A dirtier word than ‘DLC’ and ‘free-to-play’ put together, the microtransaction now permeates even games that cost £40+. We speak to Freestyle Games’ Jamie Jackson about whether there’s a good side to the business model…
If a game comes with a full game’s worth of content on-disc, and you pay £40 for it, are you willing to put any more money at all into the product? A lot of people aren’t – they’ve made their investment and now they want to enjoy the service they’ve paid for. But as the barrier between physical games and digital ‘services’ begins to blur, what’s the solution to spending money upfront?
“When you go through a design process, you take everything in from the world around you and consider it as an option,” explains Jamie Jackson – creative director of Guitar Hero Live and Freestyle Games co-founder – when we ask him how his studio’s take on this ever-increasing issue for the industry. “Whilst we didn’t necessarily go down the Season Pass route, we did think about the various types of Guitar Hero player – so that’s those that will play the song on the hardest difficulty and are only concerned with beating the crap out of everybody, and the more casual players that just want to get a bunch of mates, beer and pizza in and play for just a night.”
Jackson explained to us that it was that second group that inspired the game’s 24 hour pass – you buy it and you can play as much of the GHTV service as you want, with no caps. GHTV, it’s worth noting, is a service kind of separate from Guitar Hero Live itself – what you get on-disc can be played with no limitations, locally, and is a full game. When you migrate to GHTV, you can play along with curated playlists, against other real-life people, whilst enjoying music streamed online and not stored to your device. This is totally free… fuelled by the money players will be spending on unlock tokens to get to the songs they want as soon as they want them.
“I guess in a way our pay system was inspired by mobile… well, not just that, but how everything is changing,” Jackson explains. “[Services like] Netflix and Spotify – all these different platforms are changing how we consume things. Mobile, in the past five years, has completely changed the face of games – if I thought about a free game five years ago I’d have said ‘Well, how am I going to eat if everyone has my game for free?’ It’s changed, though, now – some 15/16 year old kids would find the concept of paying for a game as alien as having a free game was to me!”
So the solution – at least for Freestyle Games – is to introduce small, non-essential microtransactions into their games to buffer profit margins. Boxed copies might be good for profit spikes around Christmas, but less intrusive (and less offensive) models like the Guitar Hero Live one give players control over how – and what – they consume. If you want to spend a load of time on GHTV (playing songs that aren’t on the disc) you can easily earn that time in the main game by unlocking credits and cash as you can by buying them. In a way, it creates a sense of progression and reward that offline-only games used to create through keeping content locked away.
“The thing with DJ Hero was that you had to unlock certain sets – but we always felt that… well, people have such a diverse taste in music: if you’re making a heavy metal fan play through a soft rock set to get to what they want to play, they get really frustrated,” Jackson explains. “They just get to what they want to get to. Not [locking] anything away was driven by that idea. If you want, you can just jump straight in and play what you want.
“As a developer – especially as a console developer – you have to think about everything you can do to provide a longer tail to your game,” Jackson continues. “I think gamers expect more nowadays: every big game out there has additional content, and people expect that. We wanted to do that, and GHTV means we don’t have to build a disc to deliver it. I think 80 to 90 per cent of consoles are connected nowadays, versus less than 40 per cent last generation.”
As we travel further into this digital generation, we’re very much expecting this to become the norm for games that want to live on as a platform. If a game’s launching with dedicated servers, multiplayer modes, moderation, cloud power and all that new-fangled tech they require to stay alive, we don’t mind having the option of supporting them. But we will mind if that kind of support becomes compulsory. For now, though, we’re in good hands.
Microtransactions haven’t changed the world yet, but these games did. Download our 30 Games That Changed The World now.
