Has the games industry turned tail on microtransactions?
Last week Monolith released an official statement announcing that as of 17th July, Shadow of War will no longer contain microtransactions. Buying Gold with real money will be gone for good on 8th May, and a couple of months later the market which erstwhile sold item chests, XP boosts and orcs for the Nemesis system will be dismantled completely. Apparently buying those orcs, rather than earning them in-game, "risked undermining the heart of our game," said Monolith, six months down the road from implementing that marketplace.
Six months ago the press was saturated with headlines about a new wave of intrusive microtransactions. Communities expressed their outrage, share prices dropped, oceans turned blood red. Now it's increasingly populated by news of their subsequent removal. If it wasn't for fear of having one's naivety etched indelibly onto internet record, the great microtransaction withdrawal movement of 2017/18 might be enough for one to proclaim that the practice was dead.
The reality of a multi-billion pound industry's business practices is, inevitably, nothing like that clear cut or easy to forecast. Still, the sheer number of controversies and about-turns from big publishers and major franchises in last six months demonstrate that what might have seemed like a good idea in the salad days of Q3 2017 is now a certain PR disaster. The times they are a-changin'.
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