Riot's producer Juno Blees discussed the P2W mechanics in mobile games expressing her worries that developers are increasingly focusing only on their revenue and are not protecting players anymore.
Senior game producer at Riot Games, Juno Blees, recently took to Twitter to discuss the latest tendencies in mobile games monetization. The producer talked about the problems with games featuring Pay To Win mechanics saying that developers started to more often implement them instead of taking care of actual gameplay and protecting players.
Blees criticized the P2W model calling it "predatory" as it is being masked by gameplay which might confuse and deceive players who may not understand how much real money they could actually spend. "When people are rolling dices they know it's gambling, but when they’re paying for a better chance at loot within a gameplay moment, it’s so much harder to conceptualize the P2W mechanics," she said.
The producer noted that revenue generated by a game is certainly important, but the problem is that the industry is increasingly looking at it as the only indicator of success, resorting to more "exploitative" monetization models.
"When the more renowned developers are setting this worrisome standard for the rest of the industry, I fear for the industry as a whole, both as a developer and as a gamer," Blees concluded.
Many players and game developers agreed with Blees's thoughts. For instance, the game director of Riot"s upcoming MMO, Mark Yetter, stated that indeed, there are many ways to "squeeze out more profit" nowadays but all of them are ruining players' experience and hurt the game.
"Ideally for a F2P game you want purchases to be win/win where devs make money and the players feel good about it," he added.
While discussing the "predatory P2W mechanics" Blees didn't mention a particular game, although her thread came on the heels of the ongoing discussions of Blizzard's recently-released title, Diablo Immortal, which has been criticized by players for overusing P2W mechanics that encourage them to spend loads of money to level up their characters.
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