The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), the North American industry body which assigns games age ratings, will expand its labelling on physical boxed games to include warnings of “In-Game Purchases”. This will cover everything that can be bought digitally for real money, from season passes and skins to microtransaction currencies and random loot boxes. They’re only a decade late to noticing all this, then.

Some industry commentators are disappointed that the ESRB don’t take a tougher stance against loot boxes, specifically pointing them out, but it’s no surprise. The ESRB exist to protect big publishers, and recently responded to a US senator’s concerns about loot boxes by calling them “a fun way to acquire virtual items.” Read the rest of this entry »

When Electronic Arts turned off microtransactions in Star Wars Battlefront 2 over that whole stinking loot crate progression system mess, they said they would bring ’em back after a rethink. Well, EA’s chief financial officer said on Tuesday that is still very much the plan. While he isn’t sure how and when microtransactions will return, he seems fairly certain they wouldn’t include cosmetic items which seem goofy or out-of-place in Star Wars – no pink Darth Vader, for starters. Read the rest of this entry »

Activision have created a matchmaking system which would attempt to put players in situations where they’re more likely to spend money on microtransaction items. Perhaps it would match you against a great player with a fancy gun so you’d want to buy that gun and emulate that success. Or if you’ve already bought a fancy gun, it might put you in matches where that weapon is especially effective to make the purchase seem better. Welcome to hellfuture! Hurry up and bring your jukebox money. Activision, who publish games from Call of Duty to Destiny and are corporate siblings with Blizzard, swear blind they aren’t using this system in any current game. They have been granted a patent for it, though. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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