The topic comes up again and again under numerous articles about Free2Play games: “This is a cash shop title! You can’t keep up without spending real money in the MMO!” – “No,” say others. “It just feels that way! You can enjoy the game wonderfully without paying much for it.”
In new MMOs, players often ask: “How does the cash shop work here in Bless?”, “Can I play it well without investing money?”
Looks great, but how expensive will the fun be?
Usually absent from the discussion: the actual experts, the game journalists. They should be familiar with the games and should be able to answer these questions definitively. Why they do not do so, why in tests and articles about Free2Play games the cash shop is usually left out, we will address in this article.
The rabbit hole is too deep, the trap too refined
The problem starts already with how such games are designed. They function like a “trap”: No game opens with “Get your credit card ready, we will make it burn!” [pullquote]No game opens with “Get your credit card ready, we will make it burn!”[/pullquote]
Successful cash games lure the player deep into the rabbit hole before revealing their true nature. Players should be so deep into the game and have invested so much time that the temptation to spend money is extremely high. The psychological situation: “Now I’ve already invested so much time. It would all be for nothing, so I’ll just pay a bit.”
For this reason, clever games give players some lockboxes for free. However, they then ask them to pay for the keys to open the boxes. The idea is “I earned the box … so I’ll pay for the key to get something from it.” These are the little tricks.
Welcome!
Cash shops in Free2Play games are opaque and nebulous
Publishers and studios are happy to contribute to shrouding the exact contents and advantages of the cash shop in mist. For one, an item doesn’t say “Potion of unfair advantage” or “the thing you need to guarantee an item upgrade and that saves you from having to bite your own ass 500 times,” but is flowery described and obscured.
Just figuring out how much the thing costs requires effort and recalculating “weird sums” – the item costs 1200 coins, but you can only buy either 1000 or 2000 coins directly for euros. How much is the item now?
But it can get much worse: Through convoluted tricks and maneuvers, advantages can be achieved for “paying customers” that are not obvious.
For example, in ArcheAge, a “potion limit” could be bypassed by having a second character consume potions. These provided advantages that affected the main character. All characters on an account shared the same resource in practice but had different cooldown timers for the potions that increased this resource.
Will appear more often in this article: ArcheAge.
The press was told: Players can’t buy so many advantages because there is a limit! Yes, that’s true. There was one. But it could be easily circumvented. Recognizing such tricks without being deeply immersed in the game is almost impossible.
For this reason, a “normal player” usually cannot anticipate how strongly a game shifts in this cash shop direction until they’ve invested dozens of hours. Because in the first few hours, everything usually looks “fair”.
Journalists should play at the top to make a judgment
Journalists cannot judge how “cashy” a title is based on their own experience, as they typically lack the time to play a single MMO intensely enough to reach those critical points where it often decides: “Do I want to play at the top and keep up? Then I pay now. Or do I skip this and live with never being at the top?” Game testers and journalists usually don’t reach this point. [pullquote]Do I want to play at the top and keep up? Then I pay now. Or do I skip this and live with never being at the top?[/pullquote]
Hand on heart: Most Free2Play games that resort to such despised measures are niche titles that generate relatively little interest. Journalists avoid too much work on such titles. On the other hand, top titles, into which editors invest hundreds of hours, rarely have such cash shop mechanisms, or they are well known and transparent, as in FIFA games or Hearthstone.
However, they are mostly niche games, like new titles from Asia, where such “cash shop” investigations would be appropriate. However, these appeal to only a small target audience. It would be uneconomical to invest two hundred hours into them.
And the problem is: Depending on the title, they are right. I can confirm this from my own experience. In a browser game from Jagex, many years ago, I was one of those who wanted to “play at the top” without spending money. That was possible and provided a special kick to achieve it “despite everything.” But that was also an incredible effort that I would never go through again.
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The question of whether it works in a game to “swim against the current of the cash shop” can never be definitively answered. Because the answer depends too heavily on individual criteria: Do you just want to have fun? Do you want to be at the top? How strong is your sense of fairness? Is swimming against the current exactly the thrill many seek?
The real problem is that the core task of a journalist would be to describe: “How strong is the current I have to swim against?” Then every reader could come to their own judgment. But even answering this question is practically impossible because it requires an immense amount of work to dive so deep into the games that it becomes disproportionate to the interest in the titles.
That’s why we will often see in the future, in articles and tests about Free2Play games, that the crucial points for many players, the cash shop and the issue of “Pay2Win”, are only touched upon or addressed with clichés.
Hopefully, discussions about cash shops and Pay2Win remain limited to the 7 games on this list:
This applies not only to the “classic press”: Even the YouTuber with a huge following prefers to stream for hours the upcoming shooter hit rather than deal with an obscure title from a small publisher.
In Destiny, we spend hundreds of work hours every month – but no one asks about the cash shop.
The games that require the most work get the least
The problem is that the titles requiring the most work to scrutinize receive the least time.
Meanwhile, truly popular titles that swim in money can usually afford to forgo such tricks. They are usually covered with hundreds and hundreds of work hours, as these hours can be refinanced through a lot of reader interest.
Journalists usually only dip their toes into MMOs
When we or other content creators want to test MMOs, statements about the cash shop are almost impossible because one must first get deeply into the game – investing time beyond 40, 50, 60 hours.
Otherwise, one can only speculate or make general statements about the cash shop such as “Yes, there are a lot of cosmetic items in there,” “Hmm, whether that is okay should be judged by everyone for themselves” or “There are items that speed up progress, but whether you absolutely need them is hard to say…” These are the phrases gaming journalists rely on when they don’t want to completely avoid the topic.
To say more about cash shops, one would need to invest a lot of time. Often far more than 60 hours. Even worse: This would need to be done repeatedly. Because with an MMO, everything can change after a patch.
Often, one would need to spend another 60 hours in an MMO even though hardly anyone plays it anymore. Because that’s when many games tighten the screws in the cash shop.
From my practice: This was the case with Black Desert
Black Desert I have played for about 70 hours. I have invested significantly more time than a “normal editor” needs to write a complete review of a conventional AAA title. In such a case, one plays through the campaign, engages in a bit of multiplayer, and that’s basically it.
From what I hear, colleagues assume about 20 hours – a lot compared to the time a film, book, or music critic needs for their subject – but for an MMO, that’s not even close enough.
I played Black Desert for 70 hours, but I was nowhere near being able to say: The cash shop is this and that important. And since I played BD, numerous new patches and updates have come out – so that could already be completely different now.
Controversies within the community indicate that it has indeed changed.
Despite my 70 invested hours, we have never published a review of Black Desert on Mein MMO.
And that was the case with ArcheAge
In ArcheAge, I played much more linearly, reached max level, and then quit when I realized how strong this “cash shop tilt” was after more than 50, 60 hours in the first month. But even then, I couldn’t say with certainty “This is how cash shop-heavy ArcheAge definitely is,” I would have had to spend another 100 hours in ArcheAge to be sure: “You can have fun with the game and keep up without cash shop” or “No, it simply doesn’t work. There are too many barriers in the game.”
I would have had to overcome my previously developed aversion to the “cash shop” to come to a judgment I could fully support, rather than just saying “I feel this way” and “this feels odd to me.”
Moreover, in most Free2Play games, interest is only high in the initial period, then it drops massively. In practice, one would need to come up with informed statements on the topics of “Pay2Win” and “cash shop” already in the first one or two weeks to keep players interested.
ArcheAge and Black Desert were two titles that I played relatively extensively, but I wouldn’t dare to judge how “cashy” these titles are. Also, that’s why we never had a review for ArcheAge and Black Desert.
Even AAA titles like The Elder Scrolls Online have introduced cash shop mechanisms.
So why not listen to the community?
Normally, one could rely on the experts in such a situation, on those who really play at the top and invest a lot of time: the community.
But the community is divided over all these “cashy” titles and discusses it with knives between their teeth. Because the “pain threshold” and perception of the shops are extremely different.
How “cashy” will Bless be?
While some are “burned children” who reject cash shops in general, go to the barricades and rant, others are incredibly tolerant of such mechanisms, defend their games, and say you can keep up at the top without a wallet and with a lot of skill.
And the problem is: Depending on the title, they are right. I can confirm this from my own experience. In a browser game from Jagex, many years ago, I was one of those who wanted to “play at the top” without spending money. That was possible and provided a special kick to achieve it “despite everything.” But that was also an incredible effort that I would never go through again.
Recommended editorial content
At this point you will find external content from YouTube that complements the article.
I consent to external content being displayed to me. Personal data can be transmitted to third party platforms.
Read more about our privacy policy.
The question of whether it works in a game to “swim against the current of the cash shop” can never be definitively answered. Because the answer depends too heavily on individual criteria: Do you just want to have fun? Do you want to be at the top? How strong is your sense of fairness? Is swimming against the current exactly the thrill many seek?
The real problem is that the core task of a journalist would be to describe: “How strong is the current I have to swim against?” Then every reader could come to their own judgment. But even answering this question is practically impossible because it requires an immense amount of work to dive so deep into the games that it becomes disproportionate to the interest in the titles.
That’s why we will often see in the future, in articles and tests about Free2Play games, that the crucial points for many players, the cash shop and the issue of “Pay2Win”, are only touched upon or addressed with clichés.
Hopefully, discussions about cash shops and Pay2Win remain limited to the 7 games on this list:
