So, I don't like to discuss video games a whole lot on here, as this blog is meant for politics, but sometimes hobbies and politics intersect, and I just felt like this would be a good topic to discuss in the spirit of that idea. As some of you might know, Halo Infinite just released about 10 days ago and it's completely free to pay. But, the community is losing their collective crap over the monetization and the battle pass. And given I strongly disagree with the community on this to the point according to them I sound like a shill for big corporations apparently (HAHAHAHAHA!), I just felt like I should discuss this topic from a more political type perspective.
So, for some background, I'm a millennial in my 30s for those who don't know. I was your stereotypical 90s kid raised on the Genesis/SNES and later the playstation/N64 era. I've literally grown up WITH gaming. When I was born, the systems of choice were the NES and sega master system, and I got into gaming quite young, and it has always been a hobby and passion of mine outside of politics, so I ended up playing many games throughout the years.
And when I was a kid, the business model to play games was simple. You bought the hardware, which generally cost around $130 back then from what I recall, and you bought games, which ranged from around $35-70 each. And that was it. You put the cartridges in your system, and you played them. Games were considered complete experiences in their own right. What you paid for was what you got, for better or for worse. And that was how I was raised to approach gaming.
On PC it was a bit different, where the digital realm made piracy a bit easier, leading to the introduction of CD keys by the time you got into the late 90s/early 2000s, but the process was generally the same. You bought games, you played them, you got the complete experience. TO BE FAIR, as this will be important later, some PC games did have rudimentary forms of DLC. Command and conquer games would always release expansions later, but these were often the size of entire games themselves, with fleshed out campaign modes that lasted as long as your typical game would today. But even that was rare.
As online started becoming more popular on PC, games were often modded and people would create maps for them. I remember the glory days of Unreal Tournament and Quake 3, and how you could just download hundreds of maps for free. Not all of them were winners, but generally this content did greatly expand the games, and this trend lasted on PC through the late 2000s and even the early 2010s in some cases.
MMOs did come out, like world of war craft, and quite frankly, I never played them. Why? The monetization. You have to pay $15 to play MMOs. Monthly. I always found that ridiculous. Why should I have to buy a game, only to then have to keep paying to play the game I paid for. Well, the argument goes, someone has to pay for the servers. But then blizzard would shut down any servers people made of the game that were unofficial leaving you stuck to keep paying to play their game. it seemed outrageous to me. Like, even back then, I had this indepentarian principle in me where it's like, why should I have to pay just to exist? Why should I have to pay just to keep playing a game? it felt wrong and exploitative to me. So I always refused to play such games. I might've liked MMOs if I got into them at the right time, but I just never did. I always ended up gravitating toward shooters for online play. Strategy was quite frankly too hard, and while FPS was too I had an easier time with it and I found it fun.
Consoles, they went in a different direction. Xbox came out with Xbox live, a paid service where you can pay to play games online. And once again, I didn't bite. Same issue as MMOs, why should I have to pay to play games on their crappy servers when I can play games for free on PC. Like, I hate that crap. I already paid for my games, why should I have to pay just to be able to access the full content of them? As such, while I was HUGE on halo from a single player perspective, I never actually got to the multiplayer until the recent MCC release. As far as the single player though, I loved the series. I got the books once on sale and read them and the world, the lore, all so interesting, and the games made it even better. You have this futuristic sci fi conflict between humans and this alien empire of religious zealots known as the covenant, and the covenant want to genocide humanity and blah blah blah. And I was super into it. But because I always had ethical issues with the idea of paying to play games online, I never got into the multiplayer.
It got worse with Halo 3. Apparently with the xbox 360, they started experimented with DLC, also known as downloadable content. Basically, developers had this idea that hey, why charge $60 for games when we can effectively charge $110? So they charged $60 for games, but then made the games shorter and more sparse on content. But then they'd release more content later on for $15. And do that 4 times and you make them pay $120 to play the FULL game. With multiplayer, it was full on exploitative to me. And while PC initially seemed to resist this push due to everyone on PC laughing at the very concept, eventually they took away our modding tools with newer games and forced us to pay for additional content, much to the chagrin of the player base. A lot of us were outraged at the concept, and we often refused to pay. And whenever some new game came out and we had tons of DLC, like in battlefield 3 and 4, or any COD from Modern Warfare 2 on, we were always pissed off at that. And we had a right to be. In my eyes it broke the sacred agreement gaming was traditionally built on. I buy a game, I get the content. But now they were nickel and diming us for all of this content and selling us map packs and in game weapons and yeah, it sucked. We would be kicked from servers if DLC came up in the rotation, and games often felt like they were designed to punish people who only paid $60 for the base experience. It apparently got so bad in the mid 2010s with stuff like destiny where you would be constantly forced to spend $20-30 on DLC just to be able to keep playing or you would slowly be locked out of content you paid for. I found it outrageous. Like, just design games where they're $60. And then I buy the game, and then i go home and play it as much as I like.
While this was going on among paid games, a new business model was developed along side this known as free to play. Basically, the original f2p games were often very low quality. They were released by developers in places like china and korea. The games were buggy, they were broken, but hey if you didnt want to pay for games, and didnt have good hardware to run more demanding games, they were a good alternative. F2P was most often aimed at PC gamers with low system specs who didnt have the money to buy actual AAA games or the hardware to run them. And im gonna be honest, in college, I enjoyed a crapton of them. But let's not kid ourselves, they sucked. And they themselves were exploitative. You could buy a lot of customization options, which i quite frankly never had issues with, i mean, that stuff doesnt really affect game play and i have to play as a burly dude while someone who pays $10 to play as a hot girl in a tank top? Cool, whatever. But then a lot of them were charge for weapons and make the games as such that you can literally buy your way to winning. I remember in combat arms, a popular f2p game around 2008-2009 for instance, that people were running around with grenade launchers that people paid for. Sure, free players COULD grind for them but these games were designed where you had to be a no lifer to be able to do that. Like, the amount of hours you would have to put into the game weekly amounted to a full time job. It was awful. And we really wondered his exploitative games were going to get.
Honestly, this is what gaming was like back in the late 2000s and early 2010s. And I really wondered what the future was. It used to be we just bought a game, took it home, and got the full experience. But by this time, I felt like everywhere I turned, I was being nickel and dimed, nickel and dimed. They were finding so many ways to extract cash from people, and the quality of the games suffered in my experience from that. Paid games would be cut up into parts and sold back to us in $15 increments, MMOs would charge a flat out monthly fee, so did xbox for the privilege of playing online, and f2p games were increasingly monetized and pay to win. The CEO of EA was talking about having to pay to reload in battlefield. It was scary. Really, this crap scared me. I felt like we were being squeezed out of gaming. Extra fees everywhere. And the worst part is people just accepted it, and often defended the corporations for doing business in this way. Well, it never sat right with me. I'm sorry, it didn't. And I don't miss this era of gaming, at all.
That said, gaming has changed since then. Games, after a while, started laying off. Some MMOs started going free to play. Some of the most high quality ones like FFXIV and WOW remain paid to this day, but others started focusing on microtransactions. ANd I actually saw that as an improvement. I mean, my honest opinion toward microtransactions? If they are limited to cosmetics that dont affect game play, I don't really care that much. I understand devs want to make money. I just dont appreciate them doing it through methods that make the game play worse or nickel and dime consumers for basic access to the game.
While all consoles now charge a fee to play online, PC remains a bastion of freedom. And mobile gaming has followed suit, with tons of free games available at your finger tips. Speaking of free to play, free to play improved A LOT over the years. Gone are the days of overpowered hot chicks with grenade launchers and movement bonuses mowing down everyone else. Games started first making the grinds for weapons more reasonable, a la games like tribes ascend or planetside 2. And now f2p games are a lot more fair and open. I'll get to that a bit later, as I'm trying to remain somewhat linear with the time line.
Somewhere in the mid 2010s, DLC models fell off. EA started having to give away BF4, BF hardline, and battlefront DLC free to get people to play it, as people just wouldn't buy it. New games, from rainbow six siege, to overwatch, started experimenting with different methods of gaming. Maps started being free, and while not all features were, the paid DLC model did begin to die. And I noticed games like overwatch mostly had paid customization was similar to free to play games. But people complained, mainly because a lot of skins and stuff were in lootboxes.
I'm going to be honest, coming off of the horrid DLC and pay to win F2P era, lootboxes were a godsend. Gaming companies found out gamers would give people money to open lootboxes that gave them a chance to unlock skins to make their characters look nice. And while you would get some for free just from playing, you could also buy them. I had no issue with this. They were completely optional. And given games that employed them started making maps free to download and play, and started removing may pay to win elements from games, i approved of the shift. But, people complained. Something something kids were getting addicted and it was like gambling to them. I could see how unsupervised kids would go nuts over wanting to get their special colored character, but im in my late 20s/early 30s at this point, and starting this blog. I couldnt care. After so many years of IMO objectively worse models, I'm just happy to see those former business models go. But, apparently the issues with kids getting addicted was a concern, they started being banned in parts of Europe, and that practice has been phased out in recent years.
Honestly, beyond my self interest, I had no issues with lootboxes for this reason. People need to parent their kids. Honestly, a huge reason im so rigid with payment models is because I was raised frugally by middle class parents. They were the type who were able to give me a lot of luxuries, but they werent jsut gonna throw money away on me for useless stuff. I had to choose what I wanted, and being wasteful was generally bad. So we were money conscious, and I am too, as you can tell. And you know what? my parents wouldnt have let me buy hundreds of dollars in lootboxes as a kid, are you crazy? I wasnt even allowed to go to arcades much because I had video games at home and arcades were a waste of money (they were right, you know). So, to me, not getting addicted to loot boxes is as simple as parenting your kids and giving them values. Heck maybe if they did that they wouldnt have normalized DLC and paid subscriptions for gaming in the first place. But, I guess the science is clear, so I can see an argument for it. I am a fact based person, after all.
Which brings me to the newest trends. Monetization via customization. Basically, what I said I would be okay with F2P games doing since their inception. It's like they listened, they finally listened. people dont want to be nickel and dimed for DLC. They don't want to have to put up with pay to win scams. They dont want to pay subscriptions. So, a lot of games started adding monetization to games in game. Battlefront 2 did this and got HUGE pushback, although they did still ahve some exploitative elements in it. We're all familiar with their pride and accomplishment thing right? Yeah. But then that got cleaned up, and by battlefield 5, they stopped pushing DLC and started having skins in a cash shop. And like always people complained, but I just didn't get it. I mean, it's nonessential stuff. Surely this is better than DLC, right? Like again, I'm just happy to see the old DLC model go.
Like, really, if monetization is limited to aesthetics, I don't care. It doesn't impact core game play. It's providing me with cheaper games. it's the best of all worlds, I dont feel nickel and dimed and squeezed, and they make money, since apparently some people are willing to spend a fortune on that stuff. Surely that is the most painless business model right?
But it got better. A common trend in recent years is the rise of F2P AAA games. Gone are the days of small korean studios and other no name brands releasing horribly low quality and exploitative free games. F2P at this point is an accepted business model and a lot of games have gone free over the years. Team Fortress 2 had long adopted that model and counter strike followed more recently. Valorant is popular among some. Many battle royale games adopted the f2p model simply because they understood they would die trying to compete with pubg if they didn't, so now we got games like fortnite and apex and even CALL OF DUTY Warzone (seriously, seeing COD shift from DLC to having an entire portion of their game FREE is a huge positive shift for me). And now halo infinite.
I mean, wow, given what I feared the future of gaming would be, I am quite happy to see this development. I mean, here's the thing. I'm saving so much money. i dont have to buy season passes. I dont even have to buy the games at all in some cases. They're FREE. And they offer high quality AAA games as good or better than what we used to have to pay $110 for.
But, people complain. Halo infinite is the newest game of this model, and people are hating on it. Why? because they gotta pay to change their color. OH THE HUMANITY. I mean, imagine gaming is a sandwich. It used to be, you bought a sandwich, you got the whole sandwich. Then it became, you buy a sandwich, they take half your toppings away and sell them back to you. Or you get the bread free but all of the toppings cost money.
Now we're getting to the point the entire sandwich is FREE, but now people are complaining because if you want that fancy multicolored wrapper, you have to pay $20. WHO. THE HELL. CARES?!
Like why are they complaining? I dont get it. Now, to be fair, infinite does have some problems. Battle pass progression is admittedly slow. I think I've played like 23 hours since release and I'm only like level 8. If I played COD, I generally do 1 level an hour. As far as the prices of stuff, I dont know what to tell you. I'm not someone who actually wants to buy fancy skins and stuff. I just wanna play games.
I know at this point I might sound like an old boomer but maybe being a millennial who lived through all of the above, I really think this generation of gamers is, dare I say, ENTITLED (I've become what I hate). I mean, what the actual fudge, guys? The game is FREE. it's high quality. There's no pay to win. You just gotta pay if you want your spartan to have racing stripes on it or whatever. WHO CARES?!
But, the amount of outrage on r/halo in other places has reached critical levels and I just dont get it. These people are acting so immature. I'm not a corporate shill. I understand corporations have to make money. And I've been vocal against practices I disagree with over the years. But I feel like a lot of the more legitimate fights of the past have been won, and at this point we're getting the best of all possible worlds, where mainstream high end free to play games are dominating the landscape, and people are complaining.
It boggles me to see the zoomers on r/halo going on about how great DLC used to be. Bro, just shut up. You have no idea how hard we millennials fought that stuff. And how we see it as horribly exploitative and nickel and diming. And now these zoomers, these entitled zoomers, they wanna throw it all away because "whaa I cant change my color but I could in halo reach." Let me be the first to tell you guys to PLEASE shut the hell up. Like, here's the thing. If the backlash is severe enough, I fear developers will give up on f2p and go back to paid games. Except because games are live service, people will be expected to pony up money monthly or yearly like they have to for destiny or MMO games.
I don't get you people any more. We won. The game's free. There's no tricks. It's a high end AAA game for anyone to download and play for free, and people are screaming over skins. Just shut up and play the game, jesus.
I know, Im starting to sound like an old person, but in this case I feel like my opinion is legitimate. I just don't get people. I don't long for the days of DLC. And heck I would rather have the current model than even having to pay a flat price for games. I'm okay with that, but this f2p stuff is LIT these days. Again, I save so much money and get so many high quality games to play. i don't even have time to play them all as much as I want.
Anyway, that's my stance on it. Paid games fine. Paid DLC is horrible. Subscriptions are horrible. F2P used to be crap, but now it's good. Modern F2P is even better than paid in a lot of cases more recently. The future of gaming is looking bright, and I really don't get the complaints. Is halo infinite's model perfect? No. I'll grant you that. But most changes I would want are changes around the edges, not a fundamental shift back to some paid DLC model like r/halo seems to be gunning for. Those guys are crazy. Reminds me of the boomers who gave up the gains FDR made for lower taxes. Sickening.
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