Gearbox Software’s Randy Pitchford has offered his thoughts on the ongoing debate over microtransactions, which has caused quite a rift between the gaming community and developers. In a lengthy post on Twitter, Pitchford said that he’s against “predatory monetization schemes” in video games but he feels that the term “loot box” is being misused in the arguments put forth, and is wrongly associated with questionable monetization practices.
Here’s Pitchford’s message in full:
I am generally very much against predatory monetization schemes in F2P games for consumable goods and even more so against them in premium games. I tend to oppose such techniques both as an artist and creator and also as a customer and a gamer. Evidence of my position is that we never sold Golden Keys (an arguably consumable good) in the Borderlands game. We had non-trivial levels of demand from customers to do so, but we did not relent. We chose to only give Golden Keys away via social media and partner relations. Contrarily, I tend to be very supportive of post-launch monetization of durable goods as DLC in *almost* any form. Again, as a customer and as a creator, I think that new, discrete content that took energy to create deserves to have the effort compensated. I do, however, object to some of the arguments and language being used to fight against the predatory monetization schemes I have just derided in the first post in this thread.
As an artists...