I don’t think I’ve ever purchased a battle pass and I don’t plan to. I think if a game I was interested in offered one, I’d consider just skipping it.
If no one bought the things they’d stop making them, but that is an impossible idea.
Same. As soon as I saw what a battle pass was I decided they were stupid. I’m not paying for temporary things
Or, hear me out, maybe games should just sell you a good product at a fair price rather than trying to manipulate you into playing it longer than you enjoy it for.
Only timed battle passes manipulate you into playing it more than you enjoy it for. The ones in Helldivers 2 never expire so if you were to get bored of the game you can just stop playing. Then come back to the game a year later and continue on where you left off.
They have rewards tied to grinding out the game’s content as opposed to just buying the rewards directly to play with in the game’s content, right? I’d say that’s the difference. In Magicka, I bought costumes that had different gameplay mechanics tied to them, and I could use them right away. But for business reasons, live service games create incentives to keep you playing longer than you would otherwise.
They have rewards tied to… playing the game. Just like every other video game ever made. That’s how video games work. The only way for there to be “an incentive to keep playing beyond when you want to” is by making the additional content limited in time to generate FOMO or worry that you’ll have wasted your money… which in this case is not happening at all. There is no FOMO because you can buy any of the war bonds whenever you want, and complete them whenever you want. You paid money for something you will keep forever. That’s how it’s supposed to be. That is literally the best possible approach to new content. By your reasoning, every video game ever made is manipulative because they made the game and put… content in it to get you to play the game more than before you bought the game.
“Buying the rewards directly to play in the game” on the other hand is the wrong approach. Why would you prefer to play the game less? If you don’t want to be playing the game why are you spending more money on it?
Deep Rock Galactic has, in my personal experience, the best battle pass system of them all. Every season’s pass is free, because the game costs €40 upfront, they never expire and you can switch to any other season that has ever been while maintaining progress on your current one. All of the paid cosmetics are also Steam DLC that you can buy whenever, forever. Firstly, this is great because the game never tries to pressure you to play the game by slapping a timer on any and all rewards. Secondly, by allowing players to play every single battle pass, the game now contains multiple times the content that it could ever have in one season. This way, the players can enjoy ever more content while the developers don’t need to create more of it at a fast pace. I just finished season 5: Drilling Deeper and instead of having to wait however long it takes for the developers to add more progression to the game, I just turn the knob to season 2!
Interesting how bad online gaming got, that articles like this one exist. Content of a game you bought not vanishing after a few months is revolutionary, just wow.
