Microtransactions should serve the player and enhance play experience.

Certainly not what you suggested. You should never put content behind a paywall.

People need to understand that the model in which content has to be purchased is dying out. More games are moving towards the "All content is available, but if you don't pay you'll be working a long time for it" model. Because it doesn't make the user feel like they may as well not play for free because they'll be cut off if they never pay.

It's your decision in the end. I only told you the successful free to play model right now. You are hiding content behind a paywall though, and that is not a decision you want to make.

I don't think you're telling the truth that "it feels like the entire game is behind a pay wall". Because the game has no core content that you actually have to pay for.

History lesson: League of Legends is known for being a dota clone. What people forget is that you had to pay for dota 2. Dota 2 eventually removed this paywall because all of their players were going to league of legends, where the only barrier between unlocking all the content was time spent playing. League of Legends is successful today because of some key business decisions + timing to the point where League cannot be toppled easily. It came out on top in a time where everyone was staking land, and the important thing to take out of this is the player is denied no game experience just because they didn't put a dime in. You can own every champion, own every rune, have 20 rune pages, everything needed to play the game is "free". Free in that it only costs you time grinding but compared to not-Smite, the grind is actually not that bad.

That aside, assuming that the customer owes you something because you made the game is boorish though. The customer owes you nothing. You provide a service, if they think your service is poor, they won't continue to take it. If you want customers to stay, you need to make them feel like you're not reaching for their wallets.

I support responsible DLC. Irresponsible DLC is what usually comes with preorders. Responsible DLC is content that enhances the game. Bioshock Infinite Episode 2: Burial at Sea comes to mind.

This is a discussion my design team recently got together on and talked about, because we have a microtransaction system on the board as well. The consensus we came to was that no part of the game should be designed around microtransactions at all. Every facet of the game should be balanced and fair in a completely closed system, only serving microtransactions as a method of "cheating" to allow the player an easy method of getting ahead.

Our example, we're allowing in-game currency to be purchased with microtransactions, a much broader solution than trying to assign value to every asset that's purchasable in-game, but that's purely choice.

As far as the pricing and exchange rate is concerned, that's always a tough nut to crack. First of all, you'll need a lot of data in public testing to be able to get an accurate example of the average progression rate for players.

Then you really need to ask yourself, "What is your player's time really worth to me?" There's this really interesting bit of almost joke rule that approximately $1 equals 1 hour of gameplay. It's silly, but it really does work a lot of times. Being a very small indie game, you're going to have to push that a little bit. One hour might not be $1, it might be 50 cents or 10 cents? That's just dependent on the overall quality of a game, typically compared to AAA standards.

So let's say for example that you decide that your game is probably around a 20 cent per hour kind of game. It's a very modest indie title. You collect a bunch of data that suggest that players, on average, earn about 100 credits per hour in either item worth or money. To this effect, you can pretty well guesstimate that 500 credits equals about $1 in your game. So you set up a microtransaction system where players can buy in-game money or items worth about 500 credits per $1 spent. A $5 purchase of credits would be equivalent to about 25 hours of earnings.

In the end, it's all about trial and error. Always get feedback from the community and see who's buying it and who's not. If an overwhelming majority of people are saying that it's priced too high, or a high percentage of players are buying things, you may want to think about adjusting your prices to prevent your in-game economy from breaking down and becoming trivial.

Just make sure to create the game in a way that doesn't necessitate the need for anything other than playing it. Once you've done that, people won't mind buying things to give themselves a leg up.

Unfortunately this is a problem that all game developers who facilitate microtransactions have to deal with. The perfect setup would be allowing players who pay for more to progress faster but ultimately don't let them win more simply because they paid you. As long as in end-game content every player is equal in terms of gameplay, this system works fairly well. League of Legends does this will Champions and Skins. An aesthetic use to be unique when playing a champion. It has no bearing on how well you play, but looks cool regardless.

A lot of times, players will pay money to simply look cooler. I know I do.

Lugia319 wrote:

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but isn't GTA online more about the heist missions you play with friends and play only against NPCs? Or did I miss something there?

Unless you're in a private session or have passive mode enabled ( can't attack or be attacked ), other players can and will kill you for the lawls. They do have PvP specific missions, such as deathmatch and objective-based team vs team.

But yeah, most people I know have a friends-only session and run heists together.

But I disagree with you believing those guys definitely paid real money for their weapons. They could have easily gone the route of "free" and worked for it.

I had all but a few weapons unlocked when I used to play. It really just comes down to how much time you're willing to invest in the game. Of course, having friends speeds up the process since you can agree to stick together and grind out money and levels. I wasn't aware the game had micro-transactions until I had already sold it.

Zecronious wrote:

At least then I'm not getting into fights with guys who paid to win against me and I'm not having my gameplay completely wrecked cos it takes me a week to buy one frickin gun.

Only scrubs cry about guns being more OP than others. No such thing as that, n00b. Skill > guns. You can give an AK47 to a retard and he'll still lose to a skilled player with a pistol, it sounds like you just didn't know how to play dem games. Stop blaming it on imbalance and get good. Rekt and rip in pineapples 2015.

As discussed in another thread. I believe Microtransactions should be aesthetic only.

You could also allow players to input designs for other portions of a game, such as enemies designed by players, weapons, armor, etc.

Of course, these options would be more expensive.

It's less uploading their own designs and more giving their input on what they'd like to see in the game.

For example they could say "I want a monster that's a robot that shoots lasers, here's an icon of it." The devs would look at the icon, make whichever modifications they want (or outright reject the idea depending on the game) and make changes accordingly to get them something they'd like in the game.

It's essentially allowing the player to make a heavily influenced suggestion, but it still has to be reasonable, fit the game, and the art/implementations/etc would all still be done by the devs. The player just provides the concept.

Letting players upload their own stuff would be insane! o_o