“Recurring player investment” is the actual term Ubisoft used and this includes any digital sale of post-core content. It’s not just microtransactions as most people would define it because it also covers things like season passes and expansion DLC. Rainbow Six Siege’s season 2 content, for example, was noted as selling quite well. I’d love to know how many people actually purchase the Helix credits in Assassin’s Creed games.
Still, it is important to understand that Games as Service is coming to all AAA gaming. It’s unstoppable at this point.
You say “Games as Service,” I hear Vast Wasteland of Crap. And it probably is unstoppable, because everybody saw WoW making shitloads of cash and put their own MMO into production. But nobody after WoW got that sweet WoW money and a lot of them crashed and burned before they could even get to release. Because nobody else is Blizzard and because the market didn’t need, and couldn’t support, 12 MMOs making WoW money.
And now everybody sees Overwatch making shitloads of cash, so that means they need to get their own source of that sweet Overwatch loot-crate money. But they aren’t Blizzard, and the market can only support so many hero-shooter games. Right, Battleborn, Lawbreakers, Paladins, Gigantic, and whoever else?
I don’t know, I’ve been pretty successful at ignoring the endless clones for years. And the backlog is still more than long enough to wait for the crap to be cracked from top to bottom.
Where’s your example of a successful and profitable free-to-play game in 2017 that doesn’t rely on loot boxes, booster packs, gachapon rolls, or another similar business model?
Path of Exile does do loot boxes for cosmetic items for limited time periods, though they make all of the items available for individual purchase a couple of months later. They initially had some fairly rare drops without published frequencies from the boxes, but there were complaints (and they also wanted to do this in China where there’s more regulation) so they changed it to have clearly-defined tiers of common, uncommon, and semi-rare drops with public frequencies. It’s a decent model now.
Warframe is a very rare exception to the rule, and even that has cosmetic and quality-of-life microtransactions, just not in a randomized way. It’s also a four-year-old game, and it’s more surprising than not that it hasn’t moved in some way toward loot boxes like everything else.
League of Legends has had loot boxes for quite some time, including the dreaded limited-time-only event loot boxes with a small chance at a limited-edition skin.
It helps that I don’t play any game with microtransactions!
I also don’t play any games!
(These are both lies. I’ve been playing Boggle on my phone with two IRL friends nonstop the last several months, and it has microtransactions that we all try very hard to ignore despite the game’s insistent urging that we REALLY need SUPER MEGA TIMESTOPS)
I’m of two minds about “best of all time” lists. On one hand, they’re kind of silly and totally subjective – “They put Ballblazer at 500? It clearly deserves to be in the top 480” and so on – but on the other hand, they actually kind of serve as a useful way to get acquainted with what is now approaching 30 years of videogame history. There are some great games from the 80’s and 90’s. If I were a teenager this year wanting to experience the “classics,” it’d be useful to have a place to start.
RPS does a pretty decent job with their genre-specific lists.
Now see, I have to wonder if you actually were a teenager if you would have the time of day for a 30-year-old game, historical significance or not. I take a lot of this stuff for granted; I can still lose an hour to Tetris or Super Mario Bros or M.U.L.E. or Pac Man. But a kid of today, would they be able to appreciate any of those games free of nostalgia? I tend to doubt that, though I don’t know many teenagers to validate that theory.
