14 DAY TRIAL // Forza Motorsport 5 created a huge scandal among fans soon after it was launched alongside the Xbox One when gamers discovered that they could basically buy all the cars included in the game using real-world money.
The same vehicles were also accessible to gamers who only wanted to use in-game currency but they needed to grind the same races over and over in order to get the amount of currency that they needed.
The team at Turn 10 moved quickly to slash some prices and double rewards in order to make sure that players who expressed their discontent felt vindicated, but the core economic elements of the game remained unchanged.
Clearly, the design decision made for Forza Motorsport 3 could not have happened without approval from Microsoft, given the game’s status as a launch title for the Xbox One.
This means that in the near future, we might see more titles that ask gamers to pay full price for the initial release, via either retail or digital distribution, and then ask them to pay once more in order to get access to all the content included in the experience.
Developers will explain that everything can be acquired using in-game currency, but that’s an avenue that is only accessible to hardcore gamers with plenty of time to spare.
At the moment, the median age of a player is over 30 and many of them have kids, jobs, other obligations.
This means that an important segment of the audience of the Xbox One probably has more money to spare than time and that will make them vulnerable to a strategy where they are encouraged to pay in order to save time that they would need to spend grinding.
Future games will probably be better balanced than Forza 5 was on launch, but a problem remains: we are heading for a future where paying full price for a game does not guarantee access to the entire experience.