Players of Activision’s latest Call of Duty shooter Black Ops 4 aren’t thrilled with the sneaky introduction of microtransactions into their game. The universally-hated monetization mechanic especially stings after BLOPS4 released without it and became one of the best and most innovative entries in the series in a long time.
Loot boxes, microtransactions and the likes have long become a stigma for games to feature. After an intense controversy about the topic started with 2017’s Battlefront 2, more and more games started to patch out these systems out of their games or promised they would not exist in their future games to begin with. The backlash from gaming audiences simply was that massive, and companies had to react.
But the lucrative nature is just to sweet of a nectar it seems, and some choice games are adding these – at times – greedy microtransactions post-launch into their games. A pretty brazen move, as customers can only buy games in their current form, without foreseeing such drastic updates to monetization.
Cue Call of Duty: Black Ops 4. The shooter somehow managed to surprise all critics by ditching a single-player campaign in favor of the popular battle royale game mode Blackout. What sounded like an unimaginative attempt to jump on a bandwagon turned out to be a stroke of genius. Blackout and Black Ops 4 became a huge success and for a while it looked like the Call of Duty franchise had a new bright future in front of it.
All the success in the world cannot satiate business men it seems however, sadly, as Activision decided to add loot boxes to Black Ops 4 now. A large and active player base equals a lot of possible in-game monetization after all. Fans are still disappointed and unearthed an old interview from the game’s design director David Vonderhaar where he stated that all Blackout characters would be locked behind missions and quests, not money.
Vonderhaar replied to the post on Reddit and explained that at the time the interview was conducted, what he said was true but added that “things change along the way … and not all of them are design decisions”, not-so-thinly hinting that developer Treyarch isn’t the party to blame for the loot boxes. It’s true, such decisions are usually done by the publisher, in this case Activision.
What will this controversial introduction for Black Ops 4 mean in terms of player counts will be interesting to see.
