On Tuesday, I wrote an article about how great season passes are in gaming.
That was satire.
Companies overusing season passes as a monetization model is starting to become a real issue.
There are two forms of this phenomena. With season passes, people are essentially preordering downloadable content that has been planned by the game developers ahead of time. With battle passes, the players are paying for higher tier-based unlockables that are locked behind a paywall.
For some games like ‘‘Fortnite,” where the game is free, the presence of battle passes are understandable and oftentimes reasonable. After all, Epic Games, the game developer, has to make money in some capacity.
The problem occurs when companies that create traditional pay-to-play games use battle passes in order to generate revenue.
A prime example of this is a game called ‘‘Rocket League,’’ created by Psyonix. When the game initially released, its $19.99 price tag was reasonable and fair, with content being created fairly regularly afterward for free.
Psyonix first started to delve into anti-consumer habits when it released cosmetic items hidden behind locked boxes, which players could purchase keys to open.
Upon doing so, the player would receive one of the several items available in the box. Some boxes contain more than 10 items, with the more desirable items being rarer and less likely to obtain.
Then recently, Psyonix released its battle pass, which has two levels. The free battle pass has limited rewards and less desirable cosmetic content to be achieved.
The paid battle pass opens up a second tier of unlockables, which provides new paint jobs and cars that are unavailable to those who do not purchase the pass. Plus, they receive the contents of the free battle pass along with the paid content.
The worst part is that the rewards are rendered unobtainable after the date set by Psyonix, further incentivising the players to spend more money in order to not “miss out” on the cool new stuff that is being released.
Season passes, while different, share similar traits to the battle pass. The layman’s way to think of this practice is to just give money to someone for something they say will be given to you at a later date.
Sometimes, season passes are just preorders on digital content to be added later in a game’s life.
However, oftentimes they are more nefarious than that.
Some games are being sold from launch with tiered versions of the game, with the more expensive versions providing the season pass and some minor cosmetic for the game. So basically, gamers are spending more money for things that are not even in the game yet, but will be eventually.
Typically this sort of monetization can be justified by a cheaper price for the content that is going to be released later down the line, except more often than not the price of content is eventually equivalent when it is all finally released.
Furthermore, there is a prevalent thought process of gamers to just spend money on season passes because they would buy the content later anyway, which is silly and self-destructive financially.
This trend to try and milk gamers for their money is far-reaching and unnerving.
There is not really a way to combat it as an individual, because these companies are searching for people willing to give a game thousands in order to look cool, which is not something everyone is willing and able to do.
