The micro-transactions in Forza Motorsport 5 have frustrated many players, and now it looks as though Gran Turismo 6 is doing a similar thing. We’ve known about the existence of such transactions in the game for a while, but now Polyphony Digital has released more details on how it will work and — more importantly — how much it will cost.
And it all seems a little bit steep.
The Australian pricing is as follows…
Cr. 500,000 — AUD $7.35
Cr. 1,000,000 — AUD $14.45
Cr. 2,500,000 — AUD $29.95
Cr. 7,000,000 — AUD $73.95
That means that if you wanted to buy the Jaguar XJ13, one of the most expensive cars in the game, it would cost you over $210 actual real life dollars (or 20 million credits in-game).
But, of course, no-one is forcing you to pay. You could simply play the game and accumulate enough credits to ‘win’ the Jaguar. The thing about these microtransactions is you’re paying to avoid playing or, more specifically, to avoid the grind of accumulating credits. From what we’re hearing the Gran Turismo 6 in-game economy isn’t really affected by these microtransactions, meaning you can completely ignore them and go about your game as usual.
But there is something a little strange about adding free-to-play business models into video games we’ve already paid a premium for. Doesn’t sit well with me. Games like Real Racing 3 I can understand, but when you pay full price for a game, even adding the option of microtransactions feels a little cheap.
Comments
79 responses to “Gran Turismo 6’s Microtransaction Pricing Is Pretty Steep…”
Hahahahahaha
I guess I’m missing the Humour.
But anyway, it doesn’t matter as much as in Forza, because it still takes about the same amount of time to earn the cars as it did in the older GT games, so you aren’t forced into the microtransactions. I still don’t like the trend, but in Forza it is pure evil, they changed the game so you effectively *have* to keep coughing up money for content.
Pricing…steep…in Australia??? Did you actually write that sentence thinking it was news?
So from what I gathered in Forza 5 you’re actually paying for the cars but in GT6 you’re paying for in-game currency? If that’s the case GT6’s system is far better, as long as there’s nothing locked within the game if you don’t pay anything
Forza you buy tokens to buy cars and upgrades. So pretty much the same thing. You can buy cars with normal credits you earn or tokens you buy with real $$$
ah, I was under the impression for some reason that Forza was making you buy certain cars. Then, if you can grind away and earn credits/tokens the normal way then people won’t really use this and it’ll hopefully soon go away
And that’s a key difference. MS has separated purchases into two separate currencies. With GT6 (as with GT5) you actually earn credits from races. With Forza 5 you only earn credits, not tokens. So with GT6 you could ‘top up’ your credits just a bit if you wanted to get a car a bit quicker, but with Forza 5 you either go all credits or all tokens. If you research the economy and psychology of FTP games you’ll see that this sort of thing is front and centre. It seems MS has gone a bit deeper into the FTP morass than has Sony.
Yeah I don’t see how one is worse than the other hey.
There is nothing good about it. Video game companies are simply becoming too greedy, it’s no longer enough to sell a full priced game, they have to do this shit as well.
I think it’s disgusting and must be stopped.
If only we could take the Liam Neeson/Taken approach to devs/Pubs holding our game content hostage…
I agree. I own gt1-5 but micro transactions are a deal breaker. Even if it doesn’t effect gameplay it’s on principal. Its a console game not a mobile phone game.
You make a good point, but the problem is (probably) that GT6 (and perhaps forthcoming games) will have an incentive to continue to produce grindy games when I would argue games are better when they’re largely not grindy.
In the grand scheme of things I don’t think it matters.
I think if Gran Turismo and Forza go the grindy route they will lose popularity, and new franchises will come in that won’t annoy gamers as much.
90% of the GT series is grinding. I guess since they didn’t remove gift cars and change the economy it isn’t too bad, but I don’t care not buying it anyway. GT5 ruined the series for me.
Out of interest why did GT ruin for you?
I avoided GT3 and GT4 because it was too grindy. GT1 and 2 were too in hindsight, but at that stage I was happy with it – but nowadays there’s just no time for it.
I actually found GT5 to be the least grindy. With the seasonal events you can make a lot of coin pretty quickly – and you still get a number of prize cars
We all saw this coming
First it was free basic levels -pay to unlock more levels
Then it was pay-to-win
Then “Freemium”
Now, its pay – then pay some more
I really miss the days where I could buy a game, play it, and enjoy all it had to offer because, you know, I paid for it
The internet has destroyed gaming in my opinion.
Think about it, before the internet there was no such thing as patching a game, companies did their best to get rid of all the bugs before release, because once it was out it was too late to fix it. So if you released a buggy game, your game flopped.
There was no such thing as DLC either, so companies couldn’t hold stuff back, or have stuff locked on the disc until you pay for a key to unlock it.
And now we have micro-transactions, sure it’s completely optional NOW, but how long will it be before every company is doing it, and it’s no longer an option and they make it impossible to beat games without paying for extra stuff.
Gaming is nothing like it used to be, and I don’t like where it’s headed at all.
I agree
The “always online” requirement, plus the ever increasing spread of the scourge that is called Micro-transactions is slowly killing gaming, but, its not killing the gaming industry, unfortunately.
As each new “generation” of gamers comes along, the prevalent “gaming” experience is usually a cut down, multi-(payed for)-episodic, ridiculously easy, piece of bug ridden filth! and they pay for it simply because there is either, no other option, or they don’t know any better after cutting the baby teeth on Candy Crush is its ilk.
At times I really wish this trend would kill the entire industry, kind of like putting a really old, deaf, blind and arthritic family dog down.
It it hurts, but its best in the long run.
I see your point but damn I wish some old games had received patches. FFVI with it’s evade bug, the evade stat doing nothing in game and your character’s evade being controlled by their magic evade stat instead. FFVII’s magic defense stat on items doing nothing to your character’s magic defense…
I think there will always be alternatives.
If Sony and MS piss us off, the independents will step in. And the independents are getting pretty good nowadays.
But yeah, hearing about microtransactions being so prominent in the MS games, and hearing that GT6 is being as grindy as ever just turns me off from buying a new system.
If you think old games didn’t require patches you need to take off your rose-coloured glasses. Quite a few older games were quite buggy when released; Master of Magic comes to mind in particular, but it wasn’t alone. Battlecruiser 3000AD was absolutely notorious in that respect.
It *is* true that it’s now more or less routine for new games to be released in a buggy state, because the developers assume they can patch after the fact. But buggy games are nothing new.
They’re just ignored because, twenty years after the Internet started entering the public consciousness, nobody remembers them any more. In most cases for good reason.
I was actually talking about console games. Sorry, I should have been more specific.
As long as the rate of earning in game currency through winning races is unchanged then I have no problem with this.
GT has always had a few cars at the $20 mil price point. All this is doing is allowing people to pay to access these cars without earning the cash in game.
Yes – the people who are paying for credits are over-paying and cheating themselves out of the joy of earning a car but that is their problem, not mine.
If they had some cars that you could never win in game without paying (ala Forza’s cars that cost tokens), or said that once you own a car you have to pay to drive it more than a couple of times in a row (ala Real Racing 3), then I’d be pissed. Paying for credits is fine to me.
There’s no cars in Forza that you can’t access through in game credits (apart from the DLC ones…. But that’s a difference scam entirely), everything can be purchased with either credits or real-money tokens.
Do you really trust the company implementing this not to make tiny changes to make cars just that little bit more onerous to unlock legitimately? An extra lap here and there, a slightly smaller reward at the end, a little extra cost on the cars…. As soon as you put in this free-to-play BS the interests of the developer instantly change from ‘best product possible’ to ‘most gouging possible’.
Leaving aside whether I trust Polyphony (never really thought about them in those terms), it is possible for a developer to introduce the ability to pay to cheat without adversely affecting those that choose not to do so.
I can’t say whether Polyphony have acheived this or not (not having played the game yet), but I do think it is possible.
Oh, it could be fair… But they haven’t brought this system in for fun.
It’d there to make profit.
Look at the comments here, unanimously negative. I know this is a tiny cross-section of the gaming community, but surely developers / publishers must see these responses and go ‘oh, nobody likes it and we’re generating exponential bad-will here, maybe we should stop??’.
Don’t they understand that the customers these features appeal to are not the kind of customers you want to attract? They are fair-weather consumers, they aren’t going to stick around, they’ll give you a profit for a short amount of time, and then leave for something else. It’s a business strategy only made viable by yearly iterations of the franchise, but each time these companies do that, they bolster that negativity and feeling of betrayal the customers they actually should be trying to attract have.
It all smacks of decisions being made by people too shortsighted to see there’s a long game that needs to be played too. They just want to milk this cash cow as quickly as possible, not worrying about what they will do when it collapses from exhaustion.
Given that the actual cars don’t cost them anything, I would expect lowering the prices a bit so the better cars were $20 rather than $200 would result in a sufficient boost in demand to generate more revenue overall.
(This is not universally the case, but the reason why microtransactions make money is because you have a lot of people contributing. Economic experiments show that people are a lot more willing to blow off a couple of dollars frequently than larger amounts. This is a large part of why lotteries work – and why the Free to Play model has been so successful.)
I think the high costs are so the people who do put in the hours necessary to unlock those cars rather than paying don’t feel even more cheated than they already do. Like how would it feel to spend all that time saving credits to have someone undercut that effort by purchasing the car for a small sum?
How does that undercut it? How does it in any way effect you? If anything, in my experience, it adds value to the people who grind it out, they get the bonus smug satisfaction of having done it the ‘hard’/’right’ way and mock anyone doing it differently. 😛
No idea, just trying to imagine what the hell they are thinking to create this system in the first place.
I know exactly what they’ll do when it collapses, just leave it to die and move on to whatever is popular at the time and repeat the whole process.
Not everyone agrees with TotalBiscuit on a lot of his opinions (understandable) but I believe he’s on the money with this.
First 10 or so minutes of this video – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mpx4R9SY98o
It really doesn’t sit well with me either. I recently got an Xbone, and was a bit shocked to see a game like Ryse having microtransactions as well.
I want it to go away but something tells me it never will.
It will if reviewers start actually holding them to account.
If people start putting out reviews focusing on the game being just one big attempt to gouge people after they’ve bought it then it will at least temper developers from getting too outrageous with the practice.
=
Yeah but game reviewers are basically marketers, they cant give games low scores or actually critisize the game, or they lose their ad revenue and their job, hence why Bioshock infinite was omg 10/10 goty on release, but got a 4/10 from the same site a few months later
For this to happen, people need to start seeing how the inclusion of these microtransactions is increasingly affecting the game design. Mechanics that are already somewhat grindy are getting artificially lengthened to help “encourage” people to spend money to bypass the tedium. People are being encouraged to pay more money on top of the base purchase to skip long/boring parts that only exist to encourage people to spend money to skip them.
I’m wondering how long it will be before it simply won’t be worth playing these games unless you’re willing to put down some extra cash… I have a backlog of games to play in that eventuality, should last me a year or two… hopefully that’ll be long enough for companies to realise how stupid this is.
Now watch them pull a Forza and start making items in the game harder and harder to acquire. Making the game WORSE intentionally.
As soon as you add this free-to-play bullshit into the game developers stop making the best game possible and start skewing elements of it in order to keep padding their pockets AFTER you’ve already paid for it.
Please Mark, when you review this game if they’ve intentionally made it worse for players who ONLY pay full retail for it, don’t just note it. Make a principled stand and actually tell people NOT to buy it unless their happy to be screwed over.
Far too few reviewers (including Kotaku) actually called Microsoft on the Forza bullshit. Some mentioned it, but very few genuinely held them to account when they dished out their final thoughts.
If I’d written the Forza review the final recommendation would have read: ‘A great game intentionally marred by greedy, pervasive free-to-play mechanics’.
Yeah it’s really only a matter of time until game-balance is skewed towards the expectation that people aid their progress with microtransactions, and it’s the ‘whales’ that will keep these things happening, it doesn’t have to be popular with the majority, it just has to be popular with some of the big spenders. So I just won’t buy a game that has these kinds of microtransactions. I’ve boycotted EA entirely. I’ll boycott my beloved Gran Turismo.
Man the ‘whales’ aren’t that common that they’re going to cover the losses of a few major reviews giving the game a terrible score.
If the new GT gets average scores of 70%ish based on being terrible value, that’s going to cost you plenty in sales and companies will get the idea pretty quickly.
Reviewers are always happy to point out that a game is bad value for money if it’s too short or doesn’t have enough content, but too many of them are happy to look the other way when content is hidden behind a paywall or when something like Battlefield pushes people who’ve been waiting in a server queue but who’ve ONLY paid full retail price to the back of the line in place of a ‘premium’ customer.
Also you’re a stronger man than me if you’re actually boycotting games you used to love. I can’t stand EA, but I still buy their games if they’re good enough to compensate for the bullshit. It does stop me buying the 50/50 or impulse purchases, if that helps.
Yeah, totally agreed, I really hope these kind of ‘features’ start to affect review ratings.
You know what, Battlefield 3 Premium is what made me boycott them. I’d love to play Mass Effect 3, Sim City and Battlefield 4, but I won’t be doing. Also, stay tuned for paid BF4 Battlepacks and XP Boosters. That’s my prediction for this year.
what was your issue with BF3 Premium exactly? Sure, it’s annoying to have to spend more money on a game after your have just paid retail price for it – but BF2 Premium added a lot of extra content to the game and kept it fresh over its life. $50 for 5 expansion packs is pretty good value imo.
In short, most of the regular servers were shut down and were replaced with Premium-only servers. There were user run servers as well but they always had things like +300% tickets and I just wanted a quick regular game with regular rules, also there’s shit like being kicked from the game because I was flying the server owner’s helicopter…
So yeah, I paid about $65 for the game new, LE pre-order from the UK, and then shortly after they wanted another $80 (PS3 Premium cost on it’s launch) for me to carry on playing multiplayer the way I wanted. That was the last cent I gave to EA.
I stopped playing SimCity after all the nonsense they came up with regarding always being online. i paid full retail for a PC game, on DVD, with enough grunt in my laptop to play it.
From my experience in Forza 5, cars have never been easier to play with now that they added renting. Am I missing something?
Yep you are. They’ve ALWAYS had ‘renting’ although it wasn’t called that, it was free-mode or something similar and you could drive every car in the game on every single track. If you count them you’ll notice that you can only ‘rent’ about 40-50% of the cars in the game.
The rest of them have been intentionally ransomed against either an intentionally excessive grind or a paywall.
There’s absolutely no reason to hide those cars from free mode other than to intentionally screw people over. The fact that you couldn’t paint or modify them in free mode was always encoragement enough to unlock them in career mode.
If microtransactions are the future of games I’m getting a new hobby. I know you don’t have to pay but when I found out this had them it went on my “I’ll never own you” list on principal.
This.
I’m right there with you man.
And it will work if enough people refuse to buy these games or, at the very least, refuse to play ball with the microtansactions.
Remember online passes? Nobody bought them and in the end publishers decided it’s not worth the amount it cost them to do it compared to the amount of revenue they gained.
like U-Play I hear they’re dropping that. I got Assassin’s Creed 4 on my ps3 and got the upgrade code for the ps4 version for only $14.50 which I thought was reasonable, as reasonable as paying for a game twice is anyway, I got the special edition and thought, oh crap i hope the dlc comes across to the PS4 version and it did, phew. But then it tells me I have to buy U-Play for a further $15 ish, tried my redeem code again but alas no luck, I think that’s a bit crappy, I’m using the same profile on the ps3 and 4 yet it wants me to have 2 U-Play dealies for the same game on the same profile,
That’s a bit shit. There should be a warning about that before you pay for the PS4/XBone (whatever the case may be) upgrade.
Exactly this.
Well this might be the first numbered Gran Turismo game that I don’t buy I guess then. I choose not to support this kind of business model.
This is such a load of crap. This practice needs to die.
Selling cheats is so low.
Just say NO!!!!
as long as cars are obtainable by going the traditional method….grinding and winning races..I won’t be need to pay real world money for in-game credits.
as for the pricing….that’s just typical Sony/Australia tax shit
Here is the US prices for GT6’s microtransactions
Cr. 500,000 – USD $4.99 (AUD $5.52)
Cr. 1,000,000 credits – USD $9.99 (AUD $11.05)
Cr. 2,500,000 credits – USD $19.99 (AUD $22.11)
Cr. 7,500,000 credits – USD $49.99 (AUD $55.30)
They will be, but you know they’ll find pervasive little ways to encourage you to fork out more.
Forza removed cars from free use mode, upped the price of upgrades, removed the ability to earn discounts, upped the average price of cars, lowered the winnings for races and seasons, removed free cars as a reward for levelling up…. The cars are still there if you want to grind, but if you earn 100,000 an hour and can’t test drive them for free, how many people are ever really going to be able to drive a single car that costs $5,000,000?
Not saying GT will do ALL these things, but it only has to do one of them before they’re making the game worse intentionally to blackmail already full-paying customers into paying more.
Problem is, as others have pointed out, that they’ll make it increasingly harder for you to attain those credits, just so you’ll eventually fork out for the “extras”. It’s like frequent flyer points – they were once worth something, but have become so devalued now.
The thing I like about games like GT is that feeling of satisfaction- when you compete a heap of challenges to earn the credits and buy the dream car. It makes the first drive and knowing how hard you worked (in game) to buy it.
People who splash out $20 to just buy that car straight up wont get that feeling that they earned it- and wont feel the difference of slowly gaining better and better cars. Starting at the top leaves nothing to strive for.
In saying this I don’t care that people are paying for shortcuts. I think that Polyphony Digital (or Sony) as a business has an obligation to capitalise on these opportunities. It has no effect on me, and how I like to play.
I’m cool with crazy microtransations … if they give away the game for free. Think about it, it makes sense. If you gave Forza to every Xbone owner, you’d lose a lot in upfront sales but you’d probably triple the audience. There might be more people willing to throw in a fiver or ten bucks if they enjoyed it and it was free. As it is now you’re limiting the audience.
My preorder dlc gives me heaps oc free credits anyway.
Atleast cars are not locked off like Forza. Not that o condone micro transaction regardless.
stop crying. seriously. If you hate micro transactions then DON’T USE THEM… why the hell do you think the industry crashed back in ’83? because consumers voted with their wallets and we got a renaissance with the NES.
Vote with your wallets not your keyboards. If you want something dead then kill it.
And I reckon there’s another crash coming just around the corner.
While I agree with you in theory, unfortunately gamers/consumers/westerners tend to have the problem of hating something but paying for it anyway. Like who we all bitched and moaned about, say, Diablo 3 and the whole online and error 36 thing, but they still made a bajillion dollars because we bought it anyway. Vocally complaining is much easier than sticking to principles, unfortunately.
Man it’s pretty rough if you’re a loyal GT fan from way back.
Polyphonic have released one half-finished GT game during the entire lifecycle of the PS3, now they’re releasing another after the PS4 is already out, and are taking the opportunity to gouge people who’ve waited by (likely) structuring their full priced game around a free-to-play pricing model.
If it’s anything like they did with Forza then the pay for cars model is pretty rough (seriously, paying twice the retail price of the whole game to unlock a single car can’t really be called a ‘Microtransation’)
People need to know that the car prices in GT6 remain the same scale as GT5 they have not increased the prices of the cars to exploit micro-transactions like they have in Forza 4 to 5
At what price does a transaction no longer qualify as being micro?
Best case scenario: people vote with their wallets and eventually, possibly after another gaming industry crash, developers will realize that micro-transactions are a cheap and greedy gimmick and will get rid of them.
Worst case scenario: people don’t care enough to boycott such stupid things and will continue to fork over their cash, causing more developers to include micro-transactions in other games we pay full retail price for, and will continue to greedily suck out every last dollar they can. Finally, quality of the games will be severally compromised unless you fork over more money. Should that happen, I will officially give up gaming and take up a hobby where I’m not treated like a fucking cash cow.
It’s gross as hell. I just hope people show restraint by not buying this stuff. These studios are merely testing the waters to see how far they can get away with pissing us off before dialling it back from ‘murderous outrage’ to ‘barely tolerable annoyance.’ If people buy this stuff right out of the gate, it’s a a big klaxon telling publishers that we don’t mind being ripped off. Frankly, I wish we lived in a world where if you bought a full priced game, that was it, no miscommunication.
Hey people nothing to see here … face facts its just gonna happen and keep happening until we all forget about the fuss and get used to paying to play!
Its like popcorn at the movies, paid parking at the mall and extra cents for sauce. we all complain about it but we still buy it or pay for it in the end.
After a while it becomes the norm.
Remember you don’t own that game, I haven’t checked the latest terms of use but I suspect you probably don’t actually own your new console so why should you own the right to play the game?
Pay up – it’s back to the old arcade days but just in the comfort of your own home (which of course you don’t really own the bank does).
Gran Turismo already went down the toilet with 5, avoided that crap like the plague.
I’m not entirely sure what everyone is up in arms about.
Nobody is being forced to pay for in-game credits… the option is just there for lazy people with nothing better to do with their money. It’s a win-win for the developer and publisher.
Does it affect the core game for people who play for enjoyment? Negative. Not in the slightest.
Ignore it and continue playing as normal.
Win/win for the consumer.
It is not win/win for the consumer, not by a longshot. And it does effect the core game if they make it more of a grind to unlock stuff, to encourage you to spend money.
Publishers are funding games that can become a platform for psychological warfare with their customers rather than funding games that they think might be FUN.
They are modifying the games to make them just frustrating enough to get you to pay more money without actually stopping playing.
This is painfully obvious between the gameplay changes between Forza 4 and Forza 5. Every single change seems to have been calculated to reduce the amount of available credits to increase the chance of people giving them more money.
In no way do we the consumer win. We are paying more than ever and what we get for our money continues to shrink.
For about 20 years up until recently cheat codes for single player games were free.
The only winners here are the devs and publishers.
The only time the consumer wins is when we get stuff for free.
In the case of Forza, they have changed the game to make it near impossible to get the cars without forking over real cash, so it does affect people who play for enjoyment, it locks out parts of the game you paid ‘full price’ for. It is disgusting.
It looks as if the GT6 model is better, you can still win the cars by playing, and for the same amount of time as in older GT games. Forza however is built around screwing you, has been since they removed LAN play to force you to get a gold subscription. I stopped buying Forza at that point and moved over to RFactor.
Itz a fundamental principle. We pay full price for the game and, as a consequence, expect all the features of that game. We did not pay full price, only to then have to pay extra to utilise the features we thought we had already bought.
And companies wonder why more and more people are pirating their games when they do this sort of crap…
I love how everyone is saying that Forza 5 is worse than GT6…. it’s exactly the same thing, they’re both incredibly bad strategies in a racing game.
Remember when you had the option of grinding races for glory or entering in a cheat code for money… well yeah we’ll never see a cheat code now because they have micro-transactions for that.