After a week of travel overseas, winning a Team Sonic Racing tournament, seeing family, and checking out Borderlands 3 in person, Daily Reaction is finally back from its brief hiatus. And wouldn?t you know it, just like clockwork, the video game industry gives me something great to talk about right out of the gate: The feud between Randy Pitchford and Game Informer over the word ?microtransactions.? I would have written this yesterday, but I wanted to make sure to get my hands-on impressions of Borderlands 3 out first. Pitchford has no bearing on my feelings for the game, and overall, I?m very excited for what Gearbox is doing with with Borderlands in 2019.
So let?s set the stage. During the gameplay reveal stream for Borderlands 3, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford asserted that there were no microtransactions in the game, but proceeded to talk about skins and heads for characters, just like past games have done. Yes, we got his intent behind what he was trying to say, but the script was confusing. If you tell gamers there are no microtransactions and then you to proceed to talk about things that are ostensibly microtransactions, you?re going to get called out on it. As one Twitter reply put it, cosmetic items are definitely microtransactions?despite protestations from Pitchford to the contrary?because you make a ?small (micro) purchase (transaction).?
I had seen this same presentation a day earlier when the press got its hands on time with the game. When Pitchford got to the...