What Apex Legends’ Iron Crown debacle tells us?
Over the last decade, the gaming industry has been increasingly becoming averse to the entire microtransaction-ridden free-to-play system but has reluctantly been ploughing through. While this may have been along expected lines, what’s important to ponder upon now, with the misstep of the EA-owned Respawn Entertainment’s Apx Legends, is whether its time the publishers take a few steps back or maybe end the free-to-play era altogether?
Free-to-play and its conservative roots
Free-to-play games are an advent of the smartphone era. A simple way to bring in gamers and non-gamers alike to play something that is free, but which may have advertisements or even optional paid items in game to earn a profit.
It was a simple yet marvelous video game revolution to penetrate the smartphone market.
However, with time, game publishers have slowly started selling free-to-play games that are largely designed to be in the favour of making them more money, by deciding whether you win or lose depending on how much you have paid for the in game items. These items give an unfair edge to the player and helps them progress or compete better in online matches.
So, most ethical developers stopped the pay-to-win model entirely, and provided only rare skins for your characters and other cosmetic accessories as paid items in game. These items would never affect how the game would be played and would not give anyone an upper hand. This has been the golden standard for any developer who would like to play by the rules of a trustworthy freemium game.
This arrangement may not seem like a very sour deal, right? Play a game, which costs nothing, and doesn’t charge you extra to gain an upper hand, but only hopes you may voluntarily purchase a cosmetic item.
Well things changed with the Iron Crown Collection event
Gamers have now started crying fowl even for the in game cosmetic accessories, which essentially, don’t help you win in anyway and are just extra clothes and accessories that your character can wear (to maybe make your friends jealous or to look like a seasoned player?).
Simply put, the Iron Crown Collection event of Apex Legends has 24 rare and legendary items to unlock apart from Raven’s Bite, a Heirloom item, which are usually the costliest and the most precious in Apex Legends.
You unlock each and every one of the first 24, which itself will require you to buy and open event specific lootboxes for every one of them (the lootboxes luckily won’t contain duplicate items, phew!). One such loot box costs USD 7, so do the math! After unlocking them all you UNLOCK THE RIGHT to purchase the Raven’s Bite, an axe, for a whopping USD 30.
Let me remind you again, that this is not exactly compulsory to purchase to experience enhanced gameplay or easier victories, this is just cosmetic. However, the community has created a hue and cry about it.
While this may be quite fair when business practices are concerned, this brings to the fore, a bigger problem of gambling in gaming, mainly because a large part of the player base may not really be of legal age to gamble and won’t have any idea how real life money should be spent. They may be enticed into the addiction of trying to unlock them all just because they may be feel compelled to by an unshakable urge, much to the dismay of their parent’s hefty credit card bills.
This has pissed gamers off
EA and Respawn have both apologised for this terrible new strategy saying, “Our goal has not been to squeeze every last dime out of our players.” But, the alternative they have given to the community has not been any better.
This has brought out more anger among the community who are creating reddit posts urging people not to buy the Iron Crown packs and not to be swayed by EA’s cookie cutter apologies.
Following the anger and the toxic replies of fans after EA’s apologies, Drew McCoy, project lead of Apex Legends, and the person who had written the said apologies, suddenly turned against the reddit community saying, “I’ve been in this industry long enough to remember when players weren’t complete ass-hats to developers and it was pretty neat.”
To this someone replied on the thread, “Was it by any chance a time where cosmetic events didn’t cost USD 200?”
This spiraled into another bout of name callings by the gamers to which the developers finally responded saying that the players of Apex Legends are free-loaders!
Should devs still “gamble” with such pay walls?
What this situation may tell us is that gamers may have come to a point where they are completely fatigued by the incessant monetisation. It may just be the best time to rethink if free-to-play games need a new direction or may want to take a few steps back, mainly for devs as big as Respawn. They should ideally want to decrease the scale of the pricing of such virtual items, which may be of great value to today’s kids.
Indeed, this backlash has been against the extremely high pay wall created by the devs here, that has clearly disgusted the gamers, especially when it comes from EA, a name that has become accustomed to unethical business practices (they promote loot boxes as a way to surprise gamers with free gifts!).
But more than anything, this is a clear message that gamers don’t even want cosmetics behind pay walls. They just want to pay once (or maybe more than once for DLCs), and that is about it. They don’t like the idea of surprise hidden charges.
Loot boxes and monetisation are today synonymous with immoral and dishonest practices and developers should really think how they approach this free-to-play mechanic better for fear of losing it completely as a way to publish games. Digital Extremes is doing it fine and so is Valve, but what is up with with most others? This may be time to change or die, especially for EA, which has no new critical success under its belt for quite some time now.
