A pay-to-win game is a video game which allows players to spend real money to gain advantages over other players. These advantages come in many forms such as cosmetics, special items, or level ups that improve a players statistics and their chance of winning or accomplishing a goal the game gives them.
So-called pay-to-win games have been criticized for their addictive nature, promoting impulsive purchases and spending habits that are often compared to those of gambling. Torulf Jernström, CEO of Tribeflame, a gaming company, explains the three main stages of the consumer approach to spending money–"Hook, Habit, Hobby." He describes the process starting with giving the player a seemingly very good deal by comparing it to absurd prices. Jernström explains that most players approach free-to-play games with “a wall up” thinking they will never spend money. After the ice is broken and the consumer makes their first purchase, they think of themselves as spenders and thus are much more likely to make further purchases. That's when the habit begins. The more a player spends, the more they are likely to continue spending, often resulting in a “hobby” such that once the wall is completely broken, players are willing and happy to continue to spend money on the game. Diablo Immortal is a game that incorporates this model very well. To fully max out a single character in this game, a player would need to spend over $100,000 giving the consumer a seemingly endless amount of purchase options and opportunities.
Many developers incorporate loot boxes which essentially gives the player a random reward, the likelihood of which decreases as the value goes up. These boxes make buyers believe that the odds of them receiving the desired reward grow after each purchase creating a “just one more” mentality that gets people hooked. The magnitude of the effects of such strategies is shocking: The Royal Society Publishing estimates that gaming companies generated up to $30 billion dollars in 2018 from loot box purchases alone. The National Library of Medicine warns against these games, finding that when controlling for monetary gambling, age, and gender, recent loot box purchasing increased the odds of problem gambling 3.7 to 6.0 times, and at-risk gambling 2.8 to 4.3 times. Consequently, pay-to-win games are not only problematic in themselves, but they also have important external ramifications.
Gaming companies do need to make money in order to sustain their product and profit off of it, but at what cost? The use of dark psychological tricks to manipulate consumers into spending large sums of money that they never would have imagined is seen by many as unethical. To make games more fair, developers should make purchase options simple and clear without any tricks. This would ensure that when the consumer buys an item, they are fully aware of the cost and are willing to spend it out of their own volition, and not because of how the game's reward system is crafted to deceive them.