The in game store is the reason everything sucks in call of duty…
Some people may argue it's things like SBMM or Lazy developers. But hear me out. Almost everything that we don’t like about modern call of duty, hell modern gaming is solely because the game is built with the entire purpose of driving sales in the in-game store. This is the reason that features we don’t like stay in the game or the content we want more of gets pushed to the wayside in favor of microtransactions.
At this point the sole purpose of releasing a triple a game is basically to create a container for an in game store. All the marketing and hype around the game is designed to reach a broad audience and hook you in. Because once you’re in their system, everything from when you boot up the game to playing your last match of the day is designed to get you to spend money in the store. I didn’t realize how much money ACTivision made on microtransactions and DLC content until I looked. The amount of money they earn from microtransactions alone is more than even my most outlandish guess. They made almost 5.9 billion in revenue from those two things alone in 2022. Starting around 2018 these in game purchases or DLC make up between 70 - 80 percent of Activision's total revenue. No wonder they spend so much time and energy focusing on them. Video games are a business at the end of the day. Previously they made most of their money upfront during the release of a new game that they spent 3 or more years putting money into. But with in-game purchases they’re able to one: keep making money on that investment throughout the game's life cycle, but two: essentially triple their revenue.
So what’s the big deal if someone wants to buy a skin or a weapon camo? I don’t really have an issue with microtransactions per se. I have an issue with how they’ve been implemented. Instead of making a great product and offering buyable cosmetic items, new games are a shell of their former self. Almost all progression has been removed and placed in the store, and every single part of the game is purpose built and designed to drive sales in the store. No longer are games about fun and providing good gameplay, but instead serve as a machine to manipulate you into buying microtransactions.
They do this in a few ways. First off we all know a lot of games have now implemented an SBMM or EOMM system. They try to con us by saying “oh it increases player retention and our data indicates that people enjoy the game more”. I have yet to meet a single person say they enjoy the system. In fact if you’re one of the people that claims to enjoy SBMM please comment down below and explain what you like about. It seems that Unanimously across the board, from low skill all the way to professional players everyone says that they don’t enjoy whatever match making system is in call of duty. The real reason match making exists is to manipulate your dopamine release like some lab rat in an experiment with the goal of keeping you playing a little bit longer. And the more time you put into the game the more likely you are to buy something in the store. All of this is built on data driven psychology. They even have patents that say that players who purchase in game cosmetics will be matched with lower skill players. The idea being that a high skill player with a cool skin or camo will stomp on lower skill players and they will falsely attribute the skill with the cosmetic item and increase the likely hood those lower skill players will go buy something. Now they claim this patent is not active in call of duty franchise but rather another one of activision's titles and fine maybe that’s true. But that’s just one patent that we managed to find. How many other ways are they manipulating your experience that we aren’t aware of?
Another way they manipulate you is by removing your awareness of how much money you’re actually spending. Everyone accepts that we use COD points to buy things in the store but why? Why can’t it just be dollars instead this weird secondary currency. Well the point is to remove your ability to discern how much things actually cost by converting your dollars into COD points. Spending 2500 cod points is much less obvious to your brain than spending 20 dollars or whatever the conversion is. Not to mention have you ever noticed that everything in the store is always an odd number of points. You ever notice how after making a purchase you always have just a little bit of cod points leftover? Ya this is intentional. It’s another psychological trick used to drive more sales and get you to spend more money. Having that little bit of currency left over will always sit in the back of your mind leaving you feeling like you’ve wasted some of your money if you don’t find a way to use it. But it’s never enough to buy anything else in the store so you need to spend more money on more cod points.
You might be thinking ya I hear you but how does this negatively impact the game? This is the reason that the in game store gets so much time, attention and development resources. We’ve all made the joke that an annoying bug in the game takes months to fix but if even one pixel is off in the store it gets an instant update. This is why. Back in the day, when a game was released it had to be a finished, polished product because it got shipped on a disk and developers couldn’t just send out an update to fix the game. Not to mention the game had to actually be good and deliver a fun gameplay experience. Nowadays all of the methods of creating organic player retention and replay-ability are all gone. Things like traditional prestige, earnable cosmetics to show off your time and skill and even things as simple as the emblem editor are gone. All swapped out for match making manipulation and microtransactions.
So why am I telling you all of this? One to help make you aware of it. You can’t opt out of a system you don’t know you’re in. Two because I believe if you want games to be better you need to vote with your time and your dollar. Stop spending money on items in the store and play games with consumer friendly practices. I know someone out there is going to say “But I’m just one person I won’t make a difference” and you one person won’t. But if all the people who said that decided to stand up and say enough is enough then games would transform almost over night. We’ve seen massive changes come to games like call of duty in a matter of week when content creators and their fans all stopped playing warzone. It is possible to make change and if you believe in something then you should stop supporting the thing you’re against.
Comments