Steam began its life as an app to simply streamline patches to Counter Strike. Today, Steam is one of the biggest digital games platforms in the world, allowing both major and indie games developers to sell their games through the free Steam client.
It seems like Steam will need to create new ‘Game Tags’ for its latest additions…
However what’s fairly new to Steam is the concept of paying for a game, to then be continuously teased to pay additional sums of money throughout the gameplay experience – or better known as ‘microtransactions’.
Warhammer Quest is one of the first to charge a price tag and still include microtransactions
I must admit, while King and Zynga were making just about every casual gamer on the planet worship the free-to-play business model, I was always sceptical about it leaking into the PC and console market and bringing the dreaded ‘microtransactions’ with it.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m in no way against ‘free-to-play’ games. If done correctly (e.g. Team Fortress 2, DOTA 2, Planetside 2 and many more) the design gives gamers easily accessible and fun games where additional payment is optional (not essential for progression) and still allows the developers to live off their hard work. It’s when the retail game (non free-to-play) merges with microtransactions. Should these two game types ever appear on the same product page?
H1Z1 (Sony’s answer to DAYZ) is now available on Steam with an Early Access price tag…and microtransactions. Realism isn’t the only reason why ammo is scarce in H1Z1…
As hard as it may be to believe, Steam is starting to introduce us to this game model. Pay and keep paying. Should developers really have the right to charge for a game with a free-to-play design? More importantly, should Steam prevent developers from ever submitting these games in the first place?
Hit the comments section and let us know what you think.
