Gears of War 4 came out at a time when in-game monetization in the AAA space was at its worst. Before the Battlefront 2 controversy, pay-to-win microtransactions and loot boxes were a dime a dozen and could be found in basically every other major new release – especially if they had a multiplayer component – and Gears of War 4 was also guilty of using loot boxes.
With Gears 5 though, The Coalition and Microsoft are completely changing their monetization model (among other things). Though characters will be purchasable with real money (in addition to being earnable in-game), the game will have no loot boxes, while it’s also dropping the Season Pass, which means every new map that is released for the multiplayer post-launch will be free for everyone.
In addition, there’s also Tour of Duty mode, where players can partake in Daily Challenges and seasonal Medals and get customization content for ranking up, while Supply gives players free content just for playing more multiplayer. It’s a clear improvement over Gears of War 4, and according to the game’s multiplayer design director Ryan Cleven, it’s “a very player-centric, player-friendly way of doing customisation and monetisation.”
Cleven, in fact, feels that Gears 5 is ahead of the curve as compared to other games in the industry when it comes to monetization, especially with its removal of loot boxes. “We really think we’re ahead of the industry here in getting rid of loot boxes and making sure that we can both service people that are looking to accelerate their progression or earn cosmetics using money but also keeping the integrity of the game experience,” he said, while speaking with GamesIndustry.
The decision to remove loot boxes, as per Cleven, was made even before the controversy surrounding loot boxes heated up. “We had made that decision before all that happened,” he said. “We were sort of reading the tea leaves, I guess, and we were one of the earliest to adopt card packs inside our game. We thought we’d done it quite elegantly in Gears 4 — some people liked it, some people didn’t. There were other companies and other games that would have done it differently that people were less happy about.
“We put the challenge to ourselves: can we still provide purchasable things to players that want to purchase and still have the rest of the players really enjoy the system? That was a challenge we set right from the beginning of Gears 5.”
“We just felt that [loot boxes] weren’t a good fit for Gears and we wanted to be ahead of the curve looking for possible solutions, even before all the controversy,” he concluded.
Gears 5 is out on September 10 for the Xbox One and PC.