Today’s AMA isn’t going well
There’s a shitstorm going on at the Payday subreddit today, and for good reason — the devs have recently implemented microtransactions after they promised they wouldn’t. This particular Category 5 is based on an AMA held by Overkill producer Almir Listo, which fans are going crazy over.
For starters, Listo deflects nearly every well-intentioned question regarding the implementation of microtransactions, and attempts to directly PR-speak the community, which is a bizarre tactic. He also outright blames the media for misrepresenting the topic in some sort of desperate straw-man maneuver, when it’s clear to practically everyone that this was implemented in one of the poorest ways possible (basically in the dead of night under the guise of an event called the “Black Market Update”).
Despite the blowback though, the microtransactions are here to stay. Listo confirms this in the AMA, noting, “We understand that there is a lot of fury, anger and disappointment with us adding this. From an economical standpoint however, completely based on statistics, we can already see that the Black Market update is working as we intended.”
The thing is, Overkill will probably stand to make a lot of money on this system, preying on whales and casual players, leaving their dedicated fanbase in the dust. While I don’t have an inherent issue with microtransactions in games where they’re easily ignored, the fact that they already promised that they wouldn’t implement them, and proceeded to ignore their dedicated community with tone deaf, canned responses is troubling.
The real question is — will it be worth it in the long term if they don’t budge on this.
