Big Picture Mode

Industry issues given the widescreen treatment

Nathan Brown takes a measured look at loot in the age of outrage

At last, my son likes a videogame! Specifically, Splatoon 2. It was the Splatfest that did it, the eternal struggle between warring condiments proving an irresistible lure for a three-yearold. “Mayonnaise wi-ins,” he’d sing-song after every victory, delighted. He sat tight by my side, watching me play, for a good hour. This is unprecedented. It helped, I expect, that I went on a tremendous winstreak. I’ve always played well in front of an audience.

There are obvious reasons why he was drawn to Splatoon 2: it is loud, happy and cartoonish, a game with a clear objective which revolves around splashing the place with bright, lurid colour. Or, more to the point, two colours. He is just starting to understand the notion of conflict; superheroes increasingly feature in his play, so he knows all about goodies (Superman; mayonnaise) and baddies (me; ketchup).

He is increasingly becoming used, then, to making binary choices. What is missing is a sense of nuance; of understanding that life is not so simple as good or bad. He assumed that, by siding with mayonnaise, I was saying I didn’t like ketchup – not that I really like it with chips and bacon sarnies, but use its creamy cousin with a greater variety of foodstuffs, so narrowly sided with it. That understanding will come with age, or so you’d think. Looking at the standard of debate around certain issues in videogames these days, I’m no longer quite so sure.

There was a great deal of fuss recently when Warner Bros announced that Middle

earth: Shadow Of War would feature a lootbox system. I understand. As players, we are naturally suspicious of a publisher seeking to make more money from us after we’ve bought a game at full price. And that wariness naturally takes precedence over the educated player’s understanding that game development is pricier than ever, so simply making a game has never entailed so great a risk, so efforts must be made to mitigate against it. We’ve seen it with horse armour, season and online passes, XP boosters and treasure maps. Now it’s loot’s turn.

Warners’ implementation of the loot box, however, is to have it contain gameplay advantages. I accept that is a different matter, and seems grubby. Yet if you listen to certain corners of the internet, it is the death of all videogames. In the endless wars of so-styled ‘pro-consumer’ videogame reporting – as if everyone that doesn’t automatically reach for their End Is Nigh A-board at times like these is somehow anti-consumer – there is no room for nuance. It’s inconvenient; it muddles the message.

Yet there is plenty of middle ground here; this is no binary choice. For one, Warners has said that those who refuse to pay up will still get loot boxes: they are bought using a premium currency that can be earned while you play the game. This is standard practice in free-to-play games, as you no doubt know. And I agree that its implementation in a paid-for game seems a little off. But how generous is it? How dramatic are the benefits that the loot itself affords? And what, really, is the purpose of gaining a gameplay advantage in a singleplayer game that you paid good money for? How many are really going to pay – and what makes you think Warner is dumb enough to design a game so that you have no choice but to do so?

The daft thing in all of this is that Warners has recent form in putting a loot system in a paid-for game. Injustice 2 has a premium currency, and it’s just part of a bafflingly complex series of economies that I never came close to understanding during my time with the game. But its loot system, as a non-IAP player, was incredibly generous, to the point of overkill. And ultimately it was pretty useless: I’d honestly have preferred an

Overwatch- style cosmetic gear system to the meagre boosts of a percentage point here or there to a near-invisible power stat. We can only judge a company on its actions and its form. In Warners’ case, the latter gives me reason to look kindly upon the former.

But then, I don’t make YouTube videos. And when I have questions about a developer or publisher’s decision, I ask them before I put words on a page. Yet in the attention economy it is much easier to simply steam in, to decry something as the worst thing ever without stopping to think about the things that might undermine their argument, or bring them to a more nuanced position. That, dear reader, is why someone thinks only of a bacon sandwich, and mindlessly picks ketchup. Heresy, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Making a game has never entailed so great a risk, so efforts must be made to mitigate against it