YES

by Anton P. Nym (aka Steve) , London, Ontario, Canada, Saturday, March 02, 2013, 07:11 (4288 days ago) @ thebruce
edited by Anton P. Nym (aka Steve), Saturday, March 02, 2013, 07:24

But you're assigning "value" to the $60 game by saying it's universally "bad design" to have microtransactions. Value is entirely subjective. And the point is, there are <i>plenty</i> of people who will value a game at $60, yet still happily go about taking advantage of microtransactions to <i>enhance</i> their experience. "Bad design" to you is perfectly fine and enjoyable design to someone else.

Cody's very Aristotelian Platonic on game design; as far as I can tell he really thinks there is an Ideal Form for games and that a game's merit depends upon how closely it approaches that Ideal Form. Subjective things like personal taste don't matter from that POV. That Cody's concept for that Ideal Form is extremely narrow and apparently based on a small time window in the history of the games industry only makes the discussion even more headdesky for the many who disagree.

-- Steve does not think that microtransactions are inherently detrimental to game design, but rather are one possible choice in design that can be implemented well or poorly in a game.

PS: With all the studio failures we've been seeing over the past few months, as well as some epically shitty games being released just to get them off the books and realise some revenue from the debacle (cough A:CM cough), I'm thinking that studios looking for alternate revenue streams may actually help the gaming ecosystem maintain some diversity in titles. Otherwise we're looking at a raft of browser games decorated with a few "World of Hacknslash" and "Shaven-headed Shooter" knockoffs.

edited to fix a philosophical reference; yes, on some things I can be a bit OCD