For Monetization, player perception is their reality – and it’s amazing how quickly players “assume evil intentions”. Example:

Studio is going to release a new PvP fighting game with 30 characters. Buy the game for $60 and you get all the characters unlocked. This is the “good and just” way to make a fair, ethical, non-p2w game according to the youtube videogame critic consensus.

After talking about it though, the studio decides they also want to let players try playing real pvp before they buy. It’ll increase the number of players on ladder and make sure players don’t regret their purchase. They’ll let folks play with 6 characters for free and you can buy a $60 bundle to unlock the remaining 24 characters.

Now some devs feel that forcing you to buy ALL 24 characters in a genre where players tend to focus on just a few feels a bit scummy. They suggest doing it like iTunes, where players can just buy the individual characters they want for a few dollars each instead of being forced to purchase the full album. Maybe buying a single character costs $3.99 since buying the remaining 24 costs $60 as a complete bundle ($2.50 each). Cool discount for buying in bulk, but now you have the option to save a bunch of money if you just want a few specific characters.

Some other devs point out that free players are very valuable to the ladder population, and it’d be good if they also had a way to eventually unlock all the characters for free. That would also work well with the option to buy individual characters, because you could buy some while you work toward unlocking other ones for free. Meta-goals are great for PvP games, because even if you lose several games in a row you can still feel good about making progress toward a meta-goal. Things just got better for free players: they used to be locked to just trying out 6 characters – now they can potentially unlock the other 24 for free!

Finally, a system designer notes that the meta-goals making it feel better to play even when you’re losing make a lot of sense for everyone – and it’s kind of a shame to buy all the characters because suddenly it feels like you don’t have meta-goals anymore. It can make you feel actively dumb for going the “buy2play” option, and folks might regret buying the bundle. That sucks. So why not include some cosmetics too? That way folks can still work towards unlocking cosmetics with the currency earned from playing. They’ll still have a gameplay-driven goal even if they already have all the characters.

Each step in this decision process arguably only makes the game easier to play for free, and gives players more options to buy what they want. You can buy nothing, buy everything, or only buy some things and unlock the others over time. Even the addition of cosmetics was based on solving an emotional problem, and costumes don’t affect gameplay.

Yet we ended up with a seeming textbook example of “evil p2w microtransaction game by greedy devs”.