Developer Overkill Software once promised that its multiplayer heist game, Payday 2 , wouldn’t contain microtransactions. Then, one day, the game suddenly contained microtransactions. Fans were less than happy about this.
Making matters worse, the developers were silent for 10 days after the controversy. This frustrated many. When Overkill Software staff finally took to reddit to try to explain its side of the story, they managed to anger people even more.
In a long AMA, producer, Almir Listo, responded to post after post. The essence of what he had to say was simply that the development team has grown signficantly, as have their ambitions for the game. In order to pay those people, they introduced microtransactions and, from a business standpoint, those transactions have been successful. Listo also noted the considerable outrage, but insisted that the microtransactions were there to stay. To many, this parsed as: “these are making money, so we’re okay with the broken promises.”
Fans have since started an initiative to boycott the game and tank Payday 2’s metacritic score.
It will be interesting to see how this story continues to escalate going forward. It’s hard to say at this point whether or not Overkill Software will be negatively impacted by this outrage, or if they will still experience overall net gains from both the new monetization scheme and the increased publicity.
Source: Kotaku