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Opposable Thumbs / Gaming & Entertainment

In-game micro-transactions alive in Dead Space 3

Ability to pay for convenience can have troubling implications for game design.

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At this point, gamers are used to free-to-play games that make most of their revenue from "pay-for-convenience" features. These games essentially let you quickly purchase features that you'd usually have to unlock through hours of gameplay, in effect letting you spend your money instead of your time. Now, it seems, that "convenience" is starting to creep into traditional, single-player retail titles like the upcoming Dead Space 3.

Eurogamer discovered a pay-to-upgrade option during some recent hands-on time with the game, noting a button prompt for "downloadable content" when crafting new weapons from component resources. Those resources can be collected normally in the course of the game, but impatient players can lay down real cash in the in-game store to get around that gameplay requirement.

Associate Producer Yara Khoury was quick to explain to Eurogamer that the game would never require the player to spend extra money to get certain items, and that you can't simply spend your way to the best weapon as soon as you start the game.

"There are a lot of weapon parts that are only available to buy later in the game, unless you're playing through it again [on New Game Plus]," Khoury said.

Still, it's a bit off-putting to see a big-budget third-person shooter letting players pay to skip the "grind" of resource collection. It's a bit like having an optional, built-in cheat code (or using a Game Genie-style device), except players have to pay the developer every time they want to use the cheat.

It's one thing to have this kind of "pay-to-win-faster" option in a free-to-play casual title, where the business model pretty much demands you offer in-game perks to make any revenue at all. It's quite another to try to tack the business model onto a AAA single-player (or cooperative) game that already retails for $60.

The pay-for-convenience model has been creeping into some big-name online titles for a while now. Subscription-free MMOs like Guild Wars 2 and The Old Republic let players pay for convenience as well as vanity items. The option is also showing up in competitive multiplayer modes for primarily single-player games like EA's Mass Effect 3 and Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed 3, which let players buy consumable improvements rather than earning them through matches.

But the pay-for-convenience model has run into its fair share of controversy even in the online realm. Back in 2011, CCP had to fight back a player riot when a leaked document suggested it might let people pay for gameplay items in its popular Eve Online.

Online or single-player, simply adding pay-for-convenience to a standard game has the potential to affect game design decisions. This can happen overtly, as we've seen with the kinds of mindless, casual clickfests that still dominate Facebook and mobile revenue charts. Developers routinely design those kinds of games to maximize things like ARPU and Lifetime Network Value rather than, I don't know—fun?

Even aside from that extreme, though, offering in-game incentives in exchange for money can create a perverse incentive for developers to actually design games to be more annoying to the player. After all, the less enjoyable the grind is, the more likely players are to pay the developer additional money just to skip it, right? There are limits to how far this concept can go—if a retail game is nothing but annoying, pay-to-skip portions, no one will want to buy it in the first place, for instance—but even at the margins, it can cause subtle alterations in the way a game plays.

Or maybe I'm just being old-fashioned. Maybe we'll look back in 20 years and wonder how the business of gaming managed to work without games constantly offering the player the opportunity to buy more power at any time with a tiny, quick, almost invisible transaction from their GoogleZonPal account (powered by SteamOS 6). And maybe the gamers of the future will see that as an inherent part of the way games should be played. From our perspective in the present, though, it feels a little troubling.

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