2017 was a particularly bad year for monetisation in full-price games, as examples like Middle-earth: Shadow of War, Forza Motorsport 7, and especially Star Wars Battlefront II proved, but in the case of the last example, that pushed the consumers too far, and the backlash from the general public was significantly noticeable.
While some studies have shown that revenue from these services are simply too great for them to disappear, some analysts are predicting publishers might decrease their efforts on implementing further monetisation this year. Last week, analyst Doug Creutz of Cowen spoke to CNBC, and while he primarily spoke at length about downgrading EA's market value, he also mentioned that he thinks will 2018 will mark a pullback on publisher's attempts to drive microtransactions.
"(Star Wars: Battlefront II) had pretty clearly significantly underperformed expectations and remains without a live services revenue stream, while Destiny 2 has at the least suffered some unwanted engagement attrition. We suspect that 2018 will see a pullback on industry attempts aggressively drive MTX growth as a result," he said.
Do you think publishers will tread more carefully in 2018?