No Cause For Concern: No Just Cause 3 Microtransactions

When Just Cause 3 was announced yesterday, Square Enix said that it was a "full price title", causing speculation that earlier fears about the game containing microtransactions were unfounded. Now developers Avalanche have confirmed it in a post on their own site: "It does not feature in-game micro transactions."

Yep. Confirmation that the speculation about the earlier speculation being false is true.

Here's the relevant passage in full:

To be perfectly clear: Just Cause 3 will be available in 2015 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Windows PC. It will be distributed as a retail box and digital download. It is not a Free To Play game. It does not feature in-game micro transactions.

Does that mean we'll release the game and call it quits? Nope. Beyond launch, we are likely to look into DLC packs and items as part of our ambition to support Just Cause 3 and its players for many years to come, but until that time we’re completely focused on making the best Just Cause game we possibly can. Rest assured it will be a huge, fully packed and extremely rewarding experience right out of the gate.

I find it difficult to work out under which circumstances people find microtranscations acceptable given the huge number of successful games - both paid-for and free-to-play - which contain them. In this instance the fear over their use was prompted by some leaked screenshots from an earlier build of the game, one of which featured a "Buy More Now" button. People's feverish rush for information then led to complaints, and now the above clarification.

I guess in some way the fear was spawned by the thought that a thing people already liked was going to be warped in damaging ways by the needs of capitalism. That's understandable - I liked Just Cause 2 a lot. It's such a wildly silly game, though only a fraction of the story missions treated it as such. Most of my time playing it was spent creating my own fun in its beautiful open-world, tinkering with mods which offered infinite or unbreakable tethers and vastly more powerful explosives, or tooling around in the ambitious multiplayer conversion. I hope Just Cause 3 takes a cue from what the community did with the game, and the announced addition of a wingsuit alongside your re-usable parachute and grapple is a good start.

More details of the will trickle out over the coming days as part of an exclusive with Game Informer.