The title may be a bit of an overstatement, but hear me out on this. This week I’ve been on my phone playing the new Simpsons “tapped out” game, pretty simple concept. You build a world because Homer Simpson blows up Springfield so you rebuild it how you want. Simple enough right? Well, the game makes you rebuild Springfield but it only does so across a span of time, so houses, buildings and other establishments and most of the time, that will take hours to even construct. To speed this up, they include the use of “doughnuts” a form of premium currency in the game and the thing that irks me the most has to be the fact that they don’t even state a price before you buy it, the game pushes you to buy them through impulsive purchases because they know that people will buy them because the game takes so long for everything to even happen you’re forced to through pure impatience, this means less gameplay and more sitting around and waiting unless you choose to buy their premium currency, what’s the point in that? I’d rather you not let the game go free-to-play if you’re just going to cover that up through a horrible form of in game currency which we are forced to buy. That’s not the only problem I’ve had, the thing is the micro-transactions aren’t just cosmetically driven like games such as Guild Wars 2 or even League of Legends. The game practically forces you to buy the currency if you don’t want to play for more than 2 or 3 minutes a day, it becomes such a liability to play without doughnuts.
All in all, it’s a fun game, but not for more than 3 minutes at a time and there are a lot of games that are doing micro-transactions well, I mean look at League of Legends! The whole system of buying champions with both Influence points & Riot points works pretty well because if you don’t want to buy champions with your RP, you can buy skins and that’s the way micro-transactions should work in games. That being said, games like Tribes: Ascend or Blacklight: Retribution are another example of good micro-transaction systems because they don’t force you to buy the guns, you find something that’s comfortable for you and then you stick with it until you find something better, well. Until Tribes made all their gear available to buy for £19.99.
Anyway, just some food for thought.
EA planning to put micro-transactions in all games.
Have a great day.
-Isaiah.
