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Comment by jimmyjazz14 | Hacker News Reader

Over the last few years I have gotten hundred of hours of enjoyment from games like League of Legends, Valorant and Halo Infinite and couldn't even tell you how to spend money on those games if I wanted to. I honestly doubt I would have ever picked up any of those games if they were not free and I'm guessing since many other would say the same thing the lobbies would be empty and the games would die. In those case the free model is great and I don't feel like there is any loss for someone not wanting to spend money on them.

I think those cases are different than the mobile app style which makes no sense to me since many of the games are single player so nobody will see the skins or whatever anyway.

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I'm in your camp. I'd posit an additional piece of my thinking.

I feel like gaming, even with microtransactions, is probably one of the most affordable pieces of entertainment you can have.

During covid, the height of my old-man gaming, I was probably playing an hour or two each day and 4 hours each weekend. That's about 700-800 hours a year I play. If I spent 200$ in skins on COD's battlepass, that is still an incredibly cheap amount of fun I've gotten for a whole year when the entire world was closed and I couldn't get out and have fun. I really don't see why people complain so much. Coin-operated arcades were literally a microtransaction model from the 70s and 80s!

I'm paying 25 cents an hour on a game with a lot more labor involved than an old arcade game.

I think I saw that some of the old arcade games were actually rigged to get harder at certain points to get more quarters/tokens put in them, then there was the countdown timer after you died where you could continue if you put more money in.

Video games are for-profit companies and these days they are in heavy competition with each other and all the other distractions around.

I can easily spend about $40-50 to go to a movie with the family and if the movie sucks it feels like a waste of 2 hours. Same amount of money on a game will get you 10x plus more time of entertainment.

Yeah, that's exactly what I was getting at. I've wasted way more money on bad movies than games.

My experience lines up with yours, as a looong time Halo veteran who is a bit bummed with the state of Infinite, I'm happy to not pay a cent, despite spending thousands on Halo over the years. I've also spent a decent amount of the previous year playing Valorant, and I almost feel bad that I've paid nothing for it, but the the problem is that apparently the economists Riot employs have figured the sweet spot for selling in game items is $20+ (with many items in the 30-40 range), which is just too much for a single item for me.

The irony is that if gun skins were all $5-10, I'd probably have already spent over $100 on them. Oh well, time to queue up again and contribute nothing back.

Queueing up IS contributing something back - it's a multiplayer game, so every person playing is helping keep queue times low. It also gives Riot a MAU and DAU which they probably track internally to determine how successful a game is (and thus how much to invest in more content for that game).

> despite spending thousands on Halo over the years

But how could you have spent thousands? Original Halos don’t have micro transactions.

Slightly disingenuous to say I spent thousands on Halo specifically, but I used to run LANs/tournaments, so at one point or another I've owned multiple copies of every installation in the series, bought multiple of the same consoles for the sole purpose of those events, combined with controllers, etc.

We still have Halo LAN party with friends every week.

I completely agree! I feel that way about Hearthstone Battlegrounds cosmetics. I've been playing a lot and thought I might buy a skin pack or two to vary the experience up a bit, but all of the packs were more than $20 a piece! I was totally down for like $5-15, but once you hit $20, it's a like a switch flips in my brain to not worth it...

"Laurey LoL statistics indicate players spend an average of $92 a year on the game."

The thing about IAPs in games is that most money comes from whales, people spending thousands of dollars for customizations or pay-to-win items, this rises the average by a lot. It would be nice to see the distribution of payments.

This is the only thing that makes me pause before dismissing the article as ridiculous in cases where it's people choosing to spend money on cosmetics. There might be whales who are addicted to the spending or gambling somehow.

Otherwise as someone noted it's just price discrimination, and in a way that lets people try and play games for free. Really I love what video games have become.

I may spend 100-200 a year on Valorant. However, I am getting way more per hour value out of it than say, a 50 - 60$ single player game that I quit after a single play through. Or worse, the 50-60$ AAA titles that popup every few years, get a swarm of players in the first few months, then die off as the ADHD Twitch community moves to something else.

The median spend might be zero $ per year.

Also might be more.

And with a game like Lol, where it is literally pay to win, I wouldn't be surprised if it were more.

What aspect is pay to win?

You need to pay for champions, they are not unlocked for free.

You do not have to pay for champions, you can unlock them for free using easily-obtainable Blue Essence. Paying to unlock champions is pay-to-progress, because it gets you caught up to everyone else faster, but doesn't give you a competitive advantage.

You say progress, but it’s kind of both an endless treadmill and you’re weaker usually by lack of options;

When I used to play LoL, like 5-7 years ago, I was playing a rate of like 3-4 hours daily, which barely scraped by the amount of essence needed to buy the next releases champion, let alone the runes system they had introduced at the time (don’t know if it’s still around) which had a fairly dramatic impact on the early game especially for specific characters.

That is, while technically the game could be played purely on free tier and eliminate any competitive advantage… it requires a lot of effort to keep up. Not nearly as bad things like FarmVille used to pull, but definitely enough to say that ponying up cash is eventually needed.

And having more options available to you (both characters and runesets or whatever they do now) is definitely an advantage, and a significant one at that

You don't need options. It's best to play around 3 champions for your main position, and 1 or 2 for the other 4 positions. That means you want around 11 champions in your pool. More than that is too difficult to improve with. Let's round that up to 16 champions and give a bit more flexibility and experimentation. This is all you really need, and you will get it very quickly. By the time the meta changes, or you've played it enough to consider changing direction, you'll have more champions unlocked.

You can get some for free. You certainly might be attached to a particular one and want to buy it, but the game is balanced enough that you can easily win with a champion that is easy to get.

I had a lot of luck with Sona, for instance, who I got for free right away.

(Sometimes I think it would be fun to play League again but I can't stand the thought of being tied up for 45 minutes)

Take my advice and stay away, easily the most toxic online gaming community I've ever seen mostly because of the 45 minute time sink.

The best champions for new players are the ones you start with though. By the time you're ready for the other ones you've earned enough in game money to buy them.

There are plenty of pay-to-win games, but LoL is not one of them. LoL has cosmetics, and pay-to-progress, but there's nothing you can buy that will give you an advantage in-game over people who play for free.

Unlocking new characters with RMT is not pay-to-win, because all the characters are obtainable for free without requiring unreasonable effort. You're not forced to get them from random lootboxes like Gacha games, and having every character doesn't give you an appreciable advantage except at perhaps the highest level of play.

You and I clearly have a different definition of pay to win. If I start the game on a new account, and don't have access to the same champions as my enemy from game 1 unless I spend money, then the game is pay to win. Period. The fact that I could pay money, in that moment, to win, means the game is pay to win.

Edit: Further, here is an article[1] breaking down how long it would take to unlock all champions without paying money. 9.5 years playing 1 game/day. It's absurd to pretend that isn't "pay to win". By that definition, Clash of Clans isn't pay to win either, because technically you could grind the game for 100 years without paying for anything and get really far.

[1] https://www.dexerto.com/league-of-legends/lol-fan-works-out-...

I would heavily disagree. LoL now practically throws champions and skins at you now with some of their currency systems. I think the other thing is that you don't need all the champions unlocked to be good. You would probably do better by choosing a set couple of champs and getting good at those. Yes, meta's change, but that is on top of good mechanics. LoL is a lot of things, but I would strongly argue against pay to win.

But you're not paying to win. You're just paying to have a different experience. In fact, when you start your best shot at winning is with the champions they give you, since they're the easiest. League is better described as pay to lose if anything.

LoL is a game that rewards learning deep, not wide. You won't win just because you have access to many champions. You will lose, because you don't know how to play those champions, and will never learn how, because you are always starting over with a new one. Counterpicking and tier lists are lies that scrubs tell themselves to feel better about their lack of basic skills. You need 1 champion you can play perfectly without error, and a couple backups in case you don't get to play that 1 champion.

At 1 game a day, it will take you far longer than 9.5 years to learn to play every champion in the game, so it is irrelevant how long it would take to get all of them. You could play more than 300 hours on a single character before it would benefit you to add a second one.

League doesn't feel pay to win at all to me, yeah you do have to play or pay to unlock champions but they are not necessarily better champions in most cases (for new players at least).

Lol is not a pay to win game. Saying otherwise tell me you never played the game.

Best players in the world start new accounts with no champions and are still able to climb to the top of the ladder.

Also, since a few years the game literally give you tons of content such as champion and cosmetics for free.

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