Editing to add: while I’m still not a fan of the selling of skins directly overall, I’ve seen that they aren’t planning on making their soft currency purchasable. Assuming that holds true I’m glad I was wrong.
Guys, I know you’ve probably heard a lot of griping in the past year. In fact some of that has come from me (though not on this forum). I have done my best to keep my complaints both constructive and reasonable, and will continue to do so here.
Historically I’ve thought of you guys as being really good devs, and hopefully this isn’t something that you’re so committed to that you’re totally unwilling to reconsider.
Setting up a soft-currency cosmetics shop is a bad move. It’s bad for the game, bad for the players, and in the long term bad for you as a company. It’s not the WORST move in any of those regards (which would be loot-box mechanics), but it’s going to drive more of your players away. I’ve bought the main game and every single DLC at full price (for myself and my wife both, in fact), advised friends to buy the game, and indeed have bought copies for friends when it was on sale. I’ve bought 7 copies of the main game in total for various people at various times because I really enjoy the game. I can say with absolute certainty that if the cosmetics store goes up I won’t be doing that anymore. You won’t be getting any more money from me and won’t be getting additional players (who in turn may buy DLC’s themselves).
Adding microtransactions or skins is not in and of itself inherently a negative thing in a game. Numerous free to play games have done so in a mostly ethical and transparent way. That said, they aren’t a good fit for this game for a few reasons. Firstly, a huge chunk of the core gameplay loop of VT2 is built around acquiring different skins and weapons for your character. Adding in a way to just buy them does actually rob the game of some of its appeal (though doesn’t necessarily ruin it entirely). Second that’s not how the game was sold, and indeed one of the things I actually used as a selling point for friends was that there was none of the microtransaction or lootbox silliness integrated into the game. Third is that the time being used on this could be instead used on actual improvements to the game, more actual content and fixing the complete disaster that is the Weaves.
Using a soft currency to hide the cost of in-game items is deceptive at best and grossly manipulative at worst. Doing these things while making the game competitive rather than cooperative is likewise extremely suspicious.
The Winds of Magic DLC was a big letdown, but still didn’t ruin the core of the game for me the way it did for some others. There have been plenty of people who have discussed why it wasn’t really worth the money, but still it didn’t actually make the game actively worse by its existence. It just didn’t add value equal to its cost. This is different. This is a bait-and-switch that fundamentally changes the relationship between your company and players and simultaneously ensures that your company can’t be trusted in the future.
There is a more ethical way to do this. Rather than an in-game microtransaction store, you can sell these skins as a pack for a reasonable amount of money ($5-$10 for a pack including 10-20 skins for a specific character including weapon skins and the like), which then adds them as possible rewards for opening chests with that character and/or rewards for challenges. That keeps them in the same mold as prior added items, while simultaneously eliminating one of the bigger problems that the currently espoused model creates.
Just for the record for anyone reading this: this isn’t world-hunger level important, but it’s a shame to see a dev I’ve previously really respected go down the corporate scumbag path.
Hopefully you’ll reconsider,
Ben