First, that was an amazing breakdown of what's happening. If you enjoyed reading that you might like Folding Ideas breakdown of Fortnite - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPHPNgIihR0
Second, I've personally become very wary of any mobile app that introduces multiple currency types. There's gold, and rubies, and power balls, and stardust! At some point pretty early on I decide it's not worth it to figure out how much things /actually/ cost and delete the thing. My understanding is that the math shows companies that microtransactions are the winning move over and over again. I hope that eventually there's enough grumpy consumers both parties become worth serving better.
Multiple currency types are a key part of freemium / microtransaction games, but there are other reasons to have multiple currency types, and it’s becoming more and more common across all types of games.
In a sense, games are often about managing resources. Currency is a resource. If you have one currency type, you can come up with a dominant strategy that maximizes production of that particular currency type. If you make multiple currency types, which are difficult / inefficient to exchange for each other, it encourages people to interact with more portions of the game. You can also have certain currency types tied to key parts of the game’s progression.
Take a look at games like Hades or Control. Hades has obol, darkness, gems, chthonic keys, ambrosia, titan’s blood, diamonds, and nectar. That’s 8 different currency types, the way I count it. No microtransactions—you purchase the game and play it until you are satisfied. There are a ton of game design reasons why those different currency types exist, rather than using a single currency type.
The freemium / microtransaction model just needs one more currency type—something that is slow to acquire, but you can buy it with cash, that directly translates into gacha or something similar, and can be easily converted to other currency types. If Hades had microtransactions, it would probably just have 9 currency types instead of 8.
I think multi-currency systems can be used to juice microtransactions pretty hard still. For example League of
Legends gives players free "chests" and free "keys" as a slow-drip, and you can open any chest with a key to get some random loot. If your chest count doesn't match your keys you can buy more of either using real cash. So basically multi currency systems can be used to keep players intentionally in a state of imbalance. It also makes it so their money doesn't go as far in the game if you have to buy separate blue yellow and red coins instead of just yellow coins like it sounds like in your Hades example (just having 9).
Sure, but multi-currency systems juice anything. Control, for example, has tons of different materials used for upgrades and crafting. In order to get the right mix of upgrades, you have to travel to all different parts of the game world. Nier has something similar.
By comparison, there are plenty of games (especially older ones) with only one or two currencies. Maybe you just find the one place in the game world that lets you grind out those currencies the fastest, and you do that over and over until you’re sick of it.
You setup a strawman (perhaps unintentionally) with this sentence:
> Currency is a resource
by ignoring the context of the comment you replied to, and the rest of your comment just builds upon that.
Currency in this context is not just a resource, it's specifically resources tied into a system of microtransactions.
So that includes currency you buy directly with money and currency that is accepted alongside purchasable currency. Having Rubies, Emeralds, and Gold as three different currencies obviously doesn't mean anything special in isolation. Why would having X resource types in a game be special or predatory in isolation?
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What makes it predatory is when only Rubies and Gold can be purchased with money, and some items can be purchased with Emeralds or Rubies, and the pricing for Rubies and Gold are different... the end result is muddying the actual costs of items, and making it more difficult for players to only spend once.
The main MO behind systems like that is to make one currency more important at the start, for example, by letting it get you ahead on core mechanics. Then in the later game having content like skins and characters be locked behind another currency which you're now encouraged to buy having naturally accumulated enough of the first currency through gameplay.
To be honest I’m baffled by this comment. I’m not really trying to argue against anybody or against any specific viewpoint so the idea that I set up a strawman has me confused.
If you’re talking about rubies, emeralds, and gold, can you explain where those come from? Maybe provide a link?
As far as I know, in Mario Kart Tour the key limited currency is rubies. You can exchange rubies for coins, fire them into a pipe to get gacha, or various other things. This is similar to the other freemium games that I’ve played. Maybe my understanding of Mario Kart Tour is incorrect or incomplete.
Yes, there are multiple forms of currency, but only rubies are really limited. The other currencies can more or less be earned freely by playing the game (if I understand the game correctly). The ruby economy exists to get you to spend cash on the game. Likewise, in Hades, the weird economy of titan’s blood, diamonds, and nectar is what encourages you to complete the game using different combinations of weapons and heat levels.
> So that includes currency you buy directly with money and currency that is accepted alongside purchasable currency
Mario Kart Tour is letting you trade one currency that is paid for another that is earned. That "taints" the currency that can be earned by allowing them to use it to hide the real cost of an item.
And to top it off here Mario Kart is artificially limiting how many of the "earned" currency you can actually earn per day.
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You're also getting caught up on non-existent currencies that were named as digs at pay-to-win shovelware... this isn't about a literal game with "Rubies Emeralds and Gold"* it's about how currency X Y and Z are intermeshed to keep people buying.
* Rubies is one of the premier cliched names for premium currency in a P2W game, it's not unique to MK...
> You're also getting caught up on non-existent currencies that were named as digs at pay-to-win shovelware... this isn't about a literal game with "Rubies Emeralds and Gold"* it's about how currency X Y and Z are intermeshed to keep people buying.
Okay, what you said was unclear and I asked for clarification. I guess if you were trying to get me to fall into a trap, you won.
I did read the whole article. It was your comments that confused me. Maybe I just don’t understand what you’re saying, or maybe you’re just bad at explaining things clearly. I’m not sure. You are free to either clarify your point, or mock me for not understanding what you wrote, and it sounds like you’re choosing the second option.
There's a third option you omitted: That the first comment was clear, that the second comment clarified, that other commenters have clarified, and you still don't grasp it, so I'm not inclined to keep spoon feeding you this.
For example, you clearly did not read the whole thing, or definitely didn't understood what you read, when your other reply was
> Rubies are the limited currency here. These are handed out according to a timed schedule (slow drip)
> Gold can be farmed. You just need to be decent at playing the game.
When something like 5 slides are spent explaining the coin system, explaining that they are also drip fed by capping how many players can earn per day, that coins can not be unlocked just by playing well: some of the objectives require using specific locked characters.
And looking this up myself to verify it's even worse: There are paid passes that don't remove this limit but only increase it?! So you pay to still be capped on your daily progression??
It almost seems like you're a victim of this type of game and so for you, what the rest of us see as predatory, you see as perfectly normal. You keep saying things like "just for the impatient or unskilled" without understanding how little of this system has to do with being a test of skill, and how much of it has to do with extracting more money from people.
> There's a third option you omitted: That the first comment was clear, that the second comment clarified, that other commenters have clarified, and you still don't grasp it, so I'm not inclined to keep spoon feeding you this.
To be clear, your behavior in this thread is inappropriate. You are expected to disagree with people without talking about “spoon-feeding” people explanations, or acting like the person you are talking to is some kind of idiot child.
> When something like 5 slides are spent explaining the coin system, explaining that they are also drip fed by capping how many players can earn per day, …
The cap for gold is relatively high. It’s not unlimited, it’s just high. That’s what I’m talking about. You farm it by playing every day, doing the daily quests / challenges, and you get a decent number of coins. This is different from rubies, which are more limited. Rubies you get like, once every 5 levels or something, and when there’s a new tour. Not often.
> It almost seems like you're a victim of this type of game and so for you, what the rest of us see as predatory, you see as perfectly normal.
Again, your behavior in this thread is inappropriate. It is wrong to make conjectures about whether the person you’re talking to is a “victim” of “what the rest of us see as predatory”. You should not behave this way.
There are a lot of games out there without microtransactions that have the same kind of currency as the gold coins in Mario Kart Tour. These coins are not primarily there to manipulate you into spending real money—that’s what rubies are for. The purpose is to manipulate you into play the game regularly—you get rewarded for playing the game consistently, every day. I’m making a distinction between the currencies which are there to manipulate you into playing the game, and the currencies which are there to manipulate you into spending money. Obviously there’s not a hard line here between the two types, but I think that they are distinct enough.
It would be nice if we could just disagree and have that conversation. Again, it’s inappropriate to conjecture that I misunderstand something because I disagree with you on some point. Disagreement is normal, your behavior in this thread is not.
Interpreting things as inappropriate is your prerogative.
When you're still saying things like
> You farm it by playing every day, doing the daily quests / challenges, and you get a decent number of coins. This is different from rubies, which are more limited.
While not realizing the entire crux of the issue is "a decent number" is a completely arbitrary limit designed to encourage compulsive engagement and monetary spend, which is something that is predatory... implies that you have fallen for it hook line and sinker and are now simply incapable or unwilling to see it from any other viewpoint than "acceptable".
I mean, it’s my prerogative to interpret something as inappropriate, but you’re not stupid, and you I think you know that your behavior is inappropriate. You’re just trying to manipulate me into getting angry or something. You’d have better odds selling me rubies.
In Mario kart, the dollar -> ruby -> gold -> toad chain (from the OP) is designed to obfuscate the cost and get players to spend more money than if it was just dollar -> toad.
Multiple currencies (that can be indirectly bought for dollars) is thus a symptom of a game designed to remove my money.
You seemed to be suggesting that we should not be skeptical of this, because similar game design elements can be used for other reasons.
That matches my original understanding of how the game works, but I have a different interpretation of why it works that way.
Rubies are the limited currency here. These are handed out according to a timed schedule (slow drip) or at a slow enough rate that you don’t want to wait for them. Playing the game more is not a good strategy for getting more rubies, because it’s either too slow or simply doesn’t work at all.
Gold can be farmed. You just need to be decent at playing the game. Anything with a cost in gold can be purchased through ordinary gameplay. People playing the game will tend to play the game -> win gold -> get toad, rather than going the dollars -> rubies -> gold route.
The rubies -> gold exchange is there for people who are unskilled, impatient, or otherwise unwilling to play the game to earn gold. To be honest, I don’t think this exchange is there to obscure the dollar cost of buying characters in coins, because you’re supposed to be buying better characters with rubies in the first place.
I don’t play Mario Kart Tour, but a friend sat me down and explained all the predatory mechanics it has to try and get you to spend money. He went into detail about how the pipe works, the different currencies, etc. My own experience is with a game called Mahjong Soul. Mahjong Soul has jade and coins (and some other irrelevant currencies). Jade is the dollar-equivalent currency. You can’t earn it through gameplay. You can exchange jade for coins, but since you can earn coins by playing the game (daily quests, winning matches, etc) you are probably not going to make that exchange. You instead spend the jade on summons to earn new characters and outfits.
This is just the general formula I’ve observed. Any normal game will have currencies 1..N which can be earned through gameplay. The freemium / microtransaction games will often just add some dollar-equivalent currency, like rubies in Mario Kart Tour, or jade in Mahjong Soul. That dollar-equivalent currency can be exchanged for gacha (in both games) or exchanged for inferior, farmable currency (in both games).
Mobile games in general are garbage. Considering the number of games, you could just emulate console games for the rest of your life and in doing so only play games that were built as games, not exploitation machines.
It feels like there was a sweet spot in between the arcade era (where gameplay was tailored to get your quarters) and the mobile era (where gameplay is tailored to get microtransactions), where game designers saw the most success by providing a complete high‐quality experience in a single purchase.
There have been exploitative home console games and non‐exploitative arcade games and mobile games, but to me the overall opposite pattern seems to hold true. Then again, perhaps I’m being blinded by nostalgia for the home console games of my childhood!
I actually think a ton of games from the "16-bit" era up to the first generation to heavily feature online services and game downloads (PS3/Xbox360/Wii—yeah, yeah, I know even the NES had a game download system in Japan, the Dreamcast had a modem, and so on, but you know what I mean) are still damn good, and my nostalgia consoles are the Magnavox Odyssey2 (I'd not... suggest any of those games to a modern gamer without the benefit of nostalgia) and the NES (I'd advance, IDK, maybe ten or fifteen total games on there as still worth playing for sheer fun reasons, not due to historical importance or whatever, despite personally loving perhaps a hundred of them).
Like, Super Metroid is just fucking great. Timeless. That goes for a lot of those games from the early 90s through early 2000s. Symphony of the Night? A masterpiece and still absolutely worth playing. Some of the Final Fantasy games? The series has veered into a different genre, so it's hard to compare those with earlier entries, but mid-period FF games are totally on par with or better than many trad JRPG-style games still coming out. Chrono Trigger? Still excellent. Most of the Gamecube-era Nintendo multiplayer games are about as much fun as their modern versions, still. Some fighting games? Mid-period entries in those series are often better than the newer ones. And so on.
Most of those I didn't play back in the day, so I don't think nostalgia's blinding me.
Theoretically plausible for an American developer, but it’s worth pointing out that in that era (and maybe still today) video game rental was illegal in Japan.
I think that's the reason for the quality of GBA games - at that time the industry already had lots of knowledge on how to create fun experiences and the hardware was capable of providing nice simple 2d graphics
> you could just emulate console games for the rest of your life and in doing so only play games that were built as games, not exploitation machines.
And if you run out of console games to emulate, there is a thriving rom hack community that has created some truly astonishing games (New Super Mario World 2: Around the World, Hyper Metroid, etc.)
Once you get Nethack/Slashem, text adventures and some who-knows-ware licensed games such as Daikatana for Game Boy Color and patched Chinese bootlegs such as Resident Evil and FFVII for the NES, most modern games feel like overpriced propietary crap.
Some arcade games were much worse than others, some of them were basically on a timer, draining your health the entire time so no matter how well you played you'd have to keep dropping quarters in to continue. There were also games that outright cheated in terms of difficulty to extract more money from players. I avoided those kinds of games, but some kids were hooked on them.
The difference is that even the worst arcade games were only a problem for the limited time you spent in the arcade. They weren't sitting in your pocket 24/7 sending you notifications begging you to get back to the game or leaving constant threats that you're missing out on something. Arcade games had only a single currency, quarters or tokens, and those could be freely exchanged and never expired. You didn't need 30 tokens to play, while the arcade would only sell you tokens in a non-refundable pack of 50, but that sort of scam is commonplace in mobile titles. The arcade games weren't collecting massive amounts of your personal data and selling it to data brokers either.
Mobile games are so much more abusive than even the most exploitative arcade games were and people weren't happy about constantly plugging quarters into the arcade games either! That's a large part of why the console market took off. Sadly, it seems like we're coming full circle and even major console titles now sometimes look (and act) like shitty free to play mobile games.
There are more books, movies, video games, music, entertainment in general than I could ever consume in a lifetime. And I don't just mean the sum total, including the all the crap; I mean, stuff I would like, even love.
While this doesn't stop me from picking up new stuff occasionally, I have used this fact to crowbar myself off the content treadmill. Why look forward to the movie coming out in six months when my movie backlog is already as tall as I am? Why play these addiction-based mobile games when I've got enough mobile games that don't do that?
Granted, in the case of mobile games, one is really reduced to filtering through the pile to find one that doesn't work this way, but on a moment-by-moment basis, you don't need a thousand good choices... you just need the one. My phone isn't loaded down with games, but the Slay the Spire that is on it, has zero microtransactions, and basically has the same gacha mechanics embedded into it even if you need that sort of thing, is pretty sufficient for most times I've been reaching for my phone lately.
There is a local arcade I've been to a few times, but it's a price to buy in and everything inside is free play after that, so you don't have to worry about the arcade mechanics draining your wallet either.
> There are more books, movies, video games, music, entertainment in general than I could ever consume in a lifetime. And I don't just mean the sum total, including the all the crap; I mean, stuff I would like, even love.
This is why doom & gloom reactions about anything that might slow media publishing don't make any sense to me. I'd have to be insanely dedicated to make it through the backlog of very-likely-to-be-good stuff I want to experience for basically any medium, just of what's already been published/recorded/whatever. Like, tens-of-hours-per-week dedicated, for decades, just to make a single pass over all of it. "We can't reform copyright, what if novels stop being written and movies stop being made!" Well... it'd harm my quality of life basically not at all, so, that just doesn't seem like a huge problem to me (putting aside that a huge amount of writing is free anyway, and has a large audience—see: fan fiction).
Maybe I'd finally get through my list of pre-WWII films I want to watch, at least, before kicking the bucket. Catch up on the titles from the first few thousand years of the written word that are still on my to-read list. Big deal if very little more is published, it'd be impossible to run out of great material as it is.
It's even true for the young medium of video games! I'm still likely gonna have probably-good games on my to-play pile that were already published by today in 2023 if I live until 2070, even if zero more games are published starting this second. "What if this reform means less stuff gets published?" God, I just do not care. Hell, if a reform stops most new publishing but makes older stuff cheaper and more widely available, it might be a win for me, overall. Running out of content to "consume" is a complete non-issue regardless of what happens to those industries in the future. There are several lifetimes worth of good-to-great content already.
It is not pay-to-win. There is no way to use actual money to improve your chances of winning. The only things you can buy are cosmetics, and there are no randomized lootbox/gambling mechanics.
There have been some cosmetics that give a slight advantage (blending in with the background too much), but they're pretty good about updating these to reduce the impact they have. Basically, those articles are complaining about the game being pay-to-win by accident.
Don't get me wrong though. Fortnite does use the psychological tricks described in the video to make you want to buy things, and I'm sure the tricks are very effective at separating kids from their money, so he's not entirely off the mark. I just think it's a bit better than most free-to-play games, and it would have been fair to also call out some of the tricks that Fortnite won't do. I play the game and I feel like I've gotten way more enjoyment out of it than the $10 I spent on a battle pass.
But maybe this is just an indication of how much worse it's gotten in the 3 years since the video was made?
Second, I've personally become very wary of any mobile app that introduces multiple currency types. There's gold, and rubies, and power balls, and stardust! At some point pretty early on I decide it's not worth it to figure out how much things /actually/ cost and delete the thing. My understanding is that the math shows companies that microtransactions are the winning move over and over again. I hope that eventually there's enough grumpy consumers both parties become worth serving better.