Posts Tagged ‘microtransactions’

League of Legends: Brexit pushes up price of in-game currency

Megahit MOBA League of Legends [official site] will raise the price of its premium microtransaction currency, Riot Points (RP), for UK players by 20% later this month.

Seeing as the pound has tanked since the UK voted last year to leave the European Union, developers Riot Games say players elsewhere in the world have been paying more per point than Kingdomeers. Raising UK prices will “restore balance in RP pricing around the world,” Riot say. That’s bad news for us, but don’t you want RP pricing to be strong and stable? Little bit of politics there, ladies and gentlemen. Read the rest of this entry »

Payday 2 Drops Microtransactions, Payday 3 Confirmed

Last year, Overkill Games upset a pretty vocal corner of their Payday 2 [official site] community by introducing microtransactions to the co-op heist ’em up – something they’d previously promised to avoid. In an announcement made yesterday, Starbreeze – Overkill’s parent company – revealed they’ve now acquired full rights to the Payday franchise and as such will scrap paid-for in-game items via the next update. Oh, and Payday 3’s been confirmed.

Read the rest of this entry »

Payday 2 Adds More Microtransaction Bonuses

When Overkill Software first added TF2-like weapon crates to Payday 2 [official site], putting special gun skins with better stats in ‘safes’ unlocked by paying real money for ‘drills’, it went poorly. The vocal portion of the co-op heist FPS’s playerbase were riled, to say the least. Overkill backpedalled a little, making it so folks might randomly earn free drills while playing, but it was still pretty crummy of them. Now they’ve returned with a new set of safes, containing guns with new unique bonuses. Oh dear.

Read the rest of this entry »

Microtransaction Mishap: Payday 2’s ‘Safe’ Skin Tweak

We can be fairly certain that affordable time travel won’t exist within our lifetimes because Payday 2 [official site] developers Overkill Software evidently haven’t travelled back to last week and erase their mistake of adding microtransactions to unlock more-powerful versions of guns. If they had, memories of CS:GO-style weapon crates and keys concealing a random selection of garish weapon skins with better stats would fade away. No, clearly we don’t have time travel, because instead they’re now fiddling with the heist FPS’s safe system a bit, trying to placate riled-up players.

Heisters can now earn keys (or ‘drills’, in its terminology) to unlock crates (‘safes’) for free as they play, rather than having to buy or trade for them. It’s a start.

Read the rest of this entry »

Path Of Exile Teases New Pets, Tortoise OP Speed Demon

An update due Wednesday (19 August) will bring six (6) new flavours of pet to Path of Exile [official site]. They include the fastest tortoise I’ve ever seen and a well-behaved lemur. Also a pukeko which I didn’t know was a real bird until now. I’m mostly posting about this because it let me assess a bunch of digital pets.

Read the rest of this entry »

RPS Feature So that PA arcana...

Dote Night: Foreseer’s Contract And We Need Megawings

A spectral explosion

Part of a miscellany of serious thoughts, animal gifs, and anecdotage from the realm of MOBAs/hero brawlers/lane-pushers/ARTS/tactical wizard-em-ups. One day Pip might even tell you the story of how she bumped into Na’Vi’s Dendi at a dessert buffet cart.

The current big news in the Dota 2 community is the kerfuffle surrounding the Foreseer’s Contract. A short comic heralded the event on Friday and served as an introduction to the newest hero on the roster, Oracle (you can find him in the test client at time of writing but not in the regular game).

Why does the coming update make players – myself included – so concerned?

Read the rest of this entry »

Office Of Fair Trading Not Happy With In-Game Purchases

The UK’s Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is to issue new guidelines (pdf) about in-app charges for gaming loosely aimed at children. “Is to”, which is news-speak for over-simplifying a story to make it sound like a proposal is a thing that’s definitely happening. (“Government is to chop the heads off all left-handed people” will read the headline, while the story reveals this was actually a proposal made by a window cleaner who leaned his head in during a meeting.) However, the body has put out a package of suggested guidelines for the industry, in an effort to stop publishers from ripping off customers/getting children to spend all their parents’ money. They’re hoping to put it into action in April, after consultation with grumpy publishers.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s Official: World Of Warcraft Adding Microtransactions

So it was discovered by dogged data miners, so shall it be. After dabbling in microtransaction-based cosmetic items but largely buttering its bread with sweet, sweet subscription money, World of Warcraft is finally rolling out an in-game cash shop. Do you have excess moneydollars lining your pockets/sofa/cat? Are these “tough economic times” secretly treating you better than everyone else? Do you (for now) play exclusively on WoW’s Asian test servers? Then you’re in luck. Well, if you like XP boosts, pets, and mounts, anyway.

Read the rest of this entry »

In The Grim Darkness Of EA’s Future, There Are Only IAPs

Ed Balls

(I know we call ’em microtransactions not in-app purchases on PC, but John will almost definitely shout at me if I let the headline run onto two lines).

This doesn’t come as much suprise in light of what EA did to Dead Space 3, but there’s still a certain amount of gastric churn to be felt in response to an EA bossman’s public declaration that microtransactions will be a fixed feature of “all our games” from now on.
Read the rest of this entry »

Dead Space 3’s Microtransactions Exploited Away Already

EA employees attack yet another customer.

Here’s what’s great about reality: people are great at breaking stupid stuff. So as Dead Space 3 launched yesterday in the Americas, people smarter than I had already figured out a glitch in the game to acquire all the items EA had hoped you’d pay for. Game Front have posted a video explaining how, which I’ve diligently included below.

Read the rest of this entry »

Blood Money: Assassin’s Creed III’s Microtransactions

There's probably a joke about the name Connor somewhere in all of this.

Hm. Here’s something that’s leaped out of nowhere, descended upon us in a flash of bloodlust, and knocked us flat in much the same fashion as an enraged koala or, more pertinently, an assassin. Assassin’s Creed III is not by any means a F2P game, but it’ll still have a (seemingly entirely optional) pay structure just like one. Granted, that in itself isn’t really a problem. It’s this bit, however, that has me worried: “disregarding your current level.” To which I reply: but, but, but, but, but competitive multiplayer.

Read the rest of this entry »

In For A Penny: Guild Wars 2 Microtransactions Detailed

I'd buy that for a gem.
Sometime in the last five or so years, the notion that a game is something you keep on paying for after you’ve bought it took hold. We’d understood expansions and subscriptions for years, but this was something different. It wasn’t about a drip feed of more stuff, or a wholesale extension to the original game, it was about paying for optional bits and pieces that came later. I no longer hear about an online game and wonder whether microtransactions are going to be introduced, but I do want to know how they’ll be implemented. That’s the bit that hasn’t really become standardised, and each game that arrives seems to have its own take. Guild Wars already had a bit of a shonky payment model, but it was bolted on after the fact. Guild Wars 2, however, will have additional paid-for elements from the moment you start playing the game.

That’s not to say that it’s easy to understand, either. Guild Wars 2 will have three currencies: gold, gems and karma. Let’s take a look at what that means.

Read the rest of this entry »