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Azzanation on 19 November 2020
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Cerebralbore101 said:

Here's an example of how much of a rip-off MTX are in GoW5.

Let's take the delivery driver mac skin.



Is this an all new 3D model for multiplayer? Or is this just a character model from the single player mode that was repurposed as a skin. I haven't played Gears 5, so I don't know. If it's a 3D model from the single player, then the cost to turn this into a skin was likely next to nothing. I'm going to give the devs the benefit of the doubt and assume that this is an all new 3D model made for multiplayer.

How long does it take to make a character model like this, complete with texture maps, bumpmaps, rigging, and animation? About 100 hours. But I'm feeling generous so let's bump that up to 200 hours. No, let's make it 300 hours.

Now let's assume that your average 3D artist over at the Coalition makes 80K a year. Let's also ignore that they are salaried employees, and often forced to work insane amounts of overtime for free. At 80K a year, 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, it costs them $38 per hour to have a 3D artist create this asset. Multiply that by the generously assumed 300 hours that it takes to make such a character model, and we have a cost of $11,400 to make this character. In reality it likely isn't anywhere near that cost. But again, I'm assuming that these character models take 3 times longer to make than I know. Now imagine that Gears 5 has an active playerbase of 1,000,000 players. If just 5% of the active playerbase spends $10 on this skin (yes, they really are asking $10 for a simple skin. It's LOL prices, except Gears 5 is not F2P), then they've made $500,000 off of a 3D artists $11,400 worth of work. That's a profit margin of 4,300%.

This idea that devs continual support of a game means they have the right to charge insane amounts for things as simple as a skin, is just downright laughable. In reality making a new 3D model entirely from scratch costs $3,800 or less. Taking an already finished 3D model, and giving it a new texture, in order to sell it as a skin costs something like $1000 to $1,900. And that's what most skins are. They are just retextures of an already existing character model.

That character in the picture is a Multiplayer character.

Also there is nothing wrong with optional MTXs, that's why they are optional. The problem is game content being cut out and sold separately, like one of the old Street fighter vs Marvel games where one character was on the actual disk yet weren't available to the player as they needed to buy the character to unlock it. Dicing up game content while still charging full price is unacceptable. Pay to win systems are also extremely bad ways of milking gamers to pay more to win games. Actual cosmetic store buys, i have never had an issue with as long as it remains optional. 

However charging $10 more for a game is not optional, we are better off sticking with $60 game prices with optional MTXs so if you want to spend more in a game you enjoy you can.