One of the trends that I’ve noticed with games in recent months is the practices of releasing a game, wait for the reviews to come in and then completely pull a 180 that pisses off gamers by adding a feature they knew was frowned upon by the community. Call of Duty Modern Warfare is the latest example of that possible practice.
We’ve seen increments of this happen over the past months, the first glaring example of this for me was Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled, a game that was highly anticipated by many fans of the series. It came out with positive reviews and everyone enjoyed how they brought a classic back into the modern times. However, soon after the game’s hype had settled down, the developers quietly started to release patches that added micro-transaction into a game that originally did not have them. This clearly pissed off a lot people as the implantation of this shop was seen as deceitful. And, had this virtual shop been made available at the start, the reviews for this game, and the pre-orders would have taken a different direction for sure.
Now jumping a bit forward and you have rumours and speculation that the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare plans to add pay to win loot boxes and microtransaction AFTER the game has come out and has been reviewed by the public. It’s still all rumours but in my opinion, seems to follow the trend I spoke of earlier.vThis to ensure that by the time they release this feature, returning the game would be near impossible (I’m betting they might do it after two weeks to ensure the chances for a refund goes way down).
Modern Warfare up until last month was the rave in the gaming community. Aside from the small sensitive folks, everyone was hyped up for this game. Some probably assumed they’d be some form microtransactions in COD:MW, like cosmetics and whatnot, that does not affect the gameplay or give you an unfair advantage but clearly Activision knew this news was not going to sit well with fans and strategically chose to withhold it up until I presume when the game comes out and as being reviewed so the scores can’t be altered.
When you think about it, it’s devilish smart and fucked up! This is why I’ve always encouraged NOT to pre-oder anything until a game comes out. I know that these developers will try to entice you with pre-order bonuses such as Day 1 items or early access, but at some point you gotta ask yourself, is it worth the potential bullshit in the future? At least Ubisoft had the balls to straight-up tell us ahead of time so we can make the conscious decision to skip or buy Breakpoint. I’m positive that had the leaks not happened, we would’ve never heard about this pay-to-win tactics until it was too late.
It’s just something I’ve started to observe, and I’m sure some of you all have observed as well but I wanted to share it anyways for those who may not be aware of what may be going on. Let me know what you guys think? i’ve also talked about microtransaction and the cause for it a bit more in a video that you can find here.
