Free Steam game blamed for surge of microtransactions in gaming

This free-to-play Steam game is believed to be the reason you can’t play a AAA game nowadays without having microtransactions shoved in your face.

We all know the game industry is plagued with lootboxes, cosmetic items, battle passes and other forms of microtransactions. It’s the bane of many player’s lives as respected video game franchises like Assassin’s Creed, Call Of Duty and even Halo have all introduced in-game purchases for basic customisation items.

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However gamers believe they’ve found patient zero for the microtransaction epidemic, Team Fortress 2, the beloved, free, first person shooter that regularly tops the Steam charts.

In a Reddit post by RobIson240YT asking “What's a good video game that made the industry worse?” one response by Golden-Owl said, “Team Fortress 2 once decided to add a hat for a fun cosmetic feature. Things quickly got out of control, to put it lightly…”

For those unaware of the history the Steam game added in some DLC to equip your soldiers with a hat. The popularity of the add-on spurred Valve to add more hats to the game, eventually evolving into lootboxes, which seemingly inspired the rest of the game industry to do the same.

One fan said it “proved to everyone that microtransactions for purely cosmetic additions were something people would throw all their money at.”

Another said “Valve discovered how to abstract gambling enough to avoid serious regulatory scrutiny and thus ‘surprise mechanics’ were born.“

That being said some believe Valve’s decision to add in-game purchases was a good thing, as “it probably led to a lot of free fun competitive games that fund development using cosmetics,” a good example being Fortnite.

For better or worse Team Fortress 2 certainly had an impact on gaming and if you trace the history of microtransactions there’s no denying it helped them become mainstream.