The Business: On "Pay To Win" & Its Effects on Videogames

Josh Strife Hayes addresses "Pay To Win".

The key here is that it's about masking the Pay To Win nature by allowing players to spend time or money, yet make the time cost so great that spending the money becomes the logical option. This is more apparent in Player-v-Player games where direct power acquisition makes it easier to trash other players and wreck their day because the consequences are direct, immediate, and obvious. In most games, which tend to lack this, the masking is aided by the core nature of the game; you're not directly competing head-to-head, but indirectly by clearing content faster and thus earning both more status as well as accumulating that status faster.

This is the most apparent in World of Warcraft, where the highest-status players routinely exploit the IRL-Game economy point-of-contact that is the WOW Token. If you are not spending real money to buy in-game currency, your ability to clear the top-tier content when it matters is significantly or severely inhibited even if you are a valued member of a top-end guild.

With that regular infusion of currency, you can readily purchase in-game goods (gear, specifically, as well as consumables) as well as services (WOW's rampant problem with buying guaranteed raid clears as well as PVP boosting) that drastically cuts down on the time required to reach peak mechanical performance and thus be able to concentrate on what you're there for (usually ranked Arena PVP, because there is nothing else competitive to do once you've cleared the raid).

Without it, you have to lean on personal relationships and other forms of favoritism to get access to those things or you have to play the game as a second job--one that, in IRL terms, pays less than Minimum Wage--on a grueling schedule of daily frequency. Fail and you are cast aside in favor of someone else that will, even if that failure is no fault of your own. (Found this out the hard way.)

Therefore a cash shop by itself isn't Pay To Win. It takes the combination of selling power and either inefficient or non-existent time-based alternative acquisitions of same to make it Pay To Win. Selling exclusive, but wholly cosmetic, things is fine. Even selling boosts or skips is fine if a player has to unlock that option in a manner that protects non-buyers (e.g. you can't boost Class X until you play Class X to Level Y because the boost is meant for secondary, alternative characters on the same account). Finally, if the time expenditure is sufficiently low--on par or better than the money equivalent--then it's not Pay To Win even if it's on a cash shop.

The net result? If "beating the game" resembling cutting checks more than working controls, it's Pay To Win. That's not a game. That's a dopamine pusher with extra steps, and it's little different than any other drug addiction. Which means that it's an alien predator in action, and therefore it is Fair Game to deal with it as such.