Re: What is pay-to-win?

On Fri, 29 Mar 2024 09:49:17 +0000, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:

This video popped up on my feed and I thought I'd take a look as from my
time in World of Tanks (WoT) one thing became clear, there really isn't
a consensus of what is, and isn't, pay-to-win. The video is a bit long
and dry but one of the things that resonated with me is there's
pay-to-win and then there's pay-pay-pay-to-win as what money can give
you is a sliding scale.
>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgNT72xzv1Y

The video tries to define "pay to win" to broadly. It does so under
the justification that different people have different qualifications
for what 'winning' consists of; for some people, it points out, they
haven't 'won' a game until you've done everything there is to do in
the game. Therefore, if certain levels or cosmetics are hidden behind
a paywall, you can't truly win until you shell out some extra cash.

But a definition that broad is pointless. As the videographer himself
points out, under these rules even having the money to buy the game
(and hardware), or the time to play a game could be considered 'pay to
win'. After all, if I don't have the $60 to buy "Doom", I'll never
'win' it despite the fact that it's a one-time purchase.

It is better, I think, to narrow the scope of pay-to-win to leave it
to features that offer mechanical advantage, and then qualify other
post-purchase transactions under other terminology. I'd go so far as
to say 'pay-to-win' only exists if it gives you mechanical advantage
over OTHER players. Thus, anti-grind features or larger player stashes
aren't pay-to-win; they're just MTX that you pay because too many
modern games are being made purposefully worse in order to force you
to crack open the wallet a second time.

It is a problem of course, although not actually a new one. Even from
the start, arcade games were made purposefully unfair in order to
force you to shovel more coins into the machine. And these tactics
followed games onto the PCs and consoles. Even before online MTX were
a gleam in a greedy publisher's eye, they were trying to get players
to pay to make it easier to get through games (in particular, I
remember Codemasters charging for cheat codes in the late 90s... and
they weren't the only ones).

And modern games definitely suffer from this urge to push people
towards post-purchase transactions. Content is either purposefully
withheld to be sold as cosmetics, expansion DLC, or "season passes",
or games are made exceptionally grindy to convince people to buy tools
that allow them to bypass the grind. But - in general - I wouldn't
qualify any of these as 'pay-to-win' mechanics; just greedy
publishers.

Even the best developers and games often fall victim to the lure of
easy money, what with pre-release bonus content and early-access
(arguably even 'game of the year' packages could fall into the
over-broad 'pay-to-win' category promulgated by the video). The days
of 'here's our game, take it or don't but that's all there is' are
long, long gone... if those days really ever existed at all.