WHILE LOOT boxes have featured
in games for some time, they’ve
only recently been pushed into
the limelight, due in part to the
huge popularity of certain games.
Blizzard’s Overwatch was released
in 2016, with loot boxes included
at launch, and the huge financial
success of the hero-based shooter
spurred other developers to focus
on the potential profits waiting
inside those loot-filled containers.
Within a year, the majority of
triple-A multiplayer releases had
followed suit and shoehorned loot
boxes into their games, with the one
notable outlier being the infamous
Fortnite: Battle Royale.
The driving principle behind
loot boxes is simple enough: As
the games industry became more
lucrative, driving investments in
long-running franchises and
broadening the audience for games,
developers and publishers were
encouraged to seek greater profits
from their increasingly expensive
projects. 2018 was the biggest
year ever for the industry, with the
global software market passing
a staggering $137bn, 10 percent
up from the previous year, and
predicted to grow further.
Loot boxes represent a low-
effort but high-return input for
games. Previously, the sole profit
from designing and producing
a game came in the form of
initial sales revenue; producing
a sustainable income stream
demanded the release of sequels or
spin-offs. Then came the expansion
pack, bringing additional content to
beloved titles at a lower price than
that of the base game. People began
to make their own content; map
packs, mods, and more became
available to download as gaming
entered the online age, and it didn’t
take long for developers to start
capitalizing on that. Downloadable
content (DLC) slowly became a
staple of games, starting with titles
such as Cavedog Entertainment’s
1997 game Total Annihilation, which
allowed players to download small
new additions each month.MICRO MANAGING
Total Annihilation’s content was very
small, and free to download. One of
these two characteristics would
survive as the predominant feature
of much DLC. Can you guess which?
If you guessed “free to download,”we suggest you relocate your house
out from underneath that rock. Yes,
many developers have included
small pieces of bonus content
after release, but it’s far from the
norm—despite unilaterally positive
responses from gamers. When CD
Projekt Red’s award-winning The
Witcher III: Wild Hunt was released,
fans were drip-fed numerous small
add-ons with no price tag, leading
up to a pair of high-quality paid
expansions, and gamers rejoiced.
So, smaller is better. When the
Xbox 360 was released in 2005,
Microsoft reasoned that gamers
were more likely to spend between
one and five dollars on a small
piece of content for a game they
enjoyed than commit $25 to a
larger expansion. This proved to
be a successful strategy, with the
Xbox Live Marketplace producing
huge profits for Microsoft. Thus
was born the microtransaction.
Developers could sell bite-sized
pieces of content for their games,which took less time and money to
create, but reached a potentially
wider audience than larger, more
expensive DLC.
Not every microtransaction was
met with acclaim, of course.
Bethesda drew serious ire for its
two-dollar horse armor package
for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion,
which was derided to such an
extent that it remains an industry
joke years later. But some games
fitted right in: Rhythm-action
games like Guitar Hero II boasted
huge amounts of DLC at tiny prices,
specifically individual songs from
licensed musicians to play in game.
Sadly, the money involved
resulted in corporate greed taking
over. Day-one DLC became a much-
hated feature in many games,
where gamers perceived (often
correctly, let’s be honest) that parts
of the finished game were being
held back behind a paywall to try
to squeeze an extra few dollarsthe death of the loot box
36 MAXIMUMPC OCT 2019 maximumpc.com
©^RESPAWN^
ENTERTAINMENT,^ B
LIZZARD,^ VALV
EAbove from top:
Valve’s Steam
Marketplace
perpetuates
a lot of the
player-to-
player trading
of loot box
rewards.Online fantasy
card game
Hearthstone
ups the ante by
having players
reveal their loot
box rewards.A particularly
lucky loot box
opening here in
Apex Legends
awards two
gold-rarity
items.