LISTEN TO THE PLUGGED IN SHOW, EPISODE 259
Weird how “free” games make so much money, isn’t it?
Fortnite, an online game you can technically play for free, has made somewhere in the neighborhood of $26 billion in its history. In eight years, Pokemon Go has caught nearly $8 billion. These and other games literally bank on players spending a little extra cash to unlock special features or opportunities. Other games sell special weapons or outfits for real-world money.
The biggest in-game purchase of all time? We turn to the Entropia Universe, a massively multiplayer online game that doubles as a sort of free-wheeling digital moneymaking hub. A space station in Entropia sold for $330,000. An in-game nightclub sold for $635,000. And a whole planet, Planet Calypso, brought in $6 million. Sure, that’s less than a real planet would cost, but it’s a whole lot of money for what amounts to a bunch of pixels and programming.
Adam Holz, Emily Tsiao, Bob Hoose and I talk about the perks and perils of in-game purchases, especially why parents should be aware of them.
We’ll then turn our attention toward Christmas—or, more accurately, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, in theaters nationwide tomorrow. I had a chance to talk with both the director (Dallas Jenkins, who also created a little show called The Chosen) and one of the producers (Kingdom Story Company’s Kevin Downes) on how they brought this beloved book to the big screen.
And then chime in with your own thoughts. Do you ever make in-game purchases in games? Is it worth it? Planning to see The Best Christmas Pageant Ever? Does your church have any of its own treasured holiday traditions? Let us know below. Or, if you’d rather, tell us on Facebook or Instagram. Leave us a voice mail on The Plugged In Show homepage. Or write us an email at [email protected].
And then listen to us again next week when we address one of the biggest questions of our time: Should I get my kid a cell phone? And when? You won’t want to miss that.
2 Responses
The practice of loot boxes and gacha games lately in video games has been very interesting to observe. Western games are largely dropping the loot boxes that made Overwatch and Battlefront 2 notorious initially. But eastern games are making billions currently through the gacha system, which is very similar. Unfortunately, those systems are addicting just like gambling, but they aren’t regulated by the US government, so over here children can have full access to them.
I occasionally make purchases in games, myself, but nothing over 60 dollars in most cases. It’s just not wise, as far as I see it.
That said, I recommend that the Plugged In team take a look at the gacha craze. Genshin Impact is coming to Xbox this month, and with that game already making profits in the multi-billions, it will be interesting to see what its impact is on an expanded Western audience.
Yeah. Loot boxes are to a lot of modern games what booster-card packs were for young card players growing up. I’m not against the games’ content itself, but the randomized business model* is arguably unethical.
* (you always get “something,” but it’s not always valuable, to say nothing of games that let you randomly amass more copies of a resource than the rules allow you to use, then don’t compensate you for the excess, such as how the Pokémon online card game — which, notably, does not let you manually buy online-only digital packs — does compensate you with extra card-crafting currency)