The horse armor that modified the world of video video games eternally | Culture | EUROtoday

It all began with horse armor in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It price simply 200 factors (or two euros) within the Xbox 360 console on-line retailer in 2006. That was all it took to obtain a beauty merchandise that didn’t profit the participant, however modified their look. “That armor of Oblivion It was not normal and it was a scandal. Now we see it as very innocent, but the players complained. ‘What is this about having to pay again when I have already bought the game?’ sector generates every year.

To understand the abrupt change in the sector, we must go back to the nineties. Back then, when extra downloadable content online did not exist, what could be purchased were the so-called expansions: additional content with hours of extra gameplay, new maps and adventures; This is the period that many players evoke when they talk about a better “before,” as Professor Navarro remembers: “The player’s mentality was that, once you bought the game, you had bought 100% of the work.” In the pre-internet period of quick connectivity, anticipating avid gamers to obtain varied gigabytes In their properties it was an impossibility, so the works needed to be self-sufficient.

At the flip of the millennium, using the Internet for on-line purchases was normalized and, by the early 2000s, consoles already included connectivity as a key side. “There begin to be good connections and suddenly a way opens up to sell products within the game,” says Navarro. That’s when the world is aware of the DLC (from English Downloadable Content) or downloadable content material, such because the horse armor of Oblivion.

It is DLC It would mark a earlier than and after that “would take years to materialize,” says Meristarion journalist Alejandro Castillo. Suddenly, studios found that they might obtain a gradual stream of funding in the event that they continued to launch content material in small doses, so-called “microtransactions.” “It was ugly for the consumer, but more companies saw it as a way to add income beyond the initial payment for the game.” The different facet of those gross sales is within the builders who create the video games, at all times on the verge of closure or main layoffs if a manufacturing isn’t worthwhile, since not all titles have lots of of tens of millions of euros behind them from a studio like Rockstar, creators of the saga. GTA o Red Dead Redemption.

In 2024, video video games generated greater than 170 billion euros between PCs, consoles and cellphones. Only on computer systems, microtransactions and DLC They represented, that very same yr, 72% of the virtually 33,000 million in earnings. “The problem is that not everything can be given away; in the case of service games [los que reciben actualizaciones constantes, como Fortnite]”This human funding have to be accompanied by earnings by way of different means, whether or not following the acquisition of the product or with one other sort of monetization,” argues Castillo. “And within the case of expansions, dedicating a group to it slows down the event of the subsequent online game, which in the long run is the one that may maintain you within the coming years.”

We must also consider these extra purchasables as a window of opportunity to continue exploring universes with many followers. As transmedia researcher Marta Fernández Ruiz describes, “you expand the story, that idea of ​​expanding the commercial life of the product while the user can dive deeper and immerse themselves in this entire fictional world of which they are a fan.” Fernández points out that the possibility of selectively purchasing only those pieces of DLC that the player wants “offers a more personalized experience, because the user can choose their own route.”

The dark side

Like any business that moves money, there will inevitably be users who misrepresent the systems to generate profits outside the confines of in-game economies. The use of coins in-gamecombined with anonymity when playing online, allows for a host of criminal activities in the wake of these monetization systems, from purchases with stolen credit cards to money laundering. The amounts and games fluctuate, but it has happened many times: since Fortnitewhere hundreds of thousands of euros were laundered with the purchase of V-bucks (the virtual money of that title). Or in Counter-Strike: Global Offensivewhere the mother platform, Steam, disrupted an illegal resale market of almost two million euros. In that market, they bought skins (cosmetics) with illicit money and then sell them in external markets. It has also happened in areas surrounding video games, as was the case with the game streaming platform Twitch, where more than 8.6 million euros were laundered.

Víctor Navarro remembers the case of “kids who dedicated themselves to playing World of Warcraft (WoW) non-stop and then they sold the character. They got a lot of money”—last year a similar scandal involved billionaire Elon Musk, who paid for a high-level character in the game Path of Exile and he lied about it. Another controversy in WoW It was the case of the “gold farmers“, about 300 prisoners in Chinese prisons who had been compelled to play WoW for as much as 12 hours a day to generate income by acquiring the sport’s inner foreign money. In 2011, 80% of gold “farmers” farmingrepeat a job or mission advert nauseam to realize expertise or digital cash—had been in China.

Whether it is to develop the world and provide new instruments, or to maintain a undertaking open and funded, on the finish of the day it is the gamers who resolve whether or not to spend on a DLC or not. When Bethesda, the studio behind TES IV: Oblivionrevealed the remaster of the sport final yr, made positive to re-include the controversial set of horse armor that began all of it: nearly like a museum piece, 1000’s of gamers have outfitted it to their mounts, as if to revive the milestone that turned your entire trade on its head.