Gamers are furious about additional purchases in the game ‘Dragon’s Dogma 2’, which is already expensive to purchase

Suppose you buy a car, quite an expensive one. But if you want to use the built-in parking assistance, you have to pay a few euros with your banking app. Just pin it on the dashboard.

Unthinkable? Not in the gaming world. There was an uproar there in recent weeks when it turned out that the game Dragon’s Dogma 2 had included so-called ‘microtransactions’ in the gaming domain. As a playing character you can buy items in the game that will help you through the missions. A stone that brings you back to life if you have been beaten to death by a minotaur, for example. Or a crystal that helps with ‘fast travel’, in other words: traveling faster between different locations in the landscape.

These are all things that you naturally want to be able to do if you have just purchased a game for 75 euros. And that is why there is now an angry response on gaming forums and review blogs to the Japanese Capcom, the publisher of the game.

Beautiful design

Dragon’s Dogma could have been controversial for other reasons. The game, in which the player can freely adventure in an open, medieval fantasy world, is one of the most beautiful ‘open world games’ of recent years. Dragon’s Dogma is beautifully designed and the characters are voiced by excellent voice actors.

But in all that gaming splendor also lies the disaster, to which gamers now owe those detested microtransactions. Games in the ‘triple A’ category, i.e. the blockbuster-like games, are so expensive to make that the revenue model is faltering. The game Cyberpunk 2077 from 2020, for example, was made with a total budget of 407 million euros. That’s more than twice as much as the movie Dune from this year.

Teams of hundreds of people sometimes work on the vast worlds: designers, programmers, soundtrack composers and voice actors. Due to advancing technology and increasingly powerful PCs and game consoles, the demands of players are also increasing. Every major new game must look even better, with a smooth image of no less than sixty frames per second.

To make that possible, the developer must invest. And then of course earn the money back and preferably make some profit too. This is becoming increasingly difficult, also due to rising personnel costs and general inflation. The purchase price of major games has already risen considerably, to roughly 75 euros per game. Making games even more expensive, to over 100 euros for example, seems economically risky: many potential buyers will drop out because of such an amount.

Stream games on Netflix

So other ways are being sought to keep the gaming economy healthy. It is expected that games will mainly be streamed in the near future, just like films and music. The player then pays a subscription, just like for Amazon or Disney, and can pick the games from the offer. According to a study by the British research agency Midia, 180 million gamers worldwide played via a subscription service such as Netflix, Apple or Amazon last year. Netflix is ​​expected to introduce a much more extensive range of games this year.

According to the same researchers, game purchases are also becoming increasingly important. Of the turnover in 2023 of the total gaming industry, 208 billion euros, the largest part (116 billion) even came from purchases in a game, and therefore not from purchasing or streaming.

But these small purchases are usually made in free games, or phone games like Candy Crush. Competitive games if freely available Fortnite are driven by the purchases of fanatical players, who want to look nice during online matches against other players and therefore buy nice outfits or ‘skins’. Few players object to these cosmetic microtransactions, because they do not change the flow of the game and usually do not give the buyer an unfair advantage.

Wasted money

The transactions in Dragon’s Dogma are from a different category. First of all, because a consumer paid full price to get the game. And secondly, because it is a game that you play at home, alone on the couch. You simply have to pay extra to play the game better. And those costs you incur also turn out to be a waste of money. Because players who are on the road for a few hours Dragon’s Dogmaautomatically run into the crystals that they recently purchased for about a euro each.

The publisher Capcom seems to be learning an expensive lesson. The in-game purchases have generated a stream of scathing comments and reviews, which won’t help sales figures. And the players who had already bought the game are probably no longer going to spend money on objects that are literally there for the taking.

Or as someone with the gamer name Dranzel wrote in an online comment: ‘It’s now like having to pay extra for a napkin with your pizza, while you sit next to a toilet where you can wash your hands. And it doesn’t make the pizza any better.’