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Microtransactions are 18 years old this week and they’re still a blight on games – Reader’s Feature-GameCentral-Entertainment – Metro
A reader looks back on the history of microtransactions in console games but doesn’t blame Bethesda for being the trailblazer.
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With inflation it would’ve been the equivalent of £2.50 now (Picture: Bethesda)
A reader looks back on the history of microtransactions in console games but doesn’t blame Bethesda for being the trailblazer.
On April 3, 2006 Bethesda released the first proper microtransaction for a console game. There had been things like dashboard and avatar pictures before, but this was the first time an actual in-game item was offered for sale. It was horse armour for the single-player game Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, which cost £1.50 ($2.50).
At the time, because I remember it well, there was a lot of outrage over the entire concept, with the game and anyone that bought it being mocked for the horse armour’s pointlessness and expensiveness. You still get jokes about it in games today and yet… it was really successful. For some reason people bought it in droves and very quickly Bethesda, and everyone else, realised they could make easy money by selling cosmetic nonsense for real money.
Around the same time microtransactions were getting big in mobiles as well but that’s kind of a separate thing. You don’t pay for most mobile games, or if you do it usually costs less than horse armour, so while it’s still awful in its own way, it’s not something that’s constantly adding to the price of a game you’ve already paid £60+ for.
The first thing that happened when microtransactions became popular is that the whole concept of unlocking things in games disappeared almost overnight. The first Bayonetta, in 2009, was the last time I remember a game being filled with unlockable costumes and extras and even by then that felt old-fashioned. Why offer these things for free when you can sell them for real money instead?
That wasn’t necessarily the end of the world – I understand the problem that games cost more to make now and yet game prices are not rising at the same time – but then you started to get games selling in-game currency, or whatever items make a game easier or quicker to play through.
Given how lucrative microtransactions are for publishers it slowly began to make more and more sense to take things out of games in order to sell them separately later. But the real problem is that you began to suspect that they were changing the design of games to tempt people into buying the microtransactions, so suddenly you couldn’t trust that the game you were playing was actually meant to be experienced that way.
From horse armour to pay to win gaming in just a few short years, you’d think it was some cool new gameplay idea rather than just a way to fleece money out of people.
The big publishers – especially Ubisoft, Activision, and EA – soon took to only adding microtransactions in after a game was released, so it wasn’t mentioned in reviews, and were constantly being called out for it. They never stopped though, just like they never stopped with microtransactions in general.
Why would they? People complain but it’s only a small minority, just the sort of people that are probably reading this now, while everyone else just pays the money and doesn’t think about the consequences.
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So, despite the anniversary I don’t blame Bethesda, no more than I blame EA or Blizzard for loot boxes. Companies come up with these awful ideas but it’s gamers that make them a success. If nobody had bough that horse armour, 18 years ago, then microtransactions would’ve quickly been written off as something that will never work on consoles.
Unfortunately, the opposite happened and now it seems like the microtransactions are designed first and then they work out a game that can be used to sell them after. The game you pay for is basically just a shop front for what provides the real profit. So, thanks to those Oblivion players who thought £1.50 for a piece of horse armour was a good idea, you’ve had a major influence on the history of video games.
By reader Winston
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