Destiny can have microtransactions without ending the world

To the surprise of no one, Bungie and Activision have chosen microtransactions for the next bit of track in Destiny’s eternally haphazard railway along (and ideally above) the black line. With a $500 million marketing and production budget still in its rear-view mirror, Destiny has always built its track even as it barrels down it. From product tie-ins to fast-food advert campaigns, Bungie and Activision have jumped at every chance to recoup Destiny’s exorbitant development costs. In-game microtransactions in the form of 18 new emotes were the next logical step, it seems. But are they the right one? (Above image via GamesRadar)

Microtransactions exist in games for two reasons: 1) the game’s creator wants to offer more content, and 2) they want more money. Neither are inherently bad, nor are they mutually exclusive. By design, the latter is always true. If the creator didn’t want money, they wouldn’t have included a price tag. However, the former is not a guarantee; too often money is the only motive behind piddling add-ons, leaving the content itself soulless and impractical. When extra content has both qualities, however, it's perfectly fine.

But that’s just the why; we haven’t gotten to the what of microtransactions. That’s a more complicated, case-by-case matter, but there are three principles to keep in mind.

Price

A good microtransaction offers fair, up-front pricing. There’s no red tape, no fine print. You get in, get your goodies and get out. But fairness comes down to more than just getting your money’s worth. It’s also about protection, both of the dollar (the Yen, the Pound, etc.) and the consumer.

To protect the dollar is to recognize and reciprocate its worth. If your local 99-cent store started selling one type of candy bar for $100 a pop, how would you react? By not buying them, of course. But that wouldn’t be the end of it. You’d wonder what on earth they were thinking. Nobody would pay that. Why even offer something so ridiculous? Why even attempt to get away with such ludicrous price gouging? Why, indeed. There are a million reasons not to, the most pertinent being that $100 candy bars would undermine the dollar. Rather than directly change or question its value, they slander it. So too do $20 avatar hair styles and $30 HUD updates.

Protecting the consumer is a question of ethics. It’s easy but cruel to say that anyone who gets duped by a silver-tongued salesman had it coming. Sure, they should have seen through his lies and realized they were getting scammed. But the fact of the matter is, not everyone has the same purchasing knowledge and experience. This includes children capable of spending $7,500 on an Xbox, which underscores the danger of online buying in particular: if you let people buy anything, some people will buy anything.

Rather than everyone’s responsibility, it’s the producer’s and individual’s job to ensure they get a fair deal. (Though the online shopping habits of children fall to parents.) If you work retail, you tell customers about applicable sales, just as you would check sales when shopping. If you work food service, you tell customers how combo meal XYZ can save them money, just as you would carefully read the menu. If you sell cars, you make sure your clients get rates they can afford, just as you would check your own finances before settling on a year. It’s all no different than setting fair prices to begin with.

The list goes on, and it definitely includes microtransactions. The only problem is that every entry on the list is dependent on producers having some semblance of moral standards. It’s perfectly legal to let consumers waste money, and it’s both easy and legal to sell somebody—somebody illiterate, desperate or woefully unfamiliar—something broken, overpriced or something they don’t need. But it’s still unethical. Sure, that person voluntarily spent $20 on their avatar’s hair style, but someone also sold it to them.

Of course, until Bungie reveals the pricing for its microtransactions this coming Tuesday, we’ll just have to stay cautious. In the meantime, we can pin down how much we’re willing to pay for a new emote. Personally, I draw the line at $1, and even then it had better be Thriller levels of emotive, as well as account-wide.

Importance

The only acceptable microtransactions are totally non-essential. You don’t need them to enjoy the game to its fullest or to keep up with other players. But essentiality isn’t necessarily determined by impact on gameplay—we’ll get to that next. First, let’s look specifically at the importance of Destiny’s latest storefront.

The microtransactions on offer are player emotes, D-pad-assigned expressions of comically timed despair, amusement, anger and so on. As Bungie said in its announcement post, “these emotes are completely optional, and won’t impact the action game in any way.” We’ll even get two freebies. But the key word there is “action game,” because cosmetic items could easily impact the entire game.

Imagine if the next microtransactions to come to Destiny were weapon skins, one of the game’s most-requested features. Now imagine real money was the only way to get weapon skins at all. Those skins would also be completely optional and cosmetic, and wouldn’t impact the “action game” in any way. But they would still put a new, long-coveted feature behind a paywall. Consequently, you would have to shell out if you wanted to get the most out of the game—that is, to access all its features.

Destiny’s 18 new emotes pass the importance test because players already have emotes. We can dance, point, sit—Guardians would wow at a dog show. But in a world without free weapon skins, buyable weapon skins would fail the test spectacularly. Now let’s extend the principle. Could Bungie sell additional ships and shaders? Sure. We already have plenty; no skin off my nose to miss out on three or four more. There can never be objectively superior appearances, after all. But could they sell unique weapons? No, which leads nicely to our final point.

Impact

The grand undoing of most bad microtransactions is their pay-to-win design. They create an environment where, by paying more than other players, you can obtain more powerful gear and outdo all free-to-play players with little to no actual effort. It’s a frustrating model to run into, and virtually impossible to repair once implemented. Fortunately, it’s also the easiest to spot. Just look for the players crying “NIMBY!”

NIMBY, literally “Not In My Back Yard,” comes from a decades-old argument regarding residential zoning, but it holds up here. Basically, we only think things are problematic when they affect our stuff. For our purposes, that means we have a problem when Destiny’s microtransactions affect our gameplay experience. In other words, when the buying habits of other players affect us.

Let’s pick an example from the top. What’s the worst thing Bungie and Activision could realistically do with Destiny microtransactions with regards to game balance? What would really be over the top? Exclusive Exotics? Pretty stingy, but I think we can do better. Exclusive Exotics that are empirically better than normal, freely obtained Exotics? Admirably scummy, but I still see potential. If you ask me, the worst thing they could do is bring back weapon reforging and hoard it behind a paywall. If paywall Exotics are a knife to the back, paywall reforging is a running lawn mower to the temple. (Above image via SnipView)

Of course, all of these hypotheticals are disgusting. They exemplify what microtransactions cannot do: create a gap between paid and free players which can only be bridged with money. Thankfully, Destiny’s new emotes won’t even come close to this line. Not only do they have no combat or gameplay implications, they also come with a trade-off. If you’re using a paid emote in one of your four slots, you’re giving up a vanilla one.

Thus far, Destiny’s first microtransactions have gotten top marks in importance and impact. They’re non-essential and completely fair. Pricing remains to be seen, but as it stands things are looking pretty good, despite the doomsayers making the rounds in the game’s forums. Like most games, Destiny can support microtransactions as long as they’re handled well. The sky isn’t falling just yet.