Commercial advancement

Perhaps a controversial topic for commerce in video games is the use of “pay to win”. Pay to win is exactly what it sounds like, a person in a video game is able to pay their own money to win in a video game. This may be done in the form of upgrades or items in the game that can only be acquired through paying into the game. This is a big problem for a lot of gamers who either don't have the money to pay for the upgrades and feel cheated by the game's developers or gamers who feel pressured into paying money into the game to stay ahead of the curve.

Perhaps the most controversial example of this is the release of EAs “Battlefront 2”, on the games release certain characters were only available through currency in the game that players had to spend real money on. This would have seemed like a good idea to the developers who would have gotten a lot of money from this however the developers experienced backlash from the community surrounding the game. People felt as if they had been cheated out of the experience they paid for as the game was lacking and unfair for those who did not pay for these additional characters. The way EA dealt with this and a lot of developers have followed has set the base of purchasable content within video games since. EA created a system in the game so that players could earn the in game currency by playing the game, this allowed the characters that were exclusive purchases to be earned overtime in the game, however EA also kept the ability to purchase the characters meaning EA could still get money from in game purchases and the players of the game were satisfied. Most in-game purchases now use a currency specific to the game that can be earned over time or purchased using real money, another way developers get around this is to make in-game purchases cosmetic only meaning they have no effect on gameplay.

• www.gamasutra.com. (n.d.). Resurgence of the Pay to Win model in mainstream gaming. [online] Available at:  https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DanHastings/20200821/368665/Resurgence_of_the_Pay_to_Win_model_in_mainstream_gaming.php