EA, Dungeon Keeper 2, £79.99 microtransactions {boggle}

[shoju]

The oddest thing to me is that microtransactions absolutely kill the essence of a game in my mind - an open, fair, balanced system where players are rewarded for time and/or skill playing. Once you can pay real cash to get a leg up on others playing the game, it no longer meets my definition of a game because it immediately imbalances the environment. I guess I'm an old fogey in that regard, because the game industry has shifted to this and the kids don't seem to care. To me though, that's why Diablo III was a complete disaster of a game; playing it felt useless and cheapened by the fact that anyone could just spend real life money to get the equivalent of anything I did in the game, whether it was long grinding or heavily-skilled play in the early days when Inferno difficulty was absolutely evil in difficulty.

This is why I love, adore, drool, over GGG's implementation of Microtransactions in Path of Exile.
There isn't anything that you can buy that gives you a leg up. I mean... technically you could argue that stash tabs give you a leg up, but that's a stretch really. You can easily exist in PoE with the base level of Stash Tabs. Having more, just means that you can horde more.

But, if you want to look really cool, have weapon glows, helmet replacements skins, skin transfers (mogging), make your spells look different from someone elses, have a non combat pet, etc... Well, then you can pay for it. And people do. Oh, do people pay.

I am really curious, just how much GGG is making off teh game. They have a core team of 8 people, and then they have just hired 2 or 3 more people to the staff, so they aren't "that big" of a company, but even guess high, that the company has 15 employees, by the time that you factor in any "support staff" like receptionists, phone people, etc... You figure that they they are selling quite a bit of microtransactions for a game that is completely free.