Activision’s Patent Helps Encourage Players To Spend Money In-Game

These days game developers and publishers are no longer content in just selling players a copy of a game. Instead it seems that companies these days are trying to milk every dollar possible out of their players, and this is usually done with in-game transactions where players can spend real-life money to purchase things like skins, costumes, power-ups, and so on.

In some cases, some games actually encourage these purchases to help players become more “powerful”. If you were hoping to see this practice go away, we doubt that will happen. In fact a recently discovered patent by Activision seems to suggest that the company is looking at ways to further encourage in-game purchases.

The patent’s description reads, “For example, if the player purchased a particular weapon, the microtransaction engine may match the player in a gameplay session in which the particular weapon is highly effective. This may encourage the player to make future purchases to achieve similar gameplay results.”

We suppose it is well within the rights of a company to try and make as much money as possible, although we’re sure that gamers probably can’t be too thrilled at the idea that they might be manipulated into doing so. The good news is that it doesn’t appear that the patent has been used. In a statement provided to Kotaku, Activision said, “This was an exploratory patent filed in 2015 by an R&D team working independently from our game studios. It has not been implemented in-game.”

Tyler Lee
Categories: Gaming, General
Tags: Activision, Patent