In case you didn’t think that multiplayer shooter games had enough problems, Activision is aiming to prove you wrong by aggressively pushing Call of Duty WW2 microtransactions in the game’s advertising on Steam, to the point that even in the “About This Game” section microtransactions come before the actual game.
Microtransactions are the bane of many a game’s existence to a large number of gamers, who simply want to play the game and earn weaponry and cosmetics on their own. Many dislike them becasue they see it as giving some players an unfair advantage if they spend a lot of money on high-end weapons and power ups, over other players who earn things the regular way.
Since they first released, a number of different studios have implemented microtransactions as well, but they have only been for non-gameplay related content, such as skins and costumes.
The fact that Activision has made microtransactions the forefront of the Call of Duty WW2 Steam page will definitely probably ruffle the feathers of more than a few players. Middle-earth: Shadow of War, another highly-anticipated Triple-A game, already garnered a great deal of vitriol and controversy for adding in microtransactions to its own game.
What made that even worse was that Shadow of War is an entirely single-player game, making the microtransactions look even more out of place and shoehorned in for the purpose of just getting Warner Bros more money.
Even earlier, back when Dead Space 3 was getting ready to release, Electronic Arts added in microtransactions in that game (which was primarily single-player but for its co-op mode), which was one of the many different factors that led to the game not getting very many sales.
If you want to make use of the Call of Duty WW2 microtransactions when the game releases, we can’t really stop you, but hopefully there will be some sort of big backlash against Activision for this.
