Microtransactions have jumped off of our phone and are now in many more titles. It's obvious this is a push by these companies to gain more income and while they were a slight annoyance for a while they have started to invade important aspects in games that were once included for free.
I have been off and on working on a post about game analytics and I can touch on it more if I ever finish but big data is the new cry of all industries. With big data, you are able to store massive amounts of information about your customers and habits that will allow a company to create a profile of you as a player. With systems like Hadoop, you are able to scale to large amounts of data fairly cheaply and access that information with ever increasing speed. This will help game developers understand when you play and what purchases you make in hopes to compel you to do more. If you have signed up with Unity you know they have been pushing their analytic packages like its the second coming.
Activision has taken this to a new level. RollingStone released an article to talk about a patent they were awarded that will use the information to try and influence their gamers to buy their microtransactions. As described in the article they are creating a system that will reserve a room in a PvP lobby for certain people that could influence others to buy stuff. For example, if a new player comes into a round and sees someone with a similar playstyle doing really well with a weapon that you have to buy, they will be compelled to buy that weapon.
The worst part about this is the upgrades will be most likely hidden behind loot boxes. Let's say you are playing Hearthstone and someone has a deck much like yours. This person could be way better at you with that deck but let's just say they have one or two cards that you don't. Now you want those cards if you make the association they help the deck and there is a greater chance you will chase it down in more packs. This all could be set up in the new system. Now the game is purposely being tooled against you to compel you to buy more stuff by matching you with players that would cause you to do this.
They are using social influence and appeals to emotions to get a player to spend more money on the game. This is on top of a random loot system. This is pretty impressive because this is the culmination of many years of behavioral studies mixed with marketing but at the same time, it is ripe for abuse. At this point, the ESRB has already said they were not going to step in so we might be seeing something from the government at some point. Until then I am feeling more and more pessimistic about microtransactions in triple-A titles.
I have been off and on working on a post about game analytics and I can touch on it more if I ever finish but big data is the new cry of all industries. With big data, you are able to store massive amounts of information about your customers and habits that will allow a company to create a profile of you as a player. With systems like Hadoop, you are able to scale to large amounts of data fairly cheaply and access that information with ever increasing speed. This will help game developers understand when you play and what purchases you make in hopes to compel you to do more. If you have signed up with Unity you know they have been pushing their analytic packages like its the second coming.
Activision has taken this to a new level. RollingStone released an article to talk about a patent they were awarded that will use the information to try and influence their gamers to buy their microtransactions. As described in the article they are creating a system that will reserve a room in a PvP lobby for certain people that could influence others to buy stuff. For example, if a new player comes into a round and sees someone with a similar playstyle doing really well with a weapon that you have to buy, they will be compelled to buy that weapon.
The worst part about this is the upgrades will be most likely hidden behind loot boxes. Let's say you are playing Hearthstone and someone has a deck much like yours. This person could be way better at you with that deck but let's just say they have one or two cards that you don't. Now you want those cards if you make the association they help the deck and there is a greater chance you will chase it down in more packs. This all could be set up in the new system. Now the game is purposely being tooled against you to compel you to buy more stuff by matching you with players that would cause you to do this.
They are using social influence and appeals to emotions to get a player to spend more money on the game. This is on top of a random loot system. This is pretty impressive because this is the culmination of many years of behavioral studies mixed with marketing but at the same time, it is ripe for abuse. At this point, the ESRB has already said they were not going to step in so we might be seeing something from the government at some point. Until then I am feeling more and more pessimistic about microtransactions in triple-A titles.
Comments
Post a Comment