Is It Wise To Put A Box Price On A Competitive Game Designed For A Large Number Of Players?

Yesterday, Mike passed me a piece to write about the upcoming release of Bungie’s new extraction shooter Marathon. When he linked me the information for the piece, he commented that he thinks Bungie’s decision to give the game a box price was a bad one on their part. Looking at the details of the game, I was inclined to agree.

My agreement has little to do with the assumed quality of the game, but rather that the game is designed for matches involving up to 21 players. Well, if you apply a box price – rumored to be around $40 – you limit the number of people playing your game from the start. As anyone remotely familiar with competitive games knows, queue times can make or break these games. That means it’s important to have a population that will help quickly fill those match spots and get things going. Granted, 21 players is kind of a medium amount if you take into account large-scale battle royales, but I’m sure we can all think of competitive games with smaller match groups – say 5v5 – that struggle to keep queue times down.

The other issue here is that while we now know the game will have a box price, we don’t know what that price is. Nor do we know what, if anything, it will have in the way of microtransactions – although director Joe Ziegler did state during a podcast that the company wants to offer more seasons after launch and continue to evolve the game without increasing the box price. There is a possibility that it would be the box price and done, but that feels incredibly optimistic, knowing what we know about online gaming. I’d be more inclined to believe there would at least be cosmetic microtransactions. Based on the language used, I wouldn’t completely rule out paid DLC, as that technically doesn’t change the box price.

When discussing this with friends, we did consider the reasons Bungie might have for opting for a box price – other than just hoping that players would see value in the game – and one thing that could have affected the decision would be the fact that governments have been issuing legislation that regulates various aspects of monetization that, while very often used in buy-to-play games, are the typical foundation of free-to-play offerings. Bungie could want to avoid the whole thing and decided this is the best option.

That said, a lot of what is under scrutiny and being regulated are some pretty shady practices, such as forcing players to buy imaginary currency to be able to buy in-game items. I’m fairly certain most players would be happier if we didn’t have to spend extra money to have enough in-game currency to buy the items we want. Of course, there’s the whole gambling aspect of gacha-type games and lootboxes as well. That said, those aspects aren’t really necessary in shooter games, and players will happily spend money on skins and other cosmetics to make themselves look cool.

With all of this in mind, I do question if going pay-to-play on a game of this type is the wise decision. As I noted above, that initial box price can hurt your initial pool of players. People are becoming less inclined to just trust the devs and drop cash on a game they’re unsure of. If this ends up being the case for Marathon, it will be interesting to see what changes Bungie opts for to address it.