Pay-to-win games

Pay-to-win games are (typically freemium) video games that offer items or other gear that give buyers advantages over non-paying players in real money or make gameplay marginally more sluggish and difficult for players who do not pay in premium currency or real-world money. Most of them are also shovelware games due to the fact that those games have highly repetitive themes and gameplay, numerous bugs and glitches and outright dreadful graphics, gameplay and originality. Most of these games are Western, Chinese, Japanese or even Korean mobile titles.

Notable examples of video games considered to be "pay-to-win"

1. Perhaps the most notorious examples of "pay-to-win" games are video games designed for mobile devices.
   • Jurassic World: The Game - You have to sometimes pay $100 just to get a specimen.
   • Diablo Immortal - It would take YEARS of grinding, or over $100,000, just to fully upgrade your character.
   • Dungeon Keeper Mobile - Tasks can take a very long time to complete if you do not want to pay gems and the game is riddled with all sorts of microtransactions. The game has also been accused of rating interference.
   • Dragon City - The game will sometimes offer "VIP Dragons" that cost almost $20 just to obtain, far too many time-limited dragons clutter the game, and a "piggy bank" mechanic that collects the game's premium currency, gems, from certain tasks and offers the gems to you in real money are just a few examples of the "pay-to-win" practices this game engages in.
   • N3TWORK's Legendary: Game of Heroes was notorious for its high prices and constant nerfing of cards so players can't know which cards are good or not.
   • CSR Racing 2 - Most of the fastest cars in the game are obtainable via time limited in-app purchases only.
   • Summoners War, for a gacha game has a huge variety of monsters with their own abilities, with most of them being palette swaps of each other as different elements. It features a separate form of summon called light/dark which is harder to gain, and even then, the chances for a 5* from enchanted summons (premium summons) are 0.2%.
   • Real Racing 3 - You need to spend golds for next series or winning the new cars. If you don't waste your real money for golds, you can't win and it's really impossible to play.
   • Tales of Phantasia (iOS) - There were items that cost real money and some of them were mandatory to speed up the grind. Plus, there was a daily stat-up system that gave you buffs which were already standard in the original game. The game also required an internet connection and was discontinued in less than a year.
   • GrandChase was going to implement a weekly summon cap of 10. Summons could be farmed by using prana from selling heroes and monsters. For every 200 summons, players could get an SR select. After some revolting (mostly Korean), KoG decided not to implement the summon cap.
   • Cooking Fever - Upgrading the kitchen appliances, restaurant furniture, etc. will require using gems. Without the upgrades, higher levels will become very difficult or impossible to complete. Gems can only be earned in special offers such as periodic free gifts, leveling up, and the slots/casino minigame; otherwise, gems must be purchased through microtransactions.
2. NBA 2K18 - This game is a full price AAA game, and there are tons of microtransactions in the game. The game demands you VC (virtual currency) for nearly everything. If you don't spend additional money, it is literally impossible to win matches with the free teams given.
3. Metal Gear Survive - Extra weapon loadouts, money, storage, and even save slots are locked behind paywalls.
4. Counter-Strike Nexon: Zombies. It should be noted that this game is an embarrassment to the entire Counter-Strike franchise, since no Counter-Strike game was ever pay-to-win. The game is not even made by Valve, has countless of bugs and zombies are way too resilient because the free weapons are weak.
5. Some Roblox games are also pay-to-win. Examples include a "V.I.P." gamepass which gives you access to stronger weapons.
   • To add onto this, sometimes Roblox games are pay-to-play, meaning you need to spend Robux, which is bought with real money, to play the game in the first place.
6. Asphalt 8: Airborne: Once Vivendi took over Gameloft in 2016, the game has only gotten more pay-to-win, and in the 6th Anniversary Update, every Research & Development has become pay-to-win because of forced max rank, and extreme pro kit requirements since the Fast Lane Update.
7. Gangstar Vegas: In order to complete the story, you have to spend diamonds before starting a mission which is unfair considering the fact that you can easily run out of diamonds. Furthermore, they didn't even exist back then, while microtransactions are getting more rampant as the game continues to receive updates.
8. EA Sports Ultimate Team: Often times, you will have to buy Points to purchase card packs which have a random chance of giving a certain type of player. The game will get more difficult, and because you get virtually no coins after matches, it will take days or MONTHS of grinding to finally buy a top player for your team. Or you could buy Points, and try to get them in a pack, but because pack rate is so slim, it's virtually impossible unless you buy over $200 worth of Points!
9. KREW Eats: Not totally pay to win, but the game gets very sluggish when you don't pay for gems. Also, there is a very powerful VIP pet you need to pay $15 for to advance better.
10. Wizard101: This game has been advertised as free-to-play constantly, but you have to buy a membership or crowns in order to continue into farther areas (eg. Cyclops Lane and Firecat Alley), which is where the rest of the content and main story is.
11. Ace Combat Infinity: Despite allegedly being free to play, the game has large in-game credit gates preventing you playing past the third of the pitiful 8 missions unless you buy a seasonal pass; more infamously, both campaign and multiplayer require fuel to play, which can be bought with real money and can therefore limit how much players could play. As well as multiplayer being extremely pay-to-win, it was a breeding ground for seal-clubbers, pay-to-win type players who deliberately exploit low-tier players and kick better players from the lobby.

Why You Can't Win Them

1. Mobile game developers always believe that all mobile games should be free, contrary to AAA games, yet they implement this mechanic into their games (mainly because people would think twice before buying it from the store). It is clear that they need to make money from their work, but it becomes inexcusable when there are certain mobile games that are being sold just like console games and do not have P2W mechanics or even ads. Sometimes the microtransactions can even cost you more than a paid mobile game (GRID Autosport for example, a $11 game). If they need to make money from their game, why can't they simply just sell it?
2. Most importantly, they are often poor in quality. While there are some of them with good graphics (such as NBA 2K18), they have tons of glitches and lack gameplay elements.
3. As previously stated, "pay-to-win" games are incredibly unbalanced and unfair towards players who are unwilling to spend premium currency or real money on them.
4. Some "pay-to-win" games are simply clones of preexisting games, aka cash grabs.
5. Despite being dubbed pay-to-win, in some games, it only grants you access to the level and the gameplay is based around your skill, meaning that if you fail/lose, you have to pay again to play that same level.
6. Console games that have to be paid for with a full price, such as De·Formers, Star Wars Battlefront II and NBA 2K18, have microtransactions, which goes to show just how greedy the developers and publishers are.
7. Some games give absolutely 0 chance to free users to win a fight against a premium user.
8. Sometimes it's kids that are playing these pay-2-win games, since they're free to download, and since they don't understand how money works they'd take their parents credit cards and pay for them. Many times parents would find out that their bank accounts are empty in an instant with no way of restoring the lost funds.
9. Some of these games are always online making it impossible to bypass the MTX through hacking.

Redeeming Qualities

1. It is potentially justified if the developing entity is in a financial crisis and are barely clinging to life.
2. Sometimes it is added to avoid season passes or to make the game free to play (keep in mind that this is not the case everytime).

Reception

Pay-to-win games, especially on mobile games, have been known to receive mostly negative reviews by critics, but on the App Store and even the Play Store, they tend to get mostly 5 star reviews (with 1 star reviews being second place) which can mostly be sarcastic or fabricated by bribes, bots and manipulation. However, some games, like Legendary: Game of Heroes/Summoners War, have trustable reviews that actually make sense, while some games tend to have reviews that are just a poorly written sentence, crash/pop-up ad/framerate complaints which are blatantly pointless and childish.

Responsible gambling

Gambling addiction, also referred to as compulsive gambling, is a disorder that stems from multiple causes. Like other addictions, it’s a disease that can be treated by professionals. Players are driven to continue playing even when they experience significant financial issues and other ill effects. They may find it hard to concentrate on anything else.

References

1. ↑ https://gamerant.com/nba-2k18-microtransactions-change-backlash/
2. ↑ https://leafletcasino.com/fr/jeu-responsable/

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