Loot boxes to be investigated by the FTC (Federal Trade Commission)

[CuCabeludo]

CaptainExplosion said:

CuCabeludo said:
The worst case scenario is removing lootboxes and offering the players the real deal: buy the skin directly, but at a higher cost. But microtransactions will never be removed from online games because they exist today as a replacement of the old P2P-montly subscription based model. Players are less and less interested in paying subscriptions for online games. Then companies realized that offering access for free could work by adding microtransactions as a way to monetize the product.

The costs of mantaining the infrastructure of dedicated servers demand a steady income, without either a P2P (almost dead model) or F2P with MT, no online game business would survive.

Then what should they do, focus more on local multiplayer?

Unlikely, local multiplayer doesn't work for MMOs, for example. Not to mention modern online games with focus on competitive/e-sport scene have a database system and algorithms that make sure players with low skill doesn't match against high skilled players. The matchmaking algorithms are responsible for providing even ranked competitve matches and are a huge deal. They make sure that newbies will likely match against newbies and top players will likely match agains top players, this is the biggest bennefit of dedicated servers.

I remember in the early 2000s when I played online games like via descentralized p2p connections, like CS and Quake 3, it was very frustating for you to manually enter a game and find out all players in that game were much better skilled than you, leaving you eating dust, being killed all the time. It just pull new low skill players away.

Last edited by CuCabeludo - on 01 December 2018