Gamers are not too fond of microtransactions and only 5-20% of the community takes part in them. However, about 25% of gamers who engage in microtransactions spend considerable sums on in-game purchases. They used to drive the revenue of free-to-play games, though these ‘whales’ constitute a lesser proportion of in-game sales today.

A live-service game needs money to pay for development and the sustained rollout of quality updates and content, but things go awry when monetization is seen as excessive, drawing the ire of gamers. According to a SuperData report, gaming companies walk a fine line between engaging players with new content, and alienating them with unpopular monetization strategies. Paid cosmetic upgrades that do not offer a competitive edge are mostly tolerated by players.

Gamers will likely protest against exploitative practices such as:

• Pay-to-win monetization, where money buys you an unfair competitive advantage.
• Over-monetization, where everything seems to cost money, leading to a hollow vanilla game. Basic features cost money, and completing ‘free’ battle passes offers only minimal level boosts or in-game resources, forcing gamers to pay-to-play for a good experience.
• ‘Random’ rewards such as loot boxes, where there can be great variation between the amount of money paid and the quality of the rewards received. 
• Broken promises and failure to deliver on game roadmaps.

Exploitative monetization, and gamers’ distaste for microtransactions, have led to the creation of a site that tracks games and rates them on what you might have to spend after buying a pay-to-play game, or starting a free-to-play game. A few games, such as The Banner Saga 2 (2016) are given a ‘Spotless’ rating, indicating full ownership of a title once bought. The website dwells at length on all the things you might have to pay for if you buy a less-than-spotless game.

Fallout 76’s content – or lack thereof – was bad enough at launch, but it also featured pay-to-win microtransactions that further alienated users. In the case of Marvel’s Avengers (2020), the pay-to-win booster upgrades angered players so much that the publisher eventually removed the offending items from the store. Some games retain their popularity despite using pay-to-win economies: Clash of Clans (2012) and Warframe both allow paying gamers to level up faster. However, while such a practice may be tolerated, it is still pointed out and criticized.

In over-monetized games, even base features require in-store purchases. In The Hunter: Call of the Wild (2017), you had to buy hunting licenses to shoot animals in the game. In effect, you could only hit targets at the shooting range if you didn’t shell out money for the right to shoot at animals – in a game that was literally about hunting. The game’s developer Avalanche Studios now offers a pay-to-play version without microtransactions. 

In Halo Infinite’s multiplayer mode, the XP progression was so slow that leveling up effectively required playing full-time. You had to play a hundred daily challenges to reach rank one. But you could buy your way past this and level up faster, with an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription, which offered free boosts and gear. The game has since been balanced with a better progression system, involving more XP boosts and credit-drops for users who play for free.

Loot boxes are the most controversial – and perhaps the most aggravating – kind of monetization strategy. Star Wars Battlefront II loot boxes required gamers to shell out extra money to play iconic characters like Darth Vader and Princess Leia. EA’s response to a reddit post on the issue holds the record for the most downvoted reddit comment in the Guinness Book of World Records. The backlash led share prices of Electronic Arts to fall and forced EA to do away with the loot boxes in-game.

Take Two Interactive is being sued over loot boxes in the NBA 2K series of basketball games. The plaintiffs contend that the games induce players to spend significant sums on in-game items and other purchases, even though Take Two charges standard prices for the base games. 

Badly monetized games may get lambasted as thinly-veiled cash-grabs, but developers who respect player sentiments and restrict microtransactions to cosmetics can enjoy great success: Fortnite had 350 million registered players in 2020, before its legal conflict with Apple and Google. League of Legends also has a huge player base of 180 million as of 2022, while offering no competitive advantage with its in-game purchases.

In the following section, we will look at future directions for live-service gaming – the emergence of games as a platform, the promise of cloud gaming, and the controversial NFT gaming scene.