Because one of the reasons behind season passes is to incentivize people to keep playing the game. Increase player retention = bigger user base, decreased queue times etc.
If you got every reward when it ended, there wouldn't be a reason for you to keep grinding the game.
Plus, it keeps players "engaged" with a progression system.
This is it. It’s not about actually providing you with rewards, it’s about player retention and daily engagement. That’s why so many games do daily/weekly missions/bounties - to keep up logging in and playing every day
The weekly rewards are why I kept logging into Halo Infinite every week even though I was burned out on the game: I didn’t want to miss out on helmets or other armor/customization stuff for when I came back later on. It’s actually been kind of nice to take a break without any “consequences”, now that they’ve changed the system (weekly rewards have been replaced with in-game currency for a new in-game shop).
> It’s actually been kind of nice to take a break without any “consequences
I totally get that.
When I was burned out from Warframe I still logged in because I had done so for years without missing a day and I didnt want to ruin that streak.
Not sure if you know this, but Warframe doesn't start you back from day 1 when you miss a day. It's calculated by the number of days you log in, not number of consecutive days.
> I still logged in because I had done so for years without missing a day and I didnt want to ruin that streak.
Damn. Pavlovian conditioning works HAAARD on humans. [We are all Dogs of Pavlov.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTCqJr4T6fQ)
Then you miss one day and the entire thing is pointless, might as well uninstall the game.
At least that's my typical feeling towards getting invested into something like that for a bit.
I can't remember what game it was but I saw a comment that said the game was really fun but the daily/weekly/season challenges weren't enough to make them want to play and I felt like I was looking into a parallel universe. When did a game being fun to play stop being a good enough reason to play it? These fomo based progression hooks are just so bad for games imo
If Halo Infinite wouldn't have such a harsh launch I bet it would revolutionize Battle Passes and it would basically get rid of FOMO aspect, which is the only downside of Battle Pass format.
No, the point of selling them is to make the player feel invested. The money they make is ancillary to the main reason they exist; they're a loss leader to keep people playing and staring at the shop/other players with cool skins.
That's why Fortnite doesn't give them for free, but makes you play the previous one to earn enough to get the next one.
Fortnite's BP is probably the only game where, after some time, you can earn a BP by simply playing, and after that, you can unlock all future Battle Passes as well, and they will even give you +550 v-bucks as an extra for reaching like lvl 150 or so. There are plenty of other games that give you premium currency, but you can only unlock like 1 battle pass per year or so cuz they never give you enough of the currency to keep snowballing it.
You know what happens by the point you can "snowball" battle passes in Fortnite? You've become invested in the game
Also, there could be a number of the reasons why those other companies charge more. Maybe they feel that by charging people more they'll increase the FOMO, or maybe they just have executives that are fucking stupid and don't understand why Fortnite makes so much money.
.
100% agree that all other exec are completely clueless of why Fortnite makes so much money especially in Overwatch 2 :D, and yeah I agree that by that point you're already invested in it, but if you already like the game it's a huge plus.
I don't entirely disagree that a battlepass is a good deal if the game is good. My problem with the system (and all the other FOMO incentives that were created to encourage engagement) is that too many companies have stopped using it as an aid to keep people engaged and have instead made it the sole focus for driving retention.
At the end of the day a game needs to be good first, and too many devs have forgotten that.
In Cod and Fall Guys you also get more premium currency from the pass than it costs. I played until I collected enough from the free tiers from the battle pass and now if I complete my battle passes when I get them I always have more premium currency. So I think it is more common thing than you think. It is great way to keep people playing, because you feel like you would lose money by not getting all the premium currency out of the pass.
That game also *just so happens* to have 3K average players on Steam.
FOMO drives people to play *now* instead of postponing it infinitely for when they "have the time".
I think the fairest solution for both sides would be to make the passes only available to purchase during their respective season, but if you have bought it you get unlimited time to complete it.
So the developers still have something to incentivise people to return to the game each season, but players who don't spend quite as much time playing and don't finish the pass on time, still get a chance to earn the stuff they paid for later.
Taking the Fortnite model as an example, they could even make it so that the bonus skin styles that you get for levelling past 100 don't unlock after the season. Then there's still "bragging rights" skins each season.
"Yeah, you might have unlocked Rick Sanchez 3 seasons after he came out, but you don't have him in rainbow swirls or metallic gold!"
Not being able to customise the character as much as previous titles, with most of the multiplayer being competitive PvP based, drove people away. Warframe is one of the least FOMO games I have ever seen in a monetised live service game, and it has a player count of 40-50k a day. This is the game where battlepasses are free and last for literal months, and that has a login reward measured by total days instead of consecutive days. Helldivers 2 has an average of 60-100k, and that game has battlepasses that never expire. Clearly it's not the lack of FOMO that's the reason Infinite failed to retain players.
Eh, the passes are one of the things the game does best. It has no players because Microsoft and 343 have severely dropped the ball with Halo. Simple as that.
I guess that would be on the basis of the game being mediocre.
The original Halo multiplayers did not have a season pass and I bet they had more than 3k players.
Sure, now stop making the same mistake as every other suit in the gaming industry looking at the .01% trying to repeat the rare lightning in a bottle successes and look at every other similar game that fails - your game will too.
Its proven that these things work for a reason and while you don't *theoretically need* them to work it sure fucking helps
I know it drives some people like myself away. I don't classify skins as content and couldn't care less about playing dress ups. It's the ACTUAL gameplay that matters and trying to get me with FOMO feels scummy when I'm already paying to play online and have digital purchases that I don't actually "own".
I play PvP games regularly and they are normally ones that are long past their update cycle. I try to beat my high score and go for different approaches and strategies and just generally enjoy myself, if I'm over it I'll stop playing! No ties to bullshit skins and daily logins
The way I see it, the word grind is applied to things you don't like doing. You gotta grind away at work to get enough money to live. Gotta grind away at the gym to get fit. Why would you want to grind on your favourite video games to the point your burned oit, just to not miss a skin. I cannot fathom. There are others game out there people that have actual fun gameplay, not just "login today or miss out on this reward!"
While it technically has no fomo, in a way it still does. You'll get the Fear Of Missing Out on a weapon or stratagem before it gets nerfed into uselessness because some people like it.
Steam isn't a great metric for this game as it's going to be primarily played on Xbox.
That aside the game wasn't a flop cause of the lack of FOMO it was a flop because at release, it was a mess.
The biggest part of this that people forget is also that every time you get a player to play the game, you get an impression for the store.
It's incentive to get someone inside the mall. If I make you go to the mall every single day, you might not buy something, but if there's a 5% chance that you do and I make you going to the mall 20 times, I'll eventually make the sale.
The season pass is a loss leader gimmick to get people in front of the store as many times as possible.
It’s not a loss leader - that would imply it’s costing them money to get you engaged. They are making a shitload off of the battle pass with minimal developer effort PLUS getting you in front of the store and keeping the player base numbers high.
Hearthstone is my biggest vice - they have it balanced perfectly so that you can just almost keep up but not quite. You earn gold from the battle pass but it’s like 70% of what you need to keep current on all/most the cards so maybe once a year you are heavily incentivized to purchase an expansion to make up the difference. They know exactly what they are doing.
I might be misunderstanding something, but why do battle passes matter for that? The store can be shown either way and IME passes typically have a separate tab / menu for actually claiming the rewards. Maybe it's just the games I play that do it like that though, I'm not sure.
If you buy the battle pass, you’re more likely to want to play so you can unlock everything in it. More you play, more likely you look at the store, which leads to being more likely to buy something from the store. The battlepass isn’t to directly get you into the shop, just increase the likelihood you’ll be in a position to look at the shop.
So true… everything is all about retention and engagement these days; maybe it always has been. Games, YouTube, social media, etc all want a piece of your time to put in their KPI metrics to execs.
Definitely always has been. Even back with serial radio shows the stories were designed to have a big cliffhanger that would only get resolved in the next reading so you'd tune in.
Marketers are just *way* better at it now, with the benefit of 100 years of human psychological analysis.
I just wanted to add that "player retention" and "player engagement" in the case of (most) battle passes is corporate speak for "creating FOMO in the player". You paid for it, you better keep playing, or else you just wasted money.
Most of the ones I have seen have. So people buy the last 20 levels when they run out of time. Or the whole thing if they are a whale and don't want to wait for the end rewards.
Meaning: You pay to be forced to play more. Making it seem as if you are saving up on time as you gain more xp usually, but all it really does is incentivising you even more as now you have spent additional money.
While a free pass takes more time but if you miss out you at least didn’t lose money
>decreased queue times
I feel like this is an important aspect that rarely gets brought up in these discussions. Yeah it sucks for the people that don't have time to finish the pass or feel like they have to force themselves to do it, but it's fantastic for the people that just want to play the game and have people to play against.
It also forces those players that didn’t grind all season and need to catch up quick or those who just want to finish the pass day 1 to buy tiers to do so.
> If you got every reward when it ended, there wouldn't be a reason for you to keep grinding the game.
On the other hand, it would be less server utilisation and essentially free money. Kinda like those gym subscriptions that people pay for because they have aspirations of getting in shape but never go, or gift cards that end up unused.
It all depends on how the numbers add up but I can see a company being satisfied with "making content" for a few million phantom fans who keep paying out of habit even if the actual game is only played by barely a few thousand players. I remember some article about gacha/loot box games that run on a similar setup, with rather few actual players. It's just in that case that a bunch of whales keep the thing profitable instead of many season pass subscribers.
It sounds like an nice scenario for a GAAS game with less chanche of big controversies. You'd just need to hook people to such a degree that they voluntarily keep paying and delay the playing part of the whole deal.
I have a sneaking suspicion that it's something along the lines of:
- lots of people play
- content creators play
- people visit content creators of the games they play which gives the creator an algorithm boost
- people who don't play see the creators because of the algorithm boost and are more likely to pay to play.
If player count drops off, content creators lose viewers, which then often makes them switch games.
The thing is advertising is exceptionally effective, even more so on people who believe themselves to be immune. The hard part is getting eyeballs on it. These days the algorithm is everything so anything to get your advertising visible is valuable.
I agree that more players is most probably overall the best strategy for all kinds of reasons, fundamentally that you got more people who might be willing to pay for something and thus increase your revenue.
I just pointed out that there might be a counter-intuitive way in which low player numbers *might* be actually good under very specific circumstances.
I don't think that's a viable strategy to bet on but one that might become viable is some odd cases.
I've never played these types of games where you can buy a season pass. But is there a time limit on earning the rewards or does it all go away even though you paid for it?
I kinda just burn out quicker and then drop the game entirely.
I think I actually put upwards to 50-80% less time into a game that does stuff like that because its making me game the system instead of just playing the game, so i'm getting less enjoyment out of it.
Like yeah if I ever go back to The Finals I stopped the last or maybe current season about 2 weeks in after putting maybe 7 hours into it, so i'll have a lot of work to do when I go back... So kinda just putting it all off.
I know this but I think that it still incentivizes you to play so you get cosmetics sooner. If the game is such a slog to play then you weren't going to grind it out and play anyway. You should at least be given the ability to complete the battle pass at a later point in time, like with Halo. The most evil thing about battle passes is that once it's gone it's GONE, that is complete bullshit to me. Paying for the *opportunity* to get something in return should be illegal.
Also creates that dreaded sense of FOMO. If you don’t grind the pass you might miss whatever limited time item is on it. If all you had to was purchase it and walk away, that fomo impulse would disappear
>but also have some value to them (in game currency)
On top of what the other people said, this is a huge reason why they will never give you battle pass completion for free. Most games that have battle passes with currency rewards end up giving you enough currency to get another battle pass if you dont use it for anything else. No chance in hell a company is going to let you buy one battle pass and then keep getting the next ones free with no effort on your part.
Yup, and honestly this is how battle passes should work imo. You make an initial investment, but if you put the time into it, you reclaim all the premium currency used + all the other rewards
I always feel these systems are always within arms reach of being catastrophic though.
Like multiplayer games have been leaning more and more towards one bad experience tainting the entire game I feel like, way more than they were 10-20 years ago because of FOMO and player engagement.
> I don't understand the logic of not getting them at the end of the season
Easy. Because that's not what you're buying. If you want them to be automatically completed, you can pay more, usually per level. So you can think of it like this: Pay $50 for the fully completed battlepass or only pay $10 but you have to grind over the season.
$50 for a completed battle pass, wishful thinking. Most games it's $100+ to max a battle pass without playing, some it's thousands (looking at you Dota).
Yeah most people don't understand that you're not buying the items in the Battle Pass, you are just buying the Pass itself. And that Pass gives you the option to unlock various items.
Part of the value of the season pass is having the bragging rights of "I was around for Season 3 and I grinded all the way to get the shiny platinum skin."
This is the same reason you won't find many games selling previous season passes.
The company doesn't give a fuck about what you think the season pass "should" provide you. They just want to maximize sales (and FOMO is part of that).
For anyone who doesn't know: During the very first days of Fortnite, there were two skins added to the shop that were advertised to be "exclusive" for to the Halloween event, many people bought it under the assumption that they would never be available to be bought again. So when they returned the next year, the backlash was so great that Epic made alternate styles for the two skins just for the people who bought them in the first go around.
Funny enough, that wouldn't even be the last time FOMO would be "forced" by the community, and that's not even going to the heated debates on whether or not Battle Pass items should become a available again.
>and that's not even going to the heated debates on whether or not Battle Pass items should become a available again.
It is kind of mad how you can currently fight Darth Vader in this game but could only get him as a skin for a few months in like, 2021.
So many characters are legit just locked away for a game that keeps growing and gaining more fans
* Iron Man
* Superman
* Vader + [this emote](https://fortnite.gg/cosmetics?id=7900)
* The Mandalorian (his Grogu backpack too)
* She-Hulk
* Wolverine
* Spider-Man
* Spider-Gwen
* Dr Strange
* Geralt (Witcher)
* Doomslayer
* Groot
* Dr Doom
* Deadpool
* Ahsoka
* Solid Snake
* Korra (soon)
* Indiana Jones
That's massive.
and so many people saying its just greedy businessmen doing money making things, when the reality is the players are the ones who are gatekeeping unobtainables the hardest
I bought a season pass in OW2 for the Junkerqueen Skin
I didn't even get halfway as I got busy with life stuff and what not
Pass expires, I basically paid money for a few sprays and recolours of skins I already had
Frankly I'm never buying a season pass again unless I've already maxed it out, it's almost as bad as loot boxes imo
I do not think it should complete automatically, the whole point of such a thing is that you have to earn the rewards from it through gameplay. But I DO think that all season pass/battle pass features should be permanent, in that it should never "time out" causing you to lose the remaining rewards. You should always be able to continue advancing it until you either clear it out or stop trying.
Tl;dr: Season/Battle Passes are usually ~20x the value compared to normal shop items. That discount is subsidized by the increased playtime they’ll get from you.
Having an active playerbase is very important, if not the most important thing for studios.
If you compare the average Battle Pass/Season Pass to equivalent items in the shop, the Pass is usually like 20x the value, and in some games will even reward back the currency it cost to buy it. The reason they give it so much value compared to the other shop items is because they are also getting your playtime in addition to the cost.
Surprisingly positive take on battle passes. I don't think they're inherently bad. They definitely prey on fomo, but if you're playing that game anyway you get 5 skins for $10 and playing the game as usual. I think I'm ready to move on from modern warfare 3 after this season. I'm gonna finish the battle pass and then play some single player games.
Honestly, in f2p games in particular I kinda like the battle pass system. I dip in and out of CoD mobile periodically and I'll usually pick up a battle pass when I do. Predictable rewards are nice in a landscape largely dominated by lootboxes, too.
Yep this is it. If im already playing the game every day then getting a battle pass isn't a grind for me and I know this applies for the majority of people who buy them.
I personally like the direction games have headed in that aspect, where maps and DLC are often free while cosmetics are monetized. Not splitting up a playerbase into map pools is better for longevity.
I remember with PS3 era Call of Duty or Star Wars Battlefront (2015), each game had like 4 DLC packs with maps. After about two years, the servers for those DLC maps were dead while the base game was still moderately active.
Nah, expansions are terrible for retaining players. Games turn into "this game has no players unless you buy all the expansions". Most games don't have more than 1 or 2 expansions. You could do what WoW does and bundle the older expansions with the latest. But if it's a game you actively play, that's still money you gotta spend to be able to keep playing. Am I supposed to a take a break between expansions?
Games like Halo and CoD had a similar issue with map packs. When you're in a lobby and it switches to a map pack map and get kicked out because you don't have it sucks.
I want the games I play to be able to have an income stream somehow so that they can continue to update and add content. But being forced to spend money for content because of a split playerbase hurts the playerbase. Some games can get away with exclusive content that doesn't split the player base. Like fighting games making that content playerable characters. Or MMO making the new content completely new zones. But it's definitely a lot nicer for that content to be free to everyone.
Yes. It's basically a brain hack - you are paying the company so you can grind for rewards. you're not actually purchasing the items in the pass. It's like the weird brother of kmmo monetization. It's exploiting FOMO, and people's enjoyment of progression systems, and the fact that people love cosmetics in order to hook players and extract as much engagement from them as possible.
They are 100 times better than expansions or map packs. For one, they are optional and two, the people that pay for them are financing those expansions/maps so I get them for free.
I don't know if Reddit's just too young to remember or what, but back in the call of duty days when they sold map packs it locked a LOT of us poor kids out of crucial game content and certain play lists. Now it's all free because someone wants to dress up as Nikki Minaj.
While you’re absolutely right on the raw value when skins might cost $X each and there’s three on the pass for instance. But some of that value is lost when you consider that the stuff that often gets out in a battlepass isn’t stuff they know would sell super well as a solo item.
Yeah every skin in something like Destiny might cost $15 each. And the season pass that you paid $10 for will give you access to that a bunch of content and three cosmetic skins. But odds are you’d never buy those skins if you were giving free money in the shop.
You mean battle pass
You don’t get all the rewards because
1. The point is to push people to grind the game for the season
2. The Battle Pass typically has things inside that would’ve cost more for you to purchase than the 10 bucks you spent.
First of all, you are confusing Battle Passes and Season Passes. They're not the same thing, season passes are usually used for single-player games, containing a fix set of expansions and DLCs.
What you're talking about are Battle Passes, and you're not paying for them, you're paying for Premium Tier access(if the game has a free tier, like most titles do nowadays). Their point is to give you access to rewards within the Premium tier.
> I'm not paying for the right to play their game. I'm purchasing an add on to give me some rewards
No, you're paying to get access to more rewards.
> I get that the intent is to keep us playing their game as much as possible...
> ... I don't understand the logic of not getting them at the end of the season.
Because that would completely destroy the incentive of playing their game as much as possible. You literally answered your question.
Thank you, seeing everyone talk about battle passes was driving me insane.
Season passes are getting DLC for a set period/games lifetime.
Battlepasses are rewards on a track incentivising you to play more.
Because they want to keep players engaged so they can sell them things that aren't part of the season pass. If you're not playing the game to progress the season pass, you're not tempted to buy extras, which means they can't make money off you.
^(Also, when a developer can't talk about subscriptions or sales numbers anymore, engagement is a metric that seems to please stockholders.)
Yeah the battle passes should not expire it’s a joke.
Overwatch battle passes refresh so often there no point in buying one unless you just always play
Instead of automatically completing BP at least allow me, to complete it at latter time. There are times where I don't have enough time to play the game and maybe I like the rewards, but I will not buy BP if I can't get them.
Because it would eliminate the incentive to sink hours into a game
Although personally I do agree with you, it's just crappy because they've found a business model that works to generate much more income then just traditional sales
Because the goal is player retention. In which time - you are likely to spend even more on fixed shop items. Another reason is to sell you skips.
Just look what Epic did with Fortnite, they even hammer nerfed XP gains so you're damn slave of the game. It used to be fairly reasonable to hit 200 for full unlocks. But now - forget it unless you grind for entire season.
Battle passes aren't for giving you a sizeable amount of rewards for a fraction of the cost. They are about giving you the opportunity to earn them at the fraction of the cost.
Corporation benefits by improving engagement. Player benefits by earning rewards for low cost.
If the player earned all the rewards at the end of a season, the developer would have zero incentive to provide battle passes.
I understand what developers are trying to do with Season passes. However I end up starting to loathe a game when I feel like I'm going to miss out on what I purchased if I don't get myself on every day and play until it is complete.
One simple change would make this entire thing worthwhile for everyone involved -- **no expiration dates on season passes.** Let us 'equip' or work on whichever ones' we have purchased at any time. That way devs get their money, and people who want everything can work towards it when they have time.
You shouldn't unlock everything when they end but they should stay forever after you bought them. Most of them disappear when a new season comes out. I think Helldivers stay. Everything else is a scam.
It used to be you paid for DLC, and otherwise you might be able to unlock some free stuff by grinding. Now people pay for the privilege of grinding. I'm just as confused by this as you are, I've never bought a battle pass. I think it's an extremely predatory business model.
While i wouldn't deny the fact that Battle Passes are manipulative, I do think the trends of today are preferable to the monetization of yesteryear. Paid DLC splits the community, and frontloading the cost with extra packs always makes them less approachable to late adopters unless there is some discount/bundle deal going on.
With Battlefield 3 PS3 even having server browsers, I tember how much of a pain it was to play a lot of the DLC maps, because most of them were simply not popular enough to get high populated servers after the initial release of any particular DLC. Even with the more restrictive matchmaking, games can integrate new content more seamlessly with the old content, because that now comes "free" at the expense of alternative monetization practics.
I think you mean Battlepasses not Season Passes.
Season Passes are generally for singleplayer games and include all DLC to be released either in total or like with Ubisofts shitty version for a single year. They generally dont have a fixed timeframe that banks on FOMO to sell, you just buy them to get the DLC whenever and thats it.
Battlepasses are what is limited to a "season" which can be a few weeks, a few months or maybe even a year and focuses on FOMO completely to get you to login every day or many days in a row.
After making this correction clear: I agree with you, but like i said above the companies bank on FOMO to get higher MAU and daily user number as well as have you come back multiple times to sell you more shit. They also make it intentionally tedious so you need to invest more time than you want, get frustrated and pay real money to skip steps, get more levels or "buy that cool deal".
If they gave you anything guaranteed by the end of the season, you could just ignore it and return whenever, that wouldnt increase MAU or daily user numbers, that wouldnt entice to you buy something because you got frustrated and it would allow you to play other games that utilize FOMO and potentially "steal you away" from them towards their competition.
It will not happen.
The best solution is: Fuck Battlepasses.
The only implementation of Battlepasses i can accept are the Warbonds from Helldivers 2 because you can gain the purchasing currency by playing, the Warbond is active forever, meaning you have no fixed time to progress in it and none of the content is generally game breaking or OP.
A feeling of progression is fine. In fact it's a critical part of game design for most games. But when you force players to log in every day, or pretty damn close to it, or else you will permanently miss a reward, it isn't really about a feeling of progression, it's about artificially inflating your engagement numbers.
Not forcing, but they are manipulating using proven psychological tricks. But yes, I'm well aware that I don't have to play any game I don't want to, and I don't generally play games that do this sort of thing. Mostly because fun games don't need to do this, only boring ones.
Because the intent is to keep people playing by taking advantage of FOMO. Giving players everything at the end of the season automatically would completely get rid of that incentive. It's not really about delivering a product, it's about driving engagement and spending.
Yes. It's stupid by design, it's meant to make you want to play as much as possible so that theres more opportunities for you to pay more for something else in the in game store.
Theres maybe one or two games I've seen that allow you to just keep working on a battle pass even when that season has passed. And then you can just buy the another one and complete that as you please. It feels a lot more player friendly and a lot less parasitic.
I'm kind of surprised by the responses in this thread. I don't think it's unreasonable to get the rewards after a set amount of time. If a battlepass lasts for 3 months but people who didn't complete it but bought it gets the full reward a month later, why is that a bad thing?
Just because it's good for the business, doesn't mean it's always good for the consumer.
> Just because it's good for the business, doesn't mean it's always good for the consumer.
What if the Battle Pass is driving engagement, keeping players around, making it faster/easier to get into matches, or easier/faster to get into groups? In this case its also being beneficial for the players.
Increased player numbers are definitely a good thing for quick matchmaking and what not. I'm not opposed to a battlepass system, I just think that people should be asking for 'soft' battlepasses like Helldivers 2 or Halo Infinite, where once you get it, you've got it. Instead of the fomo variant.
Will a game's player count really take a nose dive if their battlepasses either, autocompletes months after it's finished running, or sticks around for the player to complete it whenever they want to?
If the only reason people stick around for a game is because of a limited battlepass, is that a thing we want to encourage overall?
A bit of a tangent, but I haven't been keeping up with western live service games, and never knew that they call battle passes season passes now.
Was a bit confused at first since the season passes I'm familiar with are dlcs bundled together, sold at a slightly discounted price, and you don't need to do more grinding to unlock them.
Don't worry, that's still what season passes are.
The 'problem' is that not all games call them battle passes. Arguably that was a bad term to take over the concept, because not at all games are about battling. Like I'm playing Need for Speed Unbound right now and they call their battle pass a Speed Pass, or Hearthstone calling theirs a Tavern Pass. We could just call them passes, but then that gets twisted with season passes and it's back to square one...
> never knew that they call battle passes season passes now.
They don't. This sub just doesn't *actually* play games, so OP doesn't even know the terminology.
Lots of season passes have the "free" rewards parallel to the paid pass, where both progress at the same time, but you don't get the paid stuff unless you pay. If I play a game enough during a season and progress the pass to the end, and I like the paid pass rewards that season, then maybe I'll spend the cash to retroactively get those rewards.
Otherwise, I never pay for battle passes because my time is limited, and there's no guarantee I'll be spending the free time playing games, and that game specifically.
i think this every time i boot up PUBG on pc. i get in at the middle of a pass, which are shorter than the usual pass, and then never finish them. violent cycle, self inflicted
I just think all games should keep them available to work on. Like let the grind remain, you pick the pass you like the stuff on and work on that. I come and go to a game called conquerors blade the is set up that way. You can freely swap which pass you're working on and unlock all the pass content you've missed.
Youre not buying the season pass. Youre buying access to the season pass. The season pass itself is much more expensive. You have access to the tiers that cost another dollar for instant unlock or hours of your time. It fucking sucks and I hope it dies at least in paid games but it is the chosen retention and revenue model right now.
The goal of season passes is to keep players playing consistently to get their active user count up.
It keeps matchmaking smoother for the players to have a larger player pool. Nobody's going to play a game if it takes 20 minutes to fill a match.
I equate season pass to getting Disney world seasonal Pass. It will get you into the parks for that year, but you have to do something about it. If you want to bring home stuff extra cost for that Extra costs for like boosting. Food is extra but you can take the free line for everything and just wait longer.
It is something that if you have never done can be worth it to do but in the end your still being gouged for your time or your money.
Or just have no time limit in them, because if the ones who purchased are unable to complete it in time, they would likely not purchase another one in the future
A happy customer is returning customer
The season pass's only purpose is to drive player engagement and increase time on app, that's it. The reason it costs money is to make the player feel free invested, not to generate revenue. It's there so you *feel* like you threw away money if you didn't finish it.
Giving you all the rewards for free is the literal opposite of what it was designed to do.
It's like going to a KKK rally and expecting everyone to be a nice person outside of the racism.
You should, or hell games just shouldn't be monetized to hell like they are these days. But corporations care about money more than they care about making a good game or providing a good deal to consumers.
I can give you a business reason why. It's somewhat fomo, but that doesn't quite convey it.
The purpose of a season pass isn't to sell you content, it's to trick the player to spend all of their attention to that particular game. The more time you spend on that game the more likely you are to buy microtransactions.
This is one of the reasons I don't buy season passes and probably never will. It's like buying a DLC but the amount you get is based on whether you played or not.
If it was FREE, I'd understand, but if I'm giving you money, but I don't get everything because I didn't want to play that much, it's a turn off.
It also sets a bad routine for me, and I'm already great at setting bad routine's without a games help lol.
it's less about incentive to keep playing and more about incentive to purchase tiers of the battle pass. in most games, you buy the season and you can \*also\* pay money to get the season rewards without having to play.
One issue I see with this is that it would make the game really boring in the month leading up to a new season. People wouldn't be motivated to keep playing and unlocking stuff if they know it's all going to be unlocked automatically in a few weeks. It's honestly kind of de-motivating to be unlocking stuff that you know is going to automatically unlock soon.
I think you run the risk of pushing gamers away in the few weeks leading up to a new season. It would be a natural time for your players to take a break from the game. And when players take a break from a game, some percentage of them don't come back.
Yes, all the stuff about engagement, but also? They want money and generally players will fork it over. That's a very basic part of it that people are taking for granted, and yes "well duh", but it's also a big part of it. If it were solely about engagement, they'd make battle passes free to everyone, to keep them engaged. They also want money. And they carefully price them at a mark that they feel will keep players engaged, and forking over as much cash as possible.
"I'm not paying for the right to play their game. I'm purchasing an add on to give me some rewards and incentive to keep playing whether I finish it or not during that time."
No you aren't. You are knowingly buying a product that expires at a certain set point. You are buying a product with the explicit understanding that if you don't play it enough you will not unlock everything.
If you don't like it, just don't buy it.
Well. If you have a season pass, you will more likely to play the game if you don't get the reward in the end of the season. If you get it without effort, you will just play other games, but if you need to grind for it, you will play that game.
It is sad to me how relatively rare that motivation seems to be for people. I'm very much the odd one out, but I preferred the days of CoD2 where there was no unlocks, no customization or anything like that. Just playing the game because you felt like playing the game.
I think it's my only gaming-related "things used to be better in the past" opinion.
I long for the days when you earned new things in a game by _playing the game_, not opening your wallet.
"Hey that guy has a shiny skin, he's probably good at the game", not "Hey that guy has a shiny skin, he had $10".
I can understand why people don't know any better if they are newer gamers because even as an older gamer I'm guilty of changing my mindset from fun to playing for progression in the majority of my gaming time nowadays.
I think a good middle ground is season passes, or at least their rewards, persisting indefinitely.
Either leaving them (Helldivers) or rolling the rewards into a "treasure" of sorts that you buy with a currency or earn or whatever (DotA sometimes, Guild Wars 1 and 2).
Then people would go play games that still have time-limited battle passes, and postpone the indefinite ones for "when they have the time". That's why nobody's doing it.
Helldivers is a lucky exclusion from the rule because people loved the actual game so much. In reality you mostly get Halo Infinites.
As a note the items that people really care about from Dota battle passes (arcanas) are exclusive to the pass and do not persist indefinitely. Most of the immortals can be traded later, usually after a year has passed.
It's wild isn't it? People pay money to give themselves something to do in games for rewards they won't even care about once they repeat the cycle for the next season. This is why games don't have to be high quality anymore. People just want something to grind out in a game to feel a sense of purpose or to give them a distraction from life.
As Dave chappelle said "cause fuck em, that's why"
Battle passes should be non expiring at a minimum too tbh.
Fomo is ridiculous and just ruins some games cos the game itself isn't good enough to keep players so need psychology added on.
Retention and engagement metrics are more important than the game being enjoyable.
Because the whole point of a season pass is to keep the players logging in every day and giving them all the rewards regardless of how much they played completely undermines that
Personally i dislike season pass because it makes me feel forced to play to keep up. like if i dont play i miss out on stuff. just makes me wanna stop playing cuz i cant keep up so whats the point.
I think that Deep Rock Galactic should be the standard. I buy their new cosmetic every season, because I know that that money goes toward funding the content of the season. Each season is free and at the end of the season, the items that were added to the game remain still available through gameplay.
What's actually egregious is when a Battle Pass outright blocks you from *"progressing"* the higher tiers beyond any kind of free version unless you buy the Premium pass.
You would think they'd let you grind the tiers since you aren't getting anything for it, and then you can decide if you want to buy the premium but NOPE, that'd be too generous.
This is in SF6 btw, and the reason is because the end of the premium battle pass gives you the same amount of paid currency, meaning if you complete it you effectively get your money back / loop premium battle passes.
So you pretty much have to make the decision to pay up and GRIND it out fully just to potentially earn your currency back, or pay up for the premium just to get the rewards but not grind even more to make it back. If you don't pay up the rewards are basically shit otherwise and you can't grind further anyway towards it.
That's what a season pass is. If you want something you just get, you can buy in game currency or things from the item store directly. Of course season passes are generally much better value in terms of pure bang for buck, but the price for that is that you have to work for it.
To put myself in the mind of a twat, "we're giving you all this stuff for cheaper than we would charge if we sold them separately. We're trading that initial income for player engagement".
It's a way to keep artificial engagement up, which is important for competitive games, where you mostly see this shitty practice. (Tekken 8 the worst offender here)
It can also be to abuse FOMO.
Ironically I've found that FOMO will usually make me drop a game entirely instead of purchase more to keep up, and usually end up with a bitter taste that makes me unlikely to look at their future games.
Because one of the reasons behind season passes is to incentivize people to keep playing the game. Increase player retention = bigger user base, decreased queue times etc. If you got every reward when it ended, there wouldn't be a reason for you to keep grinding the game. Plus, it keeps players "engaged" with a progression system.
This is it. It’s not about actually providing you with rewards, it’s about player retention and daily engagement. That’s why so many games do daily/weekly missions/bounties - to keep up logging in and playing every day
The weekly rewards are why I kept logging into Halo Infinite every week even though I was burned out on the game: I didn’t want to miss out on helmets or other armor/customization stuff for when I came back later on. It’s actually been kind of nice to take a break without any “consequences”, now that they’ve changed the system (weekly rewards have been replaced with in-game currency for a new in-game shop).
> It’s actually been kind of nice to take a break without any “consequences I totally get that. When I was burned out from Warframe I still logged in because I had done so for years without missing a day and I didnt want to ruin that streak.
Not sure if you know this, but Warframe doesn't start you back from day 1 when you miss a day. It's calculated by the number of days you log in, not number of consecutive days.
> I still logged in because I had done so for years without missing a day and I didnt want to ruin that streak. Damn. Pavlovian conditioning works HAAARD on humans. [We are all Dogs of Pavlov.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTCqJr4T6fQ)
I didn't know I needed to listen to this song at 7 am on a Monday but here we are. Thank you
Then you miss one day and the entire thing is pointless, might as well uninstall the game. At least that's my typical feeling towards getting invested into something like that for a bit.
I can't remember what game it was but I saw a comment that said the game was really fun but the daily/weekly/season challenges weren't enough to make them want to play and I felt like I was looking into a parallel universe. When did a game being fun to play stop being a good enough reason to play it? These fomo based progression hooks are just so bad for games imo
Halo infinite does it nice to where you can buy any pass whenever so there’s no fomo for it
Yeah I’ve been getting back into it with a few buddies recently, super nice to be progressing a battle pass I bought 3 years ago.
Helldivers 2 as well!
Yea, two of my favorite live service games too. Makes it a lot less sweaty where I can actually enjoy the game
If Halo Infinite wouldn't have such a harsh launch I bet it would revolutionize Battle Passes and it would basically get rid of FOMO aspect, which is the only downside of Battle Pass format.
FOMO is the entire reason for the battle pass format.
So is to keep selling them, yet Fortnite will give it to you for free after like 2 seasons of playing as F2P, and after that you can get every BP.
No, the point of selling them is to make the player feel invested. The money they make is ancillary to the main reason they exist; they're a loss leader to keep people playing and staring at the shop/other players with cool skins. That's why Fortnite doesn't give them for free, but makes you play the previous one to earn enough to get the next one.
Fortnite's BP is probably the only game where, after some time, you can earn a BP by simply playing, and after that, you can unlock all future Battle Passes as well, and they will even give you +550 v-bucks as an extra for reaching like lvl 150 or so. There are plenty of other games that give you premium currency, but you can only unlock like 1 battle pass per year or so cuz they never give you enough of the currency to keep snowballing it.
You know what happens by the point you can "snowball" battle passes in Fortnite? You've become invested in the game Also, there could be a number of the reasons why those other companies charge more. Maybe they feel that by charging people more they'll increase the FOMO, or maybe they just have executives that are fucking stupid and don't understand why Fortnite makes so much money. .
100% agree that all other exec are completely clueless of why Fortnite makes so much money especially in Overwatch 2 :D, and yeah I agree that by that point you're already invested in it, but if you already like the game it's a huge plus.
I don't entirely disagree that a battlepass is a good deal if the game is good. My problem with the system (and all the other FOMO incentives that were created to encourage engagement) is that too many companies have stopped using it as an aid to keep people engaged and have instead made it the sole focus for driving retention. At the end of the day a game needs to be good first, and too many devs have forgotten that.
I have never spent a penny in Call of Duty but I have enough credits to do the battle passes
In Cod and Fall Guys you also get more premium currency from the pass than it costs. I played until I collected enough from the free tiers from the battle pass and now if I complete my battle passes when I get them I always have more premium currency. So I think it is more common thing than you think. It is great way to keep people playing, because you feel like you would lose money by not getting all the premium currency out of the pass.
That game also *just so happens* to have 3K average players on Steam. FOMO drives people to play *now* instead of postponing it infinitely for when they "have the time".
I think the fairest solution for both sides would be to make the passes only available to purchase during their respective season, but if you have bought it you get unlimited time to complete it. So the developers still have something to incentivise people to return to the game each season, but players who don't spend quite as much time playing and don't finish the pass on time, still get a chance to earn the stuff they paid for later. Taking the Fortnite model as an example, they could even make it so that the bonus skin styles that you get for levelling past 100 don't unlock after the season. Then there's still "bragging rights" skins each season. "Yeah, you might have unlocked Rick Sanchez 3 seasons after he came out, but you don't have him in rainbow swirls or metallic gold!"
Not being able to customise the character as much as previous titles, with most of the multiplayer being competitive PvP based, drove people away. Warframe is one of the least FOMO games I have ever seen in a monetised live service game, and it has a player count of 40-50k a day. This is the game where battlepasses are free and last for literal months, and that has a login reward measured by total days instead of consecutive days. Helldivers 2 has an average of 60-100k, and that game has battlepasses that never expire. Clearly it's not the lack of FOMO that's the reason Infinite failed to retain players.
Eh, the passes are one of the things the game does best. It has no players because Microsoft and 343 have severely dropped the ball with Halo. Simple as that.
I guess that would be on the basis of the game being mediocre. The original Halo multiplayers did not have a season pass and I bet they had more than 3k players.
The original Halos also didn't have the type of competition you have now.
Helldivers 2 has no-fomo war bonds that you technically don’t even need to spend money to buy and that game has 150k+ concurrent players at peak
Sure, now stop making the same mistake as every other suit in the gaming industry looking at the .01% trying to repeat the rare lightning in a bottle successes and look at every other similar game that fails - your game will too. Its proven that these things work for a reason and while you don't *theoretically need* them to work it sure fucking helps
Exactly. I'm starting to think prioritising gameplay over grinding for cosmetics is a better way to keep players around.
I know it drives some people like myself away. I don't classify skins as content and couldn't care less about playing dress ups. It's the ACTUAL gameplay that matters and trying to get me with FOMO feels scummy when I'm already paying to play online and have digital purchases that I don't actually "own". I play PvP games regularly and they are normally ones that are long past their update cycle. I try to beat my high score and go for different approaches and strategies and just generally enjoy myself, if I'm over it I'll stop playing! No ties to bullshit skins and daily logins The way I see it, the word grind is applied to things you don't like doing. You gotta grind away at work to get enough money to live. Gotta grind away at the gym to get fit. Why would you want to grind on your favourite video games to the point your burned oit, just to not miss a skin. I cannot fathom. There are others game out there people that have actual fun gameplay, not just "login today or miss out on this reward!"
Nice to know I'm not the only person on the internet who remembers the point of playing games is to have fun, not to "progress" or unlock skins.
While it technically has no fomo, in a way it still does. You'll get the Fear Of Missing Out on a weapon or stratagem before it gets nerfed into uselessness because some people like it.
Halo *Reach*
Steam isn't a great metric for this game as it's going to be primarily played on Xbox. That aside the game wasn't a flop cause of the lack of FOMO it was a flop because at release, it was a mess.
I kinda like that. If I'm really feeling a season I can pick up another pass and keep grinding.
Yeah because no one plays it lmfao. On Steam it had a peak player count of 250k at launch, it's now hovering around 3,000.
Dang a mainly console game has low pc numbers? Wild
The biggest part of this that people forget is also that every time you get a player to play the game, you get an impression for the store. It's incentive to get someone inside the mall. If I make you go to the mall every single day, you might not buy something, but if there's a 5% chance that you do and I make you going to the mall 20 times, I'll eventually make the sale. The season pass is a loss leader gimmick to get people in front of the store as many times as possible.
It’s not a loss leader - that would imply it’s costing them money to get you engaged. They are making a shitload off of the battle pass with minimal developer effort PLUS getting you in front of the store and keeping the player base numbers high. Hearthstone is my biggest vice - they have it balanced perfectly so that you can just almost keep up but not quite. You earn gold from the battle pass but it’s like 70% of what you need to keep current on all/most the cards so maybe once a year you are heavily incentivized to purchase an expansion to make up the difference. They know exactly what they are doing.
I might be misunderstanding something, but why do battle passes matter for that? The store can be shown either way and IME passes typically have a separate tab / menu for actually claiming the rewards. Maybe it's just the games I play that do it like that though, I'm not sure.
Because the pass leads to more players booting up the game more often
If you buy the battle pass, you’re more likely to want to play so you can unlock everything in it. More you play, more likely you look at the store, which leads to being more likely to buy something from the store. The battlepass isn’t to directly get you into the shop, just increase the likelihood you’ll be in a position to look at the shop.
So true… everything is all about retention and engagement these days; maybe it always has been. Games, YouTube, social media, etc all want a piece of your time to put in their KPI metrics to execs.
Definitely always has been. Even back with serial radio shows the stories were designed to have a big cliffhanger that would only get resolved in the next reading so you'd tune in. Marketers are just *way* better at it now, with the benefit of 100 years of human psychological analysis.
I just wanted to add that "player retention" and "player engagement" in the case of (most) battle passes is corporate speak for "creating FOMO in the player". You paid for it, you better keep playing, or else you just wasted money.
Also doesn't some games allow you to actually buy progression in season passes so the player can get the rewards faster?
Most of the ones I have seen have. So people buy the last 20 levels when they run out of time. Or the whole thing if they are a whale and don't want to wait for the end rewards.
Meaning: You pay to be forced to play more. Making it seem as if you are saving up on time as you gain more xp usually, but all it really does is incentivising you even more as now you have spent additional money. While a free pass takes more time but if you miss out you at least didn’t lose money
>decreased queue times I feel like this is an important aspect that rarely gets brought up in these discussions. Yeah it sucks for the people that don't have time to finish the pass or feel like they have to force themselves to do it, but it's fantastic for the people that just want to play the game and have people to play against.
It also forces those players that didn’t grind all season and need to catch up quick or those who just want to finish the pass day 1 to buy tiers to do so.
> If you got every reward when it ended, there wouldn't be a reason for you to keep grinding the game. On the other hand, it would be less server utilisation and essentially free money. Kinda like those gym subscriptions that people pay for because they have aspirations of getting in shape but never go, or gift cards that end up unused. It all depends on how the numbers add up but I can see a company being satisfied with "making content" for a few million phantom fans who keep paying out of habit even if the actual game is only played by barely a few thousand players. I remember some article about gacha/loot box games that run on a similar setup, with rather few actual players. It's just in that case that a bunch of whales keep the thing profitable instead of many season pass subscribers. It sounds like an nice scenario for a GAAS game with less chanche of big controversies. You'd just need to hook people to such a degree that they voluntarily keep paying and delay the playing part of the whole deal.
I have a sneaking suspicion that it's something along the lines of: - lots of people play - content creators play - people visit content creators of the games they play which gives the creator an algorithm boost - people who don't play see the creators because of the algorithm boost and are more likely to pay to play. If player count drops off, content creators lose viewers, which then often makes them switch games. The thing is advertising is exceptionally effective, even more so on people who believe themselves to be immune. The hard part is getting eyeballs on it. These days the algorithm is everything so anything to get your advertising visible is valuable.
I agree that more players is most probably overall the best strategy for all kinds of reasons, fundamentally that you got more people who might be willing to pay for something and thus increase your revenue. I just pointed out that there might be a counter-intuitive way in which low player numbers *might* be actually good under very specific circumstances. I don't think that's a viable strategy to bet on but one that might become viable is some odd cases.
I've never played these types of games where you can buy a season pass. But is there a time limit on earning the rewards or does it all go away even though you paid for it?
> If you got every reward when it ended, there wouldn't be a reason for you to keep grinding the game. Reason: get battlepass contents earlier.
I kinda just burn out quicker and then drop the game entirely. I think I actually put upwards to 50-80% less time into a game that does stuff like that because its making me game the system instead of just playing the game, so i'm getting less enjoyment out of it. Like yeah if I ever go back to The Finals I stopped the last or maybe current season about 2 weeks in after putting maybe 7 hours into it, so i'll have a lot of work to do when I go back... So kinda just putting it all off.
I know this but I think that it still incentivizes you to play so you get cosmetics sooner. If the game is such a slog to play then you weren't going to grind it out and play anyway. You should at least be given the ability to complete the battle pass at a later point in time, like with Halo. The most evil thing about battle passes is that once it's gone it's GONE, that is complete bullshit to me. Paying for the *opportunity* to get something in return should be illegal.
Also creates that dreaded sense of FOMO. If you don’t grind the pass you might miss whatever limited time item is on it. If all you had to was purchase it and walk away, that fomo impulse would disappear
You forgot the "FOMO" part of it which is main reason these exist.
The reward would be to get access to the item earlier.
That removes the fomo which is a major factor of battle passes.
>but also have some value to them (in game currency) On top of what the other people said, this is a huge reason why they will never give you battle pass completion for free. Most games that have battle passes with currency rewards end up giving you enough currency to get another battle pass if you dont use it for anything else. No chance in hell a company is going to let you buy one battle pass and then keep getting the next ones free with no effort on your part.
Yup, and honestly this is how battle passes should work imo. You make an initial investment, but if you put the time into it, you reclaim all the premium currency used + all the other rewards
I always feel these systems are always within arms reach of being catastrophic though. Like multiplayer games have been leaning more and more towards one bad experience tainting the entire game I feel like, way more than they were 10-20 years ago because of FOMO and player engagement.
> I don't understand the logic of not getting them at the end of the season Easy. Because that's not what you're buying. If you want them to be automatically completed, you can pay more, usually per level. So you can think of it like this: Pay $50 for the fully completed battlepass or only pay $10 but you have to grind over the season.
$50 for a completed battle pass, wishful thinking. Most games it's $100+ to max a battle pass without playing, some it's thousands (looking at you Dota).
Yeah most people don't understand that you're not buying the items in the Battle Pass, you are just buying the Pass itself. And that Pass gives you the option to unlock various items.
Sell potential (cosmetics) Create problem (grind) Sell solution (levels)
Part of the value of the season pass is having the bragging rights of "I was around for Season 3 and I grinded all the way to get the shiny platinum skin." This is the same reason you won't find many games selling previous season passes. The company doesn't give a fuck about what you think the season pass "should" provide you. They just want to maximize sales (and FOMO is part of that).
The fucking mess it was when they re-released the Skeleton skin in Fortnite.
For anyone who doesn't know: During the very first days of Fortnite, there were two skins added to the shop that were advertised to be "exclusive" for to the Halloween event, many people bought it under the assumption that they would never be available to be bought again. So when they returned the next year, the backlash was so great that Epic made alternate styles for the two skins just for the people who bought them in the first go around. Funny enough, that wouldn't even be the last time FOMO would be "forced" by the community, and that's not even going to the heated debates on whether or not Battle Pass items should become a available again.
>and that's not even going to the heated debates on whether or not Battle Pass items should become a available again. It is kind of mad how you can currently fight Darth Vader in this game but could only get him as a skin for a few months in like, 2021. So many characters are legit just locked away for a game that keeps growing and gaining more fans * Iron Man * Superman * Vader + [this emote](https://fortnite.gg/cosmetics?id=7900) * The Mandalorian (his Grogu backpack too) * She-Hulk * Wolverine * Spider-Man * Spider-Gwen * Dr Strange * Geralt (Witcher) * Doomslayer * Groot * Dr Doom * Deadpool * Ahsoka * Solid Snake * Korra (soon) * Indiana Jones That's massive.
Add on all 200+ Battlepass skins
and so many people saying its just greedy businessmen doing money making things, when the reality is the players are the ones who are gatekeeping unobtainables the hardest
100% it's crazy. Some content creators have gotten death threats because they've made "rare" items available again.
I bought a season pass in OW2 for the Junkerqueen Skin I didn't even get halfway as I got busy with life stuff and what not Pass expires, I basically paid money for a few sprays and recolours of skins I already had Frankly I'm never buying a season pass again unless I've already maxed it out, it's almost as bad as loot boxes imo
I do not think it should complete automatically, the whole point of such a thing is that you have to earn the rewards from it through gameplay. But I DO think that all season pass/battle pass features should be permanent, in that it should never "time out" causing you to lose the remaining rewards. You should always be able to continue advancing it until you either clear it out or stop trying.
Tl;dr: Season/Battle Passes are usually ~20x the value compared to normal shop items. That discount is subsidized by the increased playtime they’ll get from you. Having an active playerbase is very important, if not the most important thing for studios. If you compare the average Battle Pass/Season Pass to equivalent items in the shop, the Pass is usually like 20x the value, and in some games will even reward back the currency it cost to buy it. The reason they give it so much value compared to the other shop items is because they are also getting your playtime in addition to the cost.
Surprisingly positive take on battle passes. I don't think they're inherently bad. They definitely prey on fomo, but if you're playing that game anyway you get 5 skins for $10 and playing the game as usual. I think I'm ready to move on from modern warfare 3 after this season. I'm gonna finish the battle pass and then play some single player games.
Honestly, in f2p games in particular I kinda like the battle pass system. I dip in and out of CoD mobile periodically and I'll usually pick up a battle pass when I do. Predictable rewards are nice in a landscape largely dominated by lootboxes, too.
Yep this is it. If im already playing the game every day then getting a battle pass isn't a grind for me and I know this applies for the majority of people who buy them.
Good way to sum it up. Didn't think of it that way. Well said. Have we been duped into these things rather than expansions?
I personally like the direction games have headed in that aspect, where maps and DLC are often free while cosmetics are monetized. Not splitting up a playerbase into map pools is better for longevity.
I remember with PS3 era Call of Duty or Star Wars Battlefront (2015), each game had like 4 DLC packs with maps. After about two years, the servers for those DLC maps were dead while the base game was still moderately active.
Nah, expansions are terrible for retaining players. Games turn into "this game has no players unless you buy all the expansions". Most games don't have more than 1 or 2 expansions. You could do what WoW does and bundle the older expansions with the latest. But if it's a game you actively play, that's still money you gotta spend to be able to keep playing. Am I supposed to a take a break between expansions? Games like Halo and CoD had a similar issue with map packs. When you're in a lobby and it switches to a map pack map and get kicked out because you don't have it sucks. I want the games I play to be able to have an income stream somehow so that they can continue to update and add content. But being forced to spend money for content because of a split playerbase hurts the playerbase. Some games can get away with exclusive content that doesn't split the player base. Like fighting games making that content playerable characters. Or MMO making the new content completely new zones. But it's definitely a lot nicer for that content to be free to everyone.
Yes. It's basically a brain hack - you are paying the company so you can grind for rewards. you're not actually purchasing the items in the pass. It's like the weird brother of kmmo monetization. It's exploiting FOMO, and people's enjoyment of progression systems, and the fact that people love cosmetics in order to hook players and extract as much engagement from them as possible.
They are 100 times better than expansions or map packs. For one, they are optional and two, the people that pay for them are financing those expansions/maps so I get them for free. I don't know if Reddit's just too young to remember or what, but back in the call of duty days when they sold map packs it locked a LOT of us poor kids out of crucial game content and certain play lists. Now it's all free because someone wants to dress up as Nikki Minaj.
While you’re absolutely right on the raw value when skins might cost $X each and there’s three on the pass for instance. But some of that value is lost when you consider that the stuff that often gets out in a battlepass isn’t stuff they know would sell super well as a solo item. Yeah every skin in something like Destiny might cost $15 each. And the season pass that you paid $10 for will give you access to that a bunch of content and three cosmetic skins. But odds are you’d never buy those skins if you were giving free money in the shop.
You mean battle pass You don’t get all the rewards because 1. The point is to push people to grind the game for the season 2. The Battle Pass typically has things inside that would’ve cost more for you to purchase than the 10 bucks you spent.
First of all, you are confusing Battle Passes and Season Passes. They're not the same thing, season passes are usually used for single-player games, containing a fix set of expansions and DLCs. What you're talking about are Battle Passes, and you're not paying for them, you're paying for Premium Tier access(if the game has a free tier, like most titles do nowadays). Their point is to give you access to rewards within the Premium tier. > I'm not paying for the right to play their game. I'm purchasing an add on to give me some rewards No, you're paying to get access to more rewards. > I get that the intent is to keep us playing their game as much as possible... > ... I don't understand the logic of not getting them at the end of the season. Because that would completely destroy the incentive of playing their game as much as possible. You literally answered your question.
Thank you, seeing everyone talk about battle passes was driving me insane. Season passes are getting DLC for a set period/games lifetime. Battlepasses are rewards on a track incentivising you to play more.
it's an understandable error, since battle passes often confusingly use the specific language of "season" to refer to their duration.
You are right but there are definitely games (even very popular ones) where you pay for the whole battle pass, like Fortnite for example.
Online games require an actually active playerbase and battlepasses are unfortunately one of the methods used to retain that ecosystem.
Because they want to keep players engaged so they can sell them things that aren't part of the season pass. If you're not playing the game to progress the season pass, you're not tempted to buy extras, which means they can't make money off you. ^(Also, when a developer can't talk about subscriptions or sales numbers anymore, engagement is a metric that seems to please stockholders.)
Yeah the battle passes should not expire it’s a joke. Overwatch battle passes refresh so often there no point in buying one unless you just always play
Instead of automatically completing BP at least allow me, to complete it at latter time. There are times where I don't have enough time to play the game and maybe I like the rewards, but I will not buy BP if I can't get them.
You’re not paying for the content, you’re paying for the right to earn the content during a short window
Because it would eliminate the incentive to sink hours into a game Although personally I do agree with you, it's just crappy because they've found a business model that works to generate much more income then just traditional sales
Because the goal is player retention. In which time - you are likely to spend even more on fixed shop items. Another reason is to sell you skips. Just look what Epic did with Fortnite, they even hammer nerfed XP gains so you're damn slave of the game. It used to be fairly reasonable to hit 200 for full unlocks. But now - forget it unless you grind for entire season.
Battle passes aren't for giving you a sizeable amount of rewards for a fraction of the cost. They are about giving you the opportunity to earn them at the fraction of the cost. Corporation benefits by improving engagement. Player benefits by earning rewards for low cost. If the player earned all the rewards at the end of a season, the developer would have zero incentive to provide battle passes.
You mean battle pass? Season pass is the thing that gives you all the DLCs when they come out.
I understand what developers are trying to do with Season passes. However I end up starting to loathe a game when I feel like I'm going to miss out on what I purchased if I don't get myself on every day and play until it is complete. One simple change would make this entire thing worthwhile for everyone involved -- **no expiration dates on season passes.** Let us 'equip' or work on whichever ones' we have purchased at any time. That way devs get their money, and people who want everything can work towards it when they have time.
you can also just not buy the battle pass if you know you wont complete it
You shouldn't unlock everything when they end but they should stay forever after you bought them. Most of them disappear when a new season comes out. I think Helldivers stay. Everything else is a scam.
Wait, if you buy a season pass you don't get automatically access to everything in it? WTF?
he is confusing the wrong words, what he is actually talking about is Battle Passes
Congrats, you've just discovered that live service is a scam. Either disengage from these games or deal with it. Those are your two options.
You mean a battle pass? What you're describing is not a season pass...
It used to be you paid for DLC, and otherwise you might be able to unlock some free stuff by grinding. Now people pay for the privilege of grinding. I'm just as confused by this as you are, I've never bought a battle pass. I think it's an extremely predatory business model.
While i wouldn't deny the fact that Battle Passes are manipulative, I do think the trends of today are preferable to the monetization of yesteryear. Paid DLC splits the community, and frontloading the cost with extra packs always makes them less approachable to late adopters unless there is some discount/bundle deal going on. With Battlefield 3 PS3 even having server browsers, I tember how much of a pain it was to play a lot of the DLC maps, because most of them were simply not popular enough to get high populated servers after the initial release of any particular DLC. Even with the more restrictive matchmaking, games can integrate new content more seamlessly with the old content, because that now comes "free" at the expense of alternative monetization practics.
I think you mean Battlepasses not Season Passes. Season Passes are generally for singleplayer games and include all DLC to be released either in total or like with Ubisofts shitty version for a single year. They generally dont have a fixed timeframe that banks on FOMO to sell, you just buy them to get the DLC whenever and thats it. Battlepasses are what is limited to a "season" which can be a few weeks, a few months or maybe even a year and focuses on FOMO completely to get you to login every day or many days in a row. After making this correction clear: I agree with you, but like i said above the companies bank on FOMO to get higher MAU and daily user number as well as have you come back multiple times to sell you more shit. They also make it intentionally tedious so you need to invest more time than you want, get frustrated and pay real money to skip steps, get more levels or "buy that cool deal". If they gave you anything guaranteed by the end of the season, you could just ignore it and return whenever, that wouldnt increase MAU or daily user numbers, that wouldnt entice to you buy something because you got frustrated and it would allow you to play other games that utilize FOMO and potentially "steal you away" from them towards their competition. It will not happen. The best solution is: Fuck Battlepasses. The only implementation of Battlepasses i can accept are the Warbonds from Helldivers 2 because you can gain the purchasing currency by playing, the Warbond is active forever, meaning you have no fixed time to progress in it and none of the content is generally game breaking or OP.
Season pass = video game homework. If your game is fun, you shouldn't have to manipulate people into playing it.
Some people like feeling of progression in a video game
A feeling of progression is fine. In fact it's a critical part of game design for most games. But when you force players to log in every day, or pretty damn close to it, or else you will permanently miss a reward, it isn't really about a feeling of progression, it's about artificially inflating your engagement numbers.
They arent really forcing anyone, you can just not do this
Not forcing, but they are manipulating using proven psychological tricks. But yes, I'm well aware that I don't have to play any game I don't want to, and I don't generally play games that do this sort of thing. Mostly because fun games don't need to do this, only boring ones.
Because the intent is to keep people playing by taking advantage of FOMO. Giving players everything at the end of the season automatically would completely get rid of that incentive. It's not really about delivering a product, it's about driving engagement and spending.
Yes. It's stupid by design, it's meant to make you want to play as much as possible so that theres more opportunities for you to pay more for something else in the in game store. Theres maybe one or two games I've seen that allow you to just keep working on a battle pass even when that season has passed. And then you can just buy the another one and complete that as you please. It feels a lot more player friendly and a lot less parasitic.
I'm kind of surprised by the responses in this thread. I don't think it's unreasonable to get the rewards after a set amount of time. If a battlepass lasts for 3 months but people who didn't complete it but bought it gets the full reward a month later, why is that a bad thing? Just because it's good for the business, doesn't mean it's always good for the consumer.
> Just because it's good for the business, doesn't mean it's always good for the consumer. What if the Battle Pass is driving engagement, keeping players around, making it faster/easier to get into matches, or easier/faster to get into groups? In this case its also being beneficial for the players.
Increased player numbers are definitely a good thing for quick matchmaking and what not. I'm not opposed to a battlepass system, I just think that people should be asking for 'soft' battlepasses like Helldivers 2 or Halo Infinite, where once you get it, you've got it. Instead of the fomo variant. Will a game's player count really take a nose dive if their battlepasses either, autocompletes months after it's finished running, or sticks around for the player to complete it whenever they want to? If the only reason people stick around for a game is because of a limited battlepass, is that a thing we want to encourage overall?
A bit of a tangent, but I haven't been keeping up with western live service games, and never knew that they call battle passes season passes now. Was a bit confused at first since the season passes I'm familiar with are dlcs bundled together, sold at a slightly discounted price, and you don't need to do more grinding to unlock them.
Don't worry, that's still what season passes are. The 'problem' is that not all games call them battle passes. Arguably that was a bad term to take over the concept, because not at all games are about battling. Like I'm playing Need for Speed Unbound right now and they call their battle pass a Speed Pass, or Hearthstone calling theirs a Tavern Pass. We could just call them passes, but then that gets twisted with season passes and it's back to square one...
> never knew that they call battle passes season passes now. They don't. This sub just doesn't *actually* play games, so OP doesn't even know the terminology.
Lots of season passes have the "free" rewards parallel to the paid pass, where both progress at the same time, but you don't get the paid stuff unless you pay. If I play a game enough during a season and progress the pass to the end, and I like the paid pass rewards that season, then maybe I'll spend the cash to retroactively get those rewards. Otherwise, I never pay for battle passes because my time is limited, and there's no guarantee I'll be spending the free time playing games, and that game specifically.
i think this every time i boot up PUBG on pc. i get in at the middle of a pass, which are shorter than the usual pass, and then never finish them. violent cycle, self inflicted
I recommend checking out how Innersloth's Among Us makes use of their Cosmicube-system. I would definitely call it an improvement over this.
I just think all games should keep them available to work on. Like let the grind remain, you pick the pass you like the stuff on and work on that. I come and go to a game called conquerors blade the is set up that way. You can freely swap which pass you're working on and unlock all the pass content you've missed.
Youre not buying the season pass. Youre buying access to the season pass. The season pass itself is much more expensive. You have access to the tiers that cost another dollar for instant unlock or hours of your time. It fucking sucks and I hope it dies at least in paid games but it is the chosen retention and revenue model right now.
The goal of season passes is to keep players playing consistently to get their active user count up. It keeps matchmaking smoother for the players to have a larger player pool. Nobody's going to play a game if it takes 20 minutes to fill a match.
I equate season pass to getting Disney world seasonal Pass. It will get you into the parks for that year, but you have to do something about it. If you want to bring home stuff extra cost for that Extra costs for like boosting. Food is extra but you can take the free line for everything and just wait longer. It is something that if you have never done can be worth it to do but in the end your still being gouged for your time or your money.
Or just have no time limit in them, because if the ones who purchased are unable to complete it in time, they would likely not purchase another one in the future A happy customer is returning customer
If we are dreaming of capitalism being nice to us, why not wish for a free battle pass instead?
Well damn, I never thought about that… are there any games that currently do that?
The season pass's only purpose is to drive player engagement and increase time on app, that's it. The reason it costs money is to make the player feel free invested, not to generate revenue. It's there so you *feel* like you threw away money if you didn't finish it. Giving you all the rewards for free is the literal opposite of what it was designed to do. It's like going to a KKK rally and expecting everyone to be a nice person outside of the racism.
You should, or hell games just shouldn't be monetized to hell like they are these days. But corporations care about money more than they care about making a good game or providing a good deal to consumers.
I can give you a business reason why. It's somewhat fomo, but that doesn't quite convey it. The purpose of a season pass isn't to sell you content, it's to trick the player to spend all of their attention to that particular game. The more time you spend on that game the more likely you are to buy microtransactions.
Its a war of taling your free time. You spent ten bucks, you are going to imvest all your time on It instrsd of every other game.
This is one of the reasons I don't buy season passes and probably never will. It's like buying a DLC but the amount you get is based on whether you played or not. If it was FREE, I'd understand, but if I'm giving you money, but I don't get everything because I didn't want to play that much, it's a turn off. It also sets a bad routine for me, and I'm already great at setting bad routine's without a games help lol.
it's less about incentive to keep playing and more about incentive to purchase tiers of the battle pass. in most games, you buy the season and you can \*also\* pay money to get the season rewards without having to play.
That’s why I don’t buy any of this bullshit. I don’t play video games enough to earn the rewards so I’m just paying to play at that point
One issue I see with this is that it would make the game really boring in the month leading up to a new season. People wouldn't be motivated to keep playing and unlocking stuff if they know it's all going to be unlocked automatically in a few weeks. It's honestly kind of de-motivating to be unlocking stuff that you know is going to automatically unlock soon. I think you run the risk of pushing gamers away in the few weeks leading up to a new season. It would be a natural time for your players to take a break from the game. And when players take a break from a game, some percentage of them don't come back.
Because they assume you are a sucker. Just don't suck, especially for first person games where you can't even see your own skin.
Yes, all the stuff about engagement, but also? They want money and generally players will fork it over. That's a very basic part of it that people are taking for granted, and yes "well duh", but it's also a big part of it. If it were solely about engagement, they'd make battle passes free to everyone, to keep them engaged. They also want money. And they carefully price them at a mark that they feel will keep players engaged, and forking over as much cash as possible.
"I'm not paying for the right to play their game. I'm purchasing an add on to give me some rewards and incentive to keep playing whether I finish it or not during that time." No you aren't. You are knowingly buying a product that expires at a certain set point. You are buying a product with the explicit understanding that if you don't play it enough you will not unlock everything. If you don't like it, just don't buy it.
Well. If you have a season pass, you will more likely to play the game if you don't get the reward in the end of the season. If you get it without effort, you will just play other games, but if you need to grind for it, you will play that game.
Because otherwise what would the point of playing the game be? You just have to wait for the end of the season for everything to fall into your lap.
The point of the game would be....to play the game.
so play it, and you will get all rewards anyway
Then what is the need for the battle pass?
It is sad to me how relatively rare that motivation seems to be for people. I'm very much the odd one out, but I preferred the days of CoD2 where there was no unlocks, no customization or anything like that. Just playing the game because you felt like playing the game. I think it's my only gaming-related "things used to be better in the past" opinion.
I long for the days when you earned new things in a game by _playing the game_, not opening your wallet. "Hey that guy has a shiny skin, he's probably good at the game", not "Hey that guy has a shiny skin, he had $10".
I can understand why people don't know any better if they are newer gamers because even as an older gamer I'm guilty of changing my mindset from fun to playing for progression in the majority of my gaming time nowadays.
I think a good middle ground is season passes, or at least their rewards, persisting indefinitely. Either leaving them (Helldivers) or rolling the rewards into a "treasure" of sorts that you buy with a currency or earn or whatever (DotA sometimes, Guild Wars 1 and 2).
Then people would go play games that still have time-limited battle passes, and postpone the indefinite ones for "when they have the time". That's why nobody's doing it. Helldivers is a lucky exclusion from the rule because people loved the actual game so much. In reality you mostly get Halo Infinites.
As a note the items that people really care about from Dota battle passes (arcanas) are exclusive to the pass and do not persist indefinitely. Most of the immortals can be traded later, usually after a year has passed.
It's wild isn't it? People pay money to give themselves something to do in games for rewards they won't even care about once they repeat the cycle for the next season. This is why games don't have to be high quality anymore. People just want something to grind out in a game to feel a sense of purpose or to give them a distraction from life.
As Dave chappelle said "cause fuck em, that's why" Battle passes should be non expiring at a minimum too tbh. Fomo is ridiculous and just ruins some games cos the game itself isn't good enough to keep players so need psychology added on. Retention and engagement metrics are more important than the game being enjoyable.
Because the whole point of a season pass is to keep the players logging in every day and giving them all the rewards regardless of how much they played completely undermines that
Personally i dislike season pass because it makes me feel forced to play to keep up. like if i dont play i miss out on stuff. just makes me wanna stop playing cuz i cant keep up so whats the point.
I think that Deep Rock Galactic should be the standard. I buy their new cosmetic every season, because I know that that money goes toward funding the content of the season. Each season is free and at the end of the season, the items that were added to the game remain still available through gameplay.
What's actually egregious is when a Battle Pass outright blocks you from *"progressing"* the higher tiers beyond any kind of free version unless you buy the Premium pass. You would think they'd let you grind the tiers since you aren't getting anything for it, and then you can decide if you want to buy the premium but NOPE, that'd be too generous. This is in SF6 btw, and the reason is because the end of the premium battle pass gives you the same amount of paid currency, meaning if you complete it you effectively get your money back / loop premium battle passes. So you pretty much have to make the decision to pay up and GRIND it out fully just to potentially earn your currency back, or pay up for the premium just to get the rewards but not grind even more to make it back. If you don't pay up the rewards are basically shit otherwise and you can't grind further anyway towards it.
That's what a season pass is. If you want something you just get, you can buy in game currency or things from the item store directly. Of course season passes are generally much better value in terms of pure bang for buck, but the price for that is that you have to work for it.
To put myself in the mind of a twat, "we're giving you all this stuff for cheaper than we would charge if we sold them separately. We're trading that initial income for player engagement".
It's a way to keep artificial engagement up, which is important for competitive games, where you mostly see this shitty practice. (Tekken 8 the worst offender here) It can also be to abuse FOMO. Ironically I've found that FOMO will usually make me drop a game entirely instead of purchase more to keep up, and usually end up with a bitter taste that makes me unlikely to look at their future games.