There's people who've put 10,000 hours into Diablo 2, for example, a game that is incredibly repetitive at the highest level - they play for the chance of that one great random drop.
Microtransaction games generally trade money or time, and then put barriers up on the time, or increase it vastly. The difference is when it feels like you're being asked for money it turns it exploitive, rather than being asked to spend 100 hours waiting for a yellow item to drop (that being more akin to "skill" and "investment").
Players want their reward fix. Microtransaction games are frequently like a watered-down drug. Just like social media, I don't think that just because people use them means they're a good thing - its junk food for the mind.
true, but addictive gameplay isn't necessarily rewarding. That's the critical difference I was trying to emphasize.
You know, I've always been confused by this: if a game is using random chance to require probabilistic hours/days of effort in order to find some drop, my first response to finding that out is not "grinding for the drop", but rather "hacking the game to give myself that thing." (First thing that comes to mind: the Sword of Kings in Earthbound.)
In such cases, the only thing standing in my way of the goal is mindless—and totally automatable—repetition. I could write a bot to grind a Sword of Kings for me. Heck, I could download someone else's bot they already wrote. So what's the difference between downloading+running such a bot, and just editing the game in a save-game editor to give myself the sword? Same amount of effort. Same reward. Either way I'm not really "playing the game." But either way, I get to skip the part of the game that isn't fun, and get back to doing something that is fun.
The only place where I feel that this approach doesn't apply, is when the game isn't using HWRNG randomness, but rather deterministic seed-based randomness, like Minecraft or many modern roguelikes. If the resources I want are only available down on the 90th floor of the dungeon in this seed—and that's a deterministic fact-of-life of the seed—then that's just the scenario I signed up to play, and I'll accept it. But, of course, with such systems, I get to "choose my luck" by looking for a generous or mean seed someone else discovered during their own playthrough (or using a bot to scan for such seeds.)
I don't think I was nearly as smart as you but Maplestory was actually my first introduction to computing.
The game was really grindy and required you to just use your mana (I was a mage), and then sit to recover it, and then go back to killing stuff. It seems like they didn't do server side checks so I actually learned how to use a memory editor and just save the mana field which made it so that it didn't go down.
Of course, the problem with this is that it morally questionable since it gives you an unfair advantage and gets you banned.
But these games don’t work like this. When you’re trying to find a rare drop, there’s nothing giving you the feeling that you’re getting any “closer” to it. You just have to throw days of blind dice rolls for no reward at the game, before it’ll turn around and give you the reward once. Variable-schedule rewards shouldn’t actually work at that sparse a frequency. People who get easily addicted to things don’t usually find themselves grinding for rare drops.
The people who do do this kind of grinding are people with big reserves of determination. And I don’t really get what they get out of it.
On the other hand I spent little time grinding and have little desire to play the game a second time on harder difficulty.
Almost bought Diablo for my Switch this year and recalled how much of it is just clicking.
That said, the amount you have to pay to get a large collection in Hearthstone is staggering, if you drop $80 every few months for the next expansion you still only have a few of the epic and legendary cards.
Free to play games with microtransactions I liked were easy to find and whenever I guessed wrong, attempt was for free.
So for all the crumbling, there are people like me who gained on that development.
Virtually all free to play and free online games I know are exploiting human psychological vulnerabilities in some way or another to keep you playing. Those games leave me completely unsatisfied.
Ms. Pacman, Arcade Tetris, Street Fighter II Turbo.
The "microtransactions" games of the 80s and 90s were the ORIGINAL video games, the arcade scene. I miss the atmosphere and the ability to physically meet friends, but ultimately, they were microtransaction games nonetheless.
I've sunk more time into honing my skills in Ms. Pacman than most modern RPGs. Multiplayer Competitive Tetris is probably my #2 game (through the game Puyo Puyo Tetris). Arcade-style 3-minute games are far easier to get into, AND easy to stop playing (!!). They are games that respect my time, yet provide a deep, and rewarding skill curve.
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TMNT Arcade, X-men arcade, Final Fight, Simpsons, Time Crisis, Missle Command, Millipede, etc. etc. There were a bunch of other arcade games that took up a lot of my time and are also excellent. I'll give Ms. Pacman the title for probably most influential arcade game though.
I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with the microtransactions model per se. There's a LOT of bad microtransaction games out there, but that's because they're skinner-boxes optimized for addictive gameplay.
The older arcade games were tests of skill, and more than just a skinner box / slot machine loot box crate. You're not spending money at the arcade for the chance of a rare card or rare drop. If someone made an arcade-game skinner box, it'd be quickly forgotten (Ms. Pacman arcades would have been sitting next to it, and no one would seriously play a skinner-box game if Ms. Pacman were so close).
I would argue that "casual game with microtransactions" is a particular design philosophy, and arcade games don't actually share this philosophy. Sure, both games have you constantly paying small amounts, but consider:
In an arcade game, if you get really good, one quarter can let you play for hours. Arcade games effectively charge bad players more for their time, with time-cost trending toward zero as skill increases. So there's effectively a finite amount of money any given player will ever have to spend on the game (unless they hit a skill ceiling, get stuck not making any progress, but continue to find the game fun nevertheless—which is rare); and skill at many types of games are "portable", such that money you spend learning one arcade game is money you don't then have to spend learning another similar game.
In a modern casual F2P game, skill at the game's mechanics is entirely orthogonal to the thing you're paying for. Sometimes this means that the thing you're paying for doesn't affect the mechanics, e.g. skins. But other times this means that both good and bad players can "pay to win", and that there's no point at which you're so good that it would no longer make sense to give the game money.
Imagine a competitive arcade game with a point-based leaderboard on its attract screen (e.g. most racing games, games like Donkey Kong or Pac-Man, etc.) But imagine that, instead of needing to pay to play and quarters equalling continues, instead, anyone can play for free, but quarters increase your score by 1000 points (with no indication that this was done.) Even the top players would need to take advantage of this to show up on the leaderboard, because if they didn't, they wouldn't rank, since all the other top players had.
Of course these shallow experiences are reproduced on mobile nowadays. Match-3 games were a staple of all gaming generations and even reached some depth (Puzzle Quest) before they completely moved to mobile in the form of exploitative skinnerware.
I don't recall ever getting to the leaderboard on Ms. Pacman in my youth. I get it today, but that's mostly because kids these days suck at the game and the leaderboards are empty.
Case in point: the most OG game was probably Whack-a-mole, in existence in some form since the early 1900s. There's no leaderboard: you play the game because its fun. Sometimes there are prizes, but more often than not, its just an arcade booth sitting by itself with a few quarters and a hammer.
Arcade games of the 80s were similar: Ms. Pacman, Missile Command, etc. etc. were just short burst games to take up time while your parents shopped elsewhere in the mall.
By the 90s, arcade games began to have longer, more cohesive stories. You could theoretically get to the end of "Simpsons" or "TMNT", but more often than not... people put a quarter or two for the first level, died, and moved on with their life. Its there just for fun and pure enjoyment.
That is just not how it is and that is also my point.
I understand that other people like it, but these games are not for me.
It is very similar with other games you mentioned. Not for me at all (maybe Mario kart would be exception for occasional play).
This argument comes up often, but I as soemone who also has limited time I can't understand it. Nobody forces you to finish huge games like The Witcher 3 in weeks, months or even years. It just means that the price of such a game buys you a lot and long-lasting entertainment (assuming you like the content). Just take your time, use the free evening that may come up every few weeks and enjoy the game much longer than most people.
Admittedly, 10 minute play sessions won't work in this case, but if you never have more time than that available, I'd say there are other things to consider, but it's not my place to judge.
Second, it is time where you can't be interrupted, so you can't do it while kids don't sleep yet (or you basically expect partner to handle it for you). It is huge chunk of regular time when you also ignore partner and are not learning something for the job are not exercising etc. That is not available three times per week in two hours long minimum chunks.
There are more then one reason why this is not for me and hated mobile games with microtransactions are something I actually enjoy. There is nothing wrong with that. There is no reason to force myself into playing games that are just annoying to me.
I'm not sure what you consider a "microtransaction game" but LoL and dota 2 are both completely free and have huge hardcore followings. I believe CS: GO is also free to play now.
They're significantly more involved than Mario Kart at the very least.
With "Mario Kart multiplayer" I mean the experience of 4-player couch multiplayer, not online multiplayer.
I'm not a "hardcore" gamer - I'm incredibly casual. I hate microtransactions because the focus has switched to "addictive" play rather than "rewarding" play. Microtransactions are usually BAD for casuals - You might have 10 minutes to play but can only play for 5 mins without paying up. You might have one night a week to play, but it wants you to log in for a few minutes every couple of hours, etc.
BUT the lack of alternatives means that there will be plenty of money spent on them. So I think this is a matter of "microtransactions out-earn flat cost games despite likely player preferences", not "hardcore vs casual".