(Photo: Activision)
It’s Call of Duty launch day, and naturally, Infinite Warfare couldn’t arrive with at least some level of controversy surrounding it. This time it’s about, you guessed it, microtransactions, namely the “Supply Drop” loot boxes the game sells, and a special tier of weapons that are only available in those boxes.
Many fans are calling it “pay-to-win” given that many of these exclusive weapon variants have marginally bumped base stats over their lesser counterparts, and have special perks to boot. While you can save up earned “keys” to get these loot boxes for free, the option exists to simply buy the keys/drops outright and rack up a full arsenal of box-only weapons if you have the cash to spend.
There are two issues here, one being if this is pay-to-win, and the other, longer problem of how we got here.
I’ll just talk about the pay-to-win aspect briefly. The short answer is yes and no. Yes, it is unusual, even in this day and age of loot crates, for a game to be selling access to something like weapons with solid stats and perks. That is a line that even microtransaction-heavy games like Destiny have yet to cross, and it’s easy to see why players are mad. But no, fundamentally, in a game like Call of Duty, even minor stat bumps or the occasionally useful perk will not turn a bad player good. Player skill is still a huge factor in games like this, and there probably won’t be too many situations where living or dying is decided by who has a bought crate weapon, unless one of them turns out to be insanely overpowered. This isn’t Clash of Clans where you can outright buy your way to a huge base and army to squash lesser foes by skipping build timers. It’s less pay-to-win and more “pay-to-possibly-have-a-slight-edge-in-extremely-rare-situations,” at worst, most likely.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not excusing this. I fully understand why players are upset about this, and in theory, they have the right to be. Selling loot boxes like this feels very antithetical to what the unlock system of Call of Duty has always been, which previously rewarded nothing else but determination and skill to unlock things quickly. Now, everyone can pay to skip that process, and roll out with a cool new arsenal as they do so. That sucks.
(Photo: Blizzard)
But funnily enough, something very similar happened with Black Ops III, which also sold Supply Drops with weapons. Players complained about it forcefully then too, but will you look at that? Here’s Activision, doing the same thing again, and pushing the limits even further. Now, why would they go and do a thing like that?
This is our fault, guys. I hate to say it, but we just can’t dance around this explanation. It’s one thing to get angry in article comments and reddit threads and blog posts (my own included), but it’s another to understand the reason this is happening, because it works. It works extremely well. We are responsible for Infinite Warfare’s terribly Supply Drops. We are responsible for all these loot crates and treasure chests and card packs infecting almost every single game out there because we have been buying them in droves, no matter how mad we seem on the internet.
Don’t believe me? Check out Activision’s revenue, which was just discussed yesterday in an earnings call. Digital revenue increased a massive 113% for a Q3 record of $1.3 billion. That means that digital sales are now an astonishing 74% of Activision’s YTD total revenue, up from 54% in 2015.
Yes, part of this is increased digital sales of games through PSN/XBL/Steam etc, and part of this is traditional DLC, but a ton of it is microtransactions. It is Overwatch loot boxes, Destiny radiant treasures and yes, Call of Duty Supply Drops.
We are creating this world for ourselves.
Maybe that’s fine. Maybe that’s just the way things are going to be now, and the industry shifts yet again. Do you remember a time when fans were furious about the idea of “Downloadable Content,” because it felt like pieces were getting ripped out of the base games and being sold for extra? I do. And yet, how often do you hear that argument now? Almost never. It’s almost hilarious, quite frankly, that we now have situations like the Destiny fanbase begging for DLC to save them from the horror of microtransaction-based F2P events. My, how far we’ve come.
I am not lecturing anyone by saying this. I say “our” in the title, and I mean it. I’m guilty of this as well. I’ve documented my addiction to loot boxes and card packs in many posts. I’ve spent close to a thousand dollars on Hearthstone cards in the last two years, despite never reaching Legend. I drop $100 on Overwatch and Destiny loot boxes as soon as new events start, partially because I’m covering them for my job, but I know I would do it anyway, even if I wasn’t doing this for a living.
(Photo: Blizzard)
It’s an addictive mechanic, that’s why it works. And I hate it for that. No, maybe I don’t like COD enough anymore to spend loads on Supply Drops, but plenty of people do. These Infinite Warfare crates would not exist if the ones in Black Ops III had not sold extremely well.
This is the part where I’m supposed to say “vote with your wallet.” That’s always the mantra as we try to take the big, bad, greedy game companies down, but guess what? In the last few years we have all been voting with our wallets, and the results are in: President Loot Box has won in a landslide, and it’s unclear if we’ll ever be rid of him.
I don’t think we will.
Yes, we will see some pushback where loot box prizes might be tweaked here and there if they go too far, but this rarely happens, and the entire concept of loot boxes certainly isn’t going away. They’re already the norm across the vast majority of AAA games, and you have to believe that behind the scenes at Ubisoft and EA, corporate higher ups are pressuring developers to include loot boxes in games that don’t have them like The Division and Titanfall 2. It’s now almost a selling point when a game doesn’t offer them, but titles like that are an endangered species, and dying out fast. With nearly every major publisher reporting record digital sales across the board, loot boxes are not going anywhere, and the concept will only continue to grow and mutate until companies figure out the next way to start charging players for some new thing.
This is worse than DLC though, that should be clear. DLC is content. DLC is something concrete you can actually play. Loot boxes are gambling, plain and simple, and there’s just no other way to spin it. We laugh at a crappy mobile title like Game of War that includes a literal slot machine as part of its mechanics, but it’s just being honest about what it is, and now everyone else is marching to this same tune.
I don’t gamble. Hardly ever. But I did spend all my allowance on Pokémon card packs back in the day, hoping for that elusive holofoil Charizard. So when Hearthstone cards came around promising the same sort of thrill, and now I had all the money I wanted with no adult supervision? I went nuts. And now, I’ve given myself license to continue to go nuts on any game I want, burying myself in pointless crap that feels great the moment it appears in a show of digital light with a fanfare of trumpets, but often not long thereafter.
I don’t know what’s next. I know we’ve leapt from people worrying they can’t sell back digital copies, to raging against DLC, to now hating on loot boxes. But the line keeps moving, and we keep chasing after it, dollars in hand.
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