooking that FOMO is absolutely a thing. It can be easily brushed off with a "do you ACTUALLY need that " but it's all specifically designed to make you feel like you do (insert SpongeBob "I need it!" meme). There are many layers of manipulation in gacha.
@@abadenoughdude300While thats true werent there games before gachas already that played for the same logic? Team fortress 2 has limited lootboxes with limited keys which is working with the same FOMO logic gacha games use, infact i know for sure that even Warframe utilises the gacha like FOMO by carefully curating what rare mods enter the system.
I still remember the day when the original snipetron weapon in warframe returned for a week and the "elites" were fuming on the forums that the unsellable weapon now loses value!
You are not to blame. Companies hire psychologists to device mechanics that have those effects. They actively prey on you. See dark patterns etc.
It only hard the first time you try to ignore fomo, it only get easier after that right now for me i don't even care about battlepass or any crap like that if i check battlepass and it only cosmetic, that instant pass for me i don't even bother even if 10$ are just meager amount.
I just got to stop you around DD2. I loved the first game, so (along with BG3 and Witcher 3) I preordered it on steam and gor right on playing. Loved every minute of my about 20 hours in it so far. And only then I opened some gaming news outlet to find a huge story on "hidden MTs" in DD2. And while I agree that it's worth a propper kick in the nuts for hiding this in the review copies...There is no P2W in there at all. It's one of those lower "pay4convinience" levels. You can happily work without MTs, there is nothing ingame to even hint that they exist...hell it takes 2 minutes to figure out how CheatEngine works (or downloading a trainer) and you get everything in that shop 🤷🏻.
That being said...MTs in singleplayer games are bullshit just the same and Capcom deserves every single part of the turd-tornado coming their way for what they pulled out there
Amazing anaylsis. And the best part is what you said.
The instant a game has something to buy extra, even if it is only microtransactions it becames pay to win if you really care about even a portion of the microtransactions...
I think I have decided into three categories in my head, pay for advantage: when you primarily save time by paying or if the stat buff you get is not needed.
Pay to win: when the games starts to make it difficult to progress without paying, or you can get so much better by paying that the only way to win is to pay.
Pay to play: games that have a hard lock on progression or wants you to spend money on lives in order to play.
How about pay because you'll look cooler
@@kapeecoffee I don't really consider that as any form of pay to win 🤷🏼
@@lidular not the guy you replied to, but i've met a handful of people who unironically tried to argue that cosmetics-only mtx is pay to win because you're winning social clout.
i'm reminded of the first few minutes of totalbiscuit's "5 Words I'd Like to See Retired from Game Discussion", where he calls the phrase "pay to win" a "thought-terminating cliche". years after his death, still seems to hold true when i run into """""pay to win""""" examples as ridiculous as cosmetics.
@@freecomkcf I agree. My point was purely how it is separated in my mind. And i am not really into cosmetics in any game, and I don't really play games where they appear, thus they don't really factor in to how I categorize it.
I really appreciate that you didn't include Expansion-DLC (example: Dark Souls: Artorias of the Abyss) in your list. Yes, you're paying money for new equipment, but its also more money for *more game.*
When you think about it subscribing to Josh's Patreon is basically DLC for more Josh content
There is no content in patreon
As much as we don't want to admit it, anti-consumer practices are the norm for companies to stay afloat, so learning to understand what affects you personally is an important skill. Looking at p2w as a comparison between the two versions of the experience, paid and not, is an amazing framework.
As an example, this framework really helps explain how Genshin gets away with having a horrendously p2w mechanic.
-The majority of content is exploring cool areas and experiencing engaging stories, divorced from the character/combat layer of systems where the p2w is taking place.
-Getting a character+weapon+gear set all up to their max level is also mostly unaffected by any payment option that exists, meaning the ceiling in this regard is equal. Paid options for skipping tedium certainly exist here, but they are so limited that it's a minor offense when comparing paths.
-Most content that is battle-related is so easy compared to the f2p ceiling that few players see any value in pushing the limits, keeping the paths looking the same here too.
-Even the gacha rides the line of reasonable despite being a level 8 offense on the checklist model. Pity count and the f2p economy are perfectly balanced so that an active f2p player will get about 50% of new 5* units, quickly becoming more than they can use at once and converging with paid players. As long as you plan accordingly to skip the units you don't value, it's common for f2p to win just as much as someone paying over the same amount of time when it comes to gathering favorite characters and having strong gameplay options.
-But then there's the horrendous p2w mechanic I alluded to at the start: the additional power granted from multiple copies of the same character/their weapon. There are team builds and character playstyles that are completely unreasonable for a free player to ever reach because they rely on abilities locked behind getting the same limited character many times, while signature weapons are big number boosts that are rare for f2p to ever get one of, much less five to reach a character's ceiling.
The paths have diverged, the free players have been locked out, and it's no longer negligible. Genshin **is** p2w. Yet people are fine with this because 95% of the path scores so low in terms of the difference that the 5% tier-8 issue is a check of good will that can afford to be cashed.
It only "gets away with it" because there are enough people on Earth without self-respect willing to put up with rotten game design for the sake of anime tiddies.
@@TiwillMany people are casuals who don't know the first thing about any of this.
@@Lenariet Hmm. I think it's a bit like people going to the casino. Or smoking. They know it's bad, they're just too distracted and too addicted to care.
@@TiwillNah, I think they just genuinely don't know or don't think much of it. I have a work colleague who told me about this mobile game she had installed and that she liked. She is a bit older and seems to be otherwise just reading books and watching TV and such. When she told me about how that mobile game was entirely free and that she had coins and energy and cooldows and sh*t and that she would set an alarm clock to go off on her phone in the middle of the night at a point when said cooldowns had run out I couldn't help myself but warn her about the manipulative psychology behind this and that these F2P games come with serious tradeoffs that can easily lead weaker-minded individuals into dark holes. She isn't stupid, I think she understood what I was trying to say. But some people are so absolutely not into gaming and so very casual and "innocent" in a sense that they really simply don't "see" even a fraction of what we more passionate hobby gamers are talking about.
@@Tiwill The conversation acknowledges this, games have gone bad and the inclusion of p2w of any level is counterproductive to designing the best game possible. Addiction and ignorance being exploited are issues. But just like there are ways to responsibly enjoy a casino (entering with a strict budget, expecting to lose that entire budget, and "winning" by enjoying the experience), games are still enjoyable even in the face of encroaching corporate greed. Learning to discuss p2w properly doesn't endorse devs doing it, it arms the community to handle it.
I'd consider Halo Infinite on the more severe side of Level 2 P2W with its cosmetics. Yes, It's purely cosmetic, but I'd say customization is a core feature of the game. It was a core feature in the past with Reach or Halo 4, where your main form of progression was ranking up or completing challenges to earn all that cool looking armor everyone wanted so you could show off stuff like Reach's Inclement Weather armor effect, which you had to grind out 2 million credits to earn (which takes a very long time), or completing Halo 3's campaign on Legendary for the EOD armor. They were a badge of honor because you had to overcome some sort of obstacle that your wallet could not solve.
Halo Infinite completely disregards this, with bloated battle pass systems to get armor in a linear fashion. You have to buy the pass, you can pay to skip levels (there were day 1 players that literally bought out the entire pass), and you can pay for things like EXP boosters and challenge swaps to gamble on getting easier ones to complete. It was even more predatory back then, because completing extremely specific challenges were your ONLY source of EXP (things so specific you have to ignore the match in pursuit of them), presumably making them hard and tedious on purpose to tempt you into just paying up to skip the grind. Not to mention limited time events that push FOMO hard, and have never ever got a rerun. Missed the first Yoroi event for that cool samurai helmet? Too bad, it's gone forever. Top that off with armor being previously locked to particular sets, so you'd get multiples of the same thing and it was highly restrictive (this is mostly no longer true, customization is a lot more open now but it took a lot of time).
Then comes the store, which always has multiple armor sets and whatnot ranging from $15-30 on average. The store always has more armor in it than the battle passes. This has always been a problem that players have complained about, to no avail. In fact, this has grown significantly worse in recent times after Infinite dropped battle passes and moved to Operations (essentially the same smaller events as before, only now you can pay money to keep them active after the event expires). With no more battle passes, all of that content was just slapped into the store. When the MK IV armor debuted, there was 1 set you could earn for free in the event. And then there were NINE MORE in the store, meaning that, at the time of writing this, about 90% of customization for that armor is paywalled. Or the current Chimera event, which has 1 free armor set and 6 more in the store, its absolutely greed-driven and disgusting. To make all of it worse, you HAVE to buy items in their pre-arranged bundles, you cannot pick a singular item. So if you just want the helmet that's in a $20 bundle, you cannot just buy the helmet, you gotta cough up the cash and end up with a bunch of stuff you didn't even want. There are smaller issues too, like throwing in weapon skins and stuff to hike the price, an armor coating that shows up 7 times on the UI to make you think you're buying more than you really are (it's just 1 paintjob available across all armor cores), or raising prices when more cross-core was introduced because it "raises the item's value"
I wrote all this to try and explain my point of how I think (and as Josh says as well) that even purely cosmetic stuff can absolutely be a P2W system. In a game like Infinite, customization is highly valued among the player base and a key component of the game, making it all the more insulting when the store and real money is constantly seeping its fingers into the actual game.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk :)
one thing i hadnt thought about until now regarding the "special editions" of singleplayer games that have added weapons and all sorts of stuff at the start of the game, essentially completely changing the vibe and pacing of the game, and how 2 people playing the same game arent necessarily having the same experience anymore, is i wonder how many times this has resulted in favourable or skewed reviews, now obviously theres the whole not wanting to bite the hand that feeds aspect in the review space where theres people afraid to say anything negative in case the company decides they dont want to work with them in the future but also the companies generally want favourable reviews anyway so i imagine reviewers get sent these special editions to review but the experience theyre getting isnt the "normal" experience and it adds another layer of taint to the review space, for example maybe the early game pacing is atrocious but because the reviewer has the $10 DLC gun from the start theyre enjoying the game and havent noticed the pacing issue
I really liked a definition you provided in one of your previous videos, it sounded something like this:
If we take 2 people, who spend an identical amount of time on a game, are on the same skill level and are the same in every aspect and start playing at the same time, but 1 pays and the other does not. Then after a month of playing, if the paying player will have more power and/or be more advanced in the story, the the game is pay to win.
Perfect definition.
Be careful not to approach gaming in a too “theoretical” way (read: research without playing it). Do keep in mind that there is a HUGE market of casual players being able to have fun for free because the monetisation comes from the 20% or so whales. And if the free players only get 60% of the fun (for FREE) it is ok. However, payed games should definitely provide at least 90% completion.
The old school runescape bond is a really interesting case study, because while yes it is giving players the ability to buy gp, it's ALSO giving f2p players the ability to access the members content WITHOUT spending money. It's a really cool way to subsidize membership costs, giving players like me who have lots of time and no money a way to play when I otherwise wouldn't be able to
It really isn't, the only way that item would've materialized, is that somebody purchased it. So it isn't really 'free', you just did manual labor for another player to 'skip the grind', which Jagex ultimately benefits from that system.
Excellent video, Josh. I wholeheartedly agree with the points and how you've defined each levels of P2W. It's so frustrating seeing people defend these egregious practises with the same tired excuses, like "I just don't have the time to play the game properly". Well, who the hell do you think set the grind to be that long and then sell you a solution?!
I cant speak on Everquest, but I would argue with WoW, player power caps on an expansion by expansion basis, and many players can reach the utmost level of power without every needing to spend anything at all, let alone by buying Tokens. I'd argue it puts you at level 6 in your tiered system, not level 7. While buying tokens for gold, and then spending that gold on gear/carry's/mounts will provide a real, genuine, tangible advantage against other players, and can even bring you to the absolute top tier of the power systems, its finite. (It would also get incredibly expensive to try to be fully mythic gear'd with BIS stuff, and it still wouldn't allow you to complete the higher level of content in the game anyway (High end PVP, Mythic Raiding, High level Mythic Keys) because its player skill that prevents most people from being able to do that, not numbers tuning.
It's been a really long time since WoW has had an infinite progression system, and the progression cap has usually been tied to individual player skill and not a significant time investment for a decent while. It's definitely level 6 though.
The Token system is fairly neat too, since it allows players who just play the game to not need to pay for the game. My subscription and expansion costs can all be paid for by WoW tokens I buy using gold I make by running carries. It's a system where WoW is just making a bit of extra money from other players paying for my subscription so that I will run them through content. Anything extra will inevitably go into cosmetic gold sinks.
Maybe this would need a second video but the fact is even if the game companies themselves couldn't sell you "pay to win", the existence of Game Genie and then later Game Shark means that pay to win has been a thing for a lot longer than standard monetization.
i feel like this argument is about a step above "you have to buy the game in the first place to beat it". Paying for hardware that can enable mods in a game doesn't actually affect whether there are pay to win mechanics *within* the design of the game itself. Josh also mentions that he wasn't interested in touching on "illegal" game cheats at 4:20
I think it potentially makes sense though that the existence of the Game Genie paved the way for pay to win mechanics in games, the same way that gold-selling in MMOs paved the way for some of the more egregious microtransactions in MMOs.
@@quilynn I think I'd actually compare it to Magic The Gathering. If you aren't familiar, MTG is legally not considered gambling because Hasbro/WOTC refuse to recognize that there is a secondary market for cards. If they did, most countries and US states would consider MTG to be legally gambling and it would be illegal to sell to children, it would be illegal to sell in big box stores, and local games stores would have to operate as casinos.
Obviously MTG cards have value on a secondary market. Look at TCGPlayer or Card Kingdom or Channel Fireball. But, for legal reasons, Hasbro has to pretend like those companies don't exist and that MTG is just a board game that definitely doesn't have a stock market attached to it.
That is the approach that MMO publishers should have taken, but didn't. Gold sellers? Huh? What do you mean? Our game is just a video game, nobody would pay real money for gold. Obviously wrong, but healthier for the game.
@@jodajoda2863I see where you are coming from, but like, Hasbro doesn't actually earn anything from the secondary market, right? Just like Blizzard doesn't earn anything from the gold sellers. They are all player-to-player transactions. There is no way any company is going to give up that potential revenue stream.
And don't MTG collectors complain all the time about Hasbro looking at the secondary market to decide what card to reprint, therefore "devalue" the existing cards?
Unless you're making the argument that the game company is making money from people hacking their game (which is what Game Genie/Shark do) it's a very different beast, because the game company isn't making money from it/designing their games to be less for those that don't hack it.
It's the equivalent of holding Blizzard accountable for private _WoW_ servers. Or accusing BioWare of putting an infinite money code in _Dragon Age_ because it doesn't encrypt the save file. It's just a completely different topic.
@@boobah5643No what I was getting at is that even in the past there was still pay to win options. It's just that you're paying a 3rd party instead of the game publisher. From my perspective at least, as someone who used both of those things heavily back in the day; the real difference between then and now is who you're paying, plus the ability for that to affect other people (in pvp for instance) in a way that didn't really exist back then.
I will never forgive horse armour for its crimes
Not even if it payed its fine and surrendered its stolen items?
We use to call this.. "easy mode" or "cheat codes"
😂
For me the whole point of a challenge is to get gud and eventually overcome 😌
When put these "wallet game master's" up against even regularly joe player's without any help their years of relying only on their overpowered adventures often becomes all to obvious ..
kinda like a paraplegic being able to go down hill faster than u 😊.. but then u take his wheelchair away 😢😂
(ok bad joke was thinking of joe from family guy .. 😂😂)
But ya the whole point of challenging content is to be challenged kinda defeats the purpose of challenging content if you remove the challenge 😂
this is tekken 8 in a nutshell.
70usd for entry
40usd for season pass dlc
4usd for a skin in the cash shop that has 32 characters
now they added a battle pass, free and premium (paid)
this. is. so. stupid.
people defend this nonsense. no your money isnt helping the devs. its fattening the publishers executives pockets.
the devs have their budget allotted before hand by the publisher. educate yourselves.
i dont tell people i meet irl i play games. im ashamed. people have no spending control. people will buy ANYTHING because it exists.
we collectively ruined gaming by opening your wallet and telling these publishers, "heres an empty check, fucc my wallet up senpai"
The argument "it's just cosmetics" is stupid to begin with. Because you can't draw a line where the visual part of a game goes from "just cosmetics" to being integral to the experience. Imagine a game where you play as the default Unreal Engine mannequin in a world without textures, and you had to buy all the graphics seperately. Would anyone think "it's just cosmetics"? probably not. Now, let the next step be that your game character has a decent outfit, but can not change appearance unless you pay with real money. The line for "just cosmetics" becomes blurred here.
Thank you for putting cosmetics into the P2W tiers and acknowledging that for some people the cosmetics is the part they enjoy, so locking it behind the paywall is P2W for them.
I'm sick of people defending cosmetics as "it's fine bro, it doesn't give any mechanical advantage, so it's not pay to win"
Yes. Yes it is. Not as egrigious as some others but it is still P2W.
Eh about WoW Token, I would put this under Level 5. The Gold is also earn ingame but some players are either just to bad or to impatient to learn the good methods. So with money they just buy gold to skip the grinding parts and go to the fun stuff via auction house or other players offering boosts.