On microtransactions
Apr. 8th, 2019 12:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellway(context)
---
Well, to be fair, there are definitely some aspects of the way my mind and life work that would tend to make it easier for me to handle this:
1. The video-game playstyle that meshes well with my brain is very much depth-over-breadth: I prefer to play a small number of games that each offer an indefinite or near-indefinite number of playtime hours, rather than a large number of small games. A game taking longer to complete if you don't spend money isn't necessarily a problem: sometimes it just means postponing the day where I go "wait, crap, I actually *finished* that game, *now* what I am going to do when I feel like playing it". (This also means that I don't really have experience with all that *many* games.)
2. While I am as much of a sucker for unlockables as the next guy, I generally don't care about cosmetic stuff for its own sake. (Not really into aesthetics much.)
3. I don't enjoy gambling unless it's the kind where the outcome is always positive (just by varying amounts). (I'm *willing* to make possible-loss gambles if I'm confident enough that the expected value is positive, but it's not fun; negative-expected-value and insufficient-information gambles don't even have *that* going for them.)
4. While I *have* a minimum-wage job, that doesn't mean I can just pick up an additional hour of minimum-wage at will. My *marginal* wage is about $1/hour, and an extremely tedious $1/hour at that. As I understand it a lot of games will let you make a couple bucks of premium currency per hour at the margin, hoping that your marginal wage is high enough that the calculations come out in favour of spending another hour at work and then using the money on premium currency, but *even if you ignore in-game methods being more fun* my calculations often come out in favour of in-game methods.
(Huh, I guess that--in a way, and to an extent--those games *do* price-discriminate: if you're so poor that a couple bucks an hour sounds like a good deal, they don't charge you.)
---
Of the six games that I currently play at least occasionally, three have some form of microtransaction element.
Flight Rising: the dev-run microtransaction store deals pretty much exclusively in stuff I don't care about (non-unlockable cosmetics, things to speed up a part of the game I don't even play much anyway), so the only point in getting premium currency at all is to trade it with other players. (The Flight Rising player economy runs on a fully-fledged dual-currency system: the player marketplace has an option to denote your item's sale price in premium currency, there are player-run exchange booths on the forums with floating exchange rates, and other player-run services will generally take both currencies.) Premium currency inflates less than the regular kind (though the regular kind of inflation isn't hyper- or anything), so I use exchange booths and arbitrage tricks to keep most of my money in premium form.
Marginal wage is maybe $2.50 - $3/hour, though mostly because I am very good at FR merchanting.
(Note also that the prevailing interest rate (denominated in premium currency) is *much* higher than in the real world: 35%/year is extremely simple and pretty low-risk to obtain (and zero risk of outright loss), and with somewhat more care and more understanding of the economic patterns, 50% is only slightly harder. Most people either never save up enough to make the investment at all (the extremely-simple investment is in increments of $20), or are unwilling to tie up that much money for several months.)
Runescape: microtransaction store has a bunch of cosmetic unlocks that I *might* save up for one day if I run out of higher-priority things to do; a few useful things like increases in item storage space that I will probably save up for somewhat sooner (though for item-storage-space specifically I am nowhere near running out, so that's a pretty low priority too); gambling (with a small number of free plays per day; because of point 3 I am perfectly content to take the free plays and then stop); and a premium-currency form of the membership subscription (which gives you access to a *lot* more content) they've been doing since before microtransactions were really a thing (I used to pay money for this, but the moment they introduced premium currency (and legalised gold-farming to obtain it) I switched to that method instead).
Marginal wage is about $2/hour if you are bad at both bossing and micro-ing (I am bad at both), $4.60 if you are good at both, and $2.60 if you are good at micro-ing but not bossing. (To be good at bossing you must also be good at micro-ing.) Non-marginal wage is about $4 - $5.60/hour and is sufficient to pay for membership at my current level but not by much (I'm currently doing a bunch of the more marginal methods because I want to have more buffer for when I'm not playing as much); at higher levels it's more than enough, and I put a higher priority on levelling that gives access to more non-marginal gold-farming methods than on levelling that doesn't.
(The Runescape player economy is larger, more complicated, and more difficult to get clear information on than the Flight Rising one, so--for the moment, anyway--I'm not very good at Runescape arbitrage or investing. (I did make a spreadsheet to determine the most profitable form of livestock-farming, though!))
Pokemon Go: the only natively mobile one (though I hear many people make do with accessing the Flight Rising desktop website on mobile, and Runescape is working on a mobile client), and indeed the most aggressive. Certainly the hardest in which to gain premium currency through in-game methods: last I checked, there was a 50c/day cap on the sole available method, so if you're capable of maxing that out every day (I usually can't, but then I'm not very good at Pokemon Go) the marginal wage is zero.
Still, at 50c/day you can max out your storage space in...five-ish months, if I've got the figures right? And you get one free raid pass per day (though you're only allowed to accumulate a one-day buffer). And you get some of the time-saving consumables through levelling up (which means the supply through that method is finite, since there are only so many levels to gain). So while it *is* very much trying to entice you into buying stuff (not even counting transportation costs; I only show up to places if I can get there on foot or was going to go there anyway, but I know a lot of players who drive around), it's also very much possible to play with just what you can get in-game. There's still plenty of things to catch and train and so on after you've run out of raid passes for the day.
(The other three games, in case you were wondering, are Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, Age of Empires III, and Nethack.)
---
Well, to be fair, there are definitely some aspects of the way my mind and life work that would tend to make it easier for me to handle this:
1. The video-game playstyle that meshes well with my brain is very much depth-over-breadth: I prefer to play a small number of games that each offer an indefinite or near-indefinite number of playtime hours, rather than a large number of small games. A game taking longer to complete if you don't spend money isn't necessarily a problem: sometimes it just means postponing the day where I go "wait, crap, I actually *finished* that game, *now* what I am going to do when I feel like playing it". (This also means that I don't really have experience with all that *many* games.)
2. While I am as much of a sucker for unlockables as the next guy, I generally don't care about cosmetic stuff for its own sake. (Not really into aesthetics much.)
3. I don't enjoy gambling unless it's the kind where the outcome is always positive (just by varying amounts). (I'm *willing* to make possible-loss gambles if I'm confident enough that the expected value is positive, but it's not fun; negative-expected-value and insufficient-information gambles don't even have *that* going for them.)
4. While I *have* a minimum-wage job, that doesn't mean I can just pick up an additional hour of minimum-wage at will. My *marginal* wage is about $1/hour, and an extremely tedious $1/hour at that. As I understand it a lot of games will let you make a couple bucks of premium currency per hour at the margin, hoping that your marginal wage is high enough that the calculations come out in favour of spending another hour at work and then using the money on premium currency, but *even if you ignore in-game methods being more fun* my calculations often come out in favour of in-game methods.
(Huh, I guess that--in a way, and to an extent--those games *do* price-discriminate: if you're so poor that a couple bucks an hour sounds like a good deal, they don't charge you.)
---
Of the six games that I currently play at least occasionally, three have some form of microtransaction element.
Flight Rising: the dev-run microtransaction store deals pretty much exclusively in stuff I don't care about (non-unlockable cosmetics, things to speed up a part of the game I don't even play much anyway), so the only point in getting premium currency at all is to trade it with other players. (The Flight Rising player economy runs on a fully-fledged dual-currency system: the player marketplace has an option to denote your item's sale price in premium currency, there are player-run exchange booths on the forums with floating exchange rates, and other player-run services will generally take both currencies.) Premium currency inflates less than the regular kind (though the regular kind of inflation isn't hyper- or anything), so I use exchange booths and arbitrage tricks to keep most of my money in premium form.
Marginal wage is maybe $2.50 - $3/hour, though mostly because I am very good at FR merchanting.
(Note also that the prevailing interest rate (denominated in premium currency) is *much* higher than in the real world: 35%/year is extremely simple and pretty low-risk to obtain (and zero risk of outright loss), and with somewhat more care and more understanding of the economic patterns, 50% is only slightly harder. Most people either never save up enough to make the investment at all (the extremely-simple investment is in increments of $20), or are unwilling to tie up that much money for several months.)
Runescape: microtransaction store has a bunch of cosmetic unlocks that I *might* save up for one day if I run out of higher-priority things to do; a few useful things like increases in item storage space that I will probably save up for somewhat sooner (though for item-storage-space specifically I am nowhere near running out, so that's a pretty low priority too); gambling (with a small number of free plays per day; because of point 3 I am perfectly content to take the free plays and then stop); and a premium-currency form of the membership subscription (which gives you access to a *lot* more content) they've been doing since before microtransactions were really a thing (I used to pay money for this, but the moment they introduced premium currency (and legalised gold-farming to obtain it) I switched to that method instead).
Marginal wage is about $2/hour if you are bad at both bossing and micro-ing (I am bad at both), $4.60 if you are good at both, and $2.60 if you are good at micro-ing but not bossing. (To be good at bossing you must also be good at micro-ing.) Non-marginal wage is about $4 - $5.60/hour and is sufficient to pay for membership at my current level but not by much (I'm currently doing a bunch of the more marginal methods because I want to have more buffer for when I'm not playing as much); at higher levels it's more than enough, and I put a higher priority on levelling that gives access to more non-marginal gold-farming methods than on levelling that doesn't.
(The Runescape player economy is larger, more complicated, and more difficult to get clear information on than the Flight Rising one, so--for the moment, anyway--I'm not very good at Runescape arbitrage or investing. (I did make a spreadsheet to determine the most profitable form of livestock-farming, though!))
Pokemon Go: the only natively mobile one (though I hear many people make do with accessing the Flight Rising desktop website on mobile, and Runescape is working on a mobile client), and indeed the most aggressive. Certainly the hardest in which to gain premium currency through in-game methods: last I checked, there was a 50c/day cap on the sole available method, so if you're capable of maxing that out every day (I usually can't, but then I'm not very good at Pokemon Go) the marginal wage is zero.
Still, at 50c/day you can max out your storage space in...five-ish months, if I've got the figures right? And you get one free raid pass per day (though you're only allowed to accumulate a one-day buffer). And you get some of the time-saving consumables through levelling up (which means the supply through that method is finite, since there are only so many levels to gain). So while it *is* very much trying to entice you into buying stuff (not even counting transportation costs; I only show up to places if I can get there on foot or was going to go there anyway, but I know a lot of players who drive around), it's also very much possible to play with just what you can get in-game. There's still plenty of things to catch and train and so on after you've run out of raid passes for the day.
(The other three games, in case you were wondering, are Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, Age of Empires III, and Nethack.)
no subject
Date: 2019-04-08 11:02 pm (UTC)This is not every mobile game that uses microtransactions, but it's a large share of the ones I end up playing, for some reason or another.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-10 01:27 am (UTC)(I didn't count them because my brain parses a query of "what games do we play?" as more like "what sources of game-related psychological nutrients do we use?", and casual games don't fill the right niche in my head.)
no subject
Date: 2019-04-09 07:38 am (UTC)... I just get distracted; there's always more to read, and I do tend to prefer finite RPG-type things over open-ended economic games, though I continue to love the idea.
(Esp I tend to not like activities I parse as grinding; like, if getting somewhere requires a lot of effort in terms of time needed to claim qualitative progress, I go read instead, so my threshold for doing stuff is higher, I guess?)
no subject
Date: 2019-04-10 02:38 am (UTC)I came across a blog post once from a guy who fit my usual stereotype of Real Gamer pretty well: experienced with and skilled at a wide variety of RPGs and FPSs, that sort of thing.
And in this post he was like "I'm not *that* intense of a gamer. You know who is? *Roguelike* players. *Those* people are hardcore. I can only aspire to be as much of a gamer as those people."
And I was like "*looks at post*...*looks at several Crawl wins plus a dormant Nethack savefile of a late-game extinctionist†*...huh."
---
As for grinding, there's the opportunity-to-listen-to-podcasts aspect (that I see we were both in a conversation about earlier, though we did not directly interact), and in any case I sometimes find grinding soothing.
---
And hey, reading is an excellent thing. :)
---
†winning is pretty much a formality at that point, as long as you don't misclick or make some particularly stupid mistake
no subject
Date: 2019-04-10 04:28 am (UTC)I hadn't thought about the podcasts thing, but I'll bear that in mind for when I'm playing some game which will need some grinding. Maybe I should get back into some minecraft mod-pack? The last time I tried died for internet-connection reasons.
(And now you're making me feel guilty for reading stupid stuff on the internet and not actual books)
no subject
Date: 2019-04-09 07:00 pm (UTC)In a weird way, being in a situation where microtransactions are completely impossible if I want to keep paying my bills is really helpful. If I had more of a financial cushion, it'd be a lot more of a challenge to resist, I think.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-10 02:45 am (UTC)Me:
what's an entertainment budget