The debate about loot boxes and microtransactions in paid games continues to rumble on after a recent spate of high profile examples came to market in quick succession.
Titles like Forza Motorsport 7, Middle-earth: Shadow of War, and NBA 2K18 have all been in the firing line lately after their respective developers opted to include paid-for loot boxes in key parts of the game, in some cases tainting the experiences they offered and seemingly encouraging players to invest further to have a complete experience.
In an interesting twist to this ongoing discussion, review aggregator site OpenCritic has dived into the debate by asking its community to offer up some ideas about how loot boxes and similar practices can be clearly highlighted.
"We're going to take a stand against loot boxes. We're looking into ways to add business model information to OpenCritic," a company rep posted on Twitter. "Let us know your thoughts on how we can categorize and display "business model intrusiveness" on game pages in a fair and scalable way."
The site then added that they're looking at the following areas:
- Random / Loot box vs "Sure-thing" / buying direct
- Cosmetic vs buying power
- Exclusively paid vs can be acquired in game
- Prompts during gameplay vs dedicated store
- 100% unlock completion time with no payment
As 99.9% of you already know, sites like OpenCritic and Metacritic collect together review scores from across the Internet and present an overall critical consensus on a game, and it's certainly an interesting development to see one of the two sites taking a public stance on the matter. Whether it'll be enough to dissuade developers/publishers from implementing these divisive microtransactions is another matter entirely, though.