The Late Great Bottleneck
or, Video Games Are Stalking Wolves
fri 28th, march 2025
i have been playing a mobile game. i know, not even me and my perfect taste are immune to their wiles. sorry
i played a shit load of the first Archero a few years ago and at some point google play told me Archero 2 was coming out, so i signed up for the pre-launch whatever. its good! its roguelike where you move to avoid enemy attacks and attack whenever you're not moving. beat a level, advance, get upgrades, earn xp. its a surprisingly elegant and challenging game and, obviously, it's wrapped up in so much microtransaction bullshit it'll make your head spin.
basically every time i open the game it looks like this...
that's TWELVE icons that demand my attention, three visible currencies (a dozen others hidden behind menus and subsystems) and just about everything on that screen can extract money from me in some way. there's, honest to god about ten different shops in this game, four or five different battle pass-style progression tracks with paid elements. every thing in this game is designed to be limited and when you run out a full screen pop up will appear saying that you can get 1200x value when buying more of that thing for often £50+. in fact, i think apart from the lower tier of currency purchases in the shop, almost everything this game tries to sell you is AT LEAST £15 and some things have price tags above £100! the brazenness and scale of the attempted extraction is absurd
now, the ability to resist all this shit has no moral component, but the fact is that my distaste for all this means that i simply will never feel pressured to spend money in these awful systems. BUT ahahaha BUT!!!! the game is very fun, probably moreso because i'm refusing to engage in the power-leveling that these purchases would provide. i get to pretend im an underdog, and im beating the system by not opening my wallet.
but all this is just scene setting for something else this game does, which i think is particularly nasty.
starting this game, you are showered with free shit, and you feel strong almost immediately. and progression is rarely locked behind... anything. ads are all optional, often to get 1 free respawn in the dungeons. playtime is restricted by a generous(?) energy system that i've honestly never ran out of. the purchases are simply not that appealling when you're making steady progress without spending anything
but i reckon the nerds at Habby Games knew this. i think their millions of data points of player behaviour may have tipped them off about this
because around 30 levels into this thing (a couple of weeks of play, for me), once your habits are nice and formed, the game pulls a trick on you and says "You can't progress until you clear level 350 of the Sky Tower" okay fine lemme do the Sky Tower, an alternate campaign of smaller challenges that cost tickets to enter. you get three free ticekts a day, and can watch ads for more tries, but you get an entry ticket for completing the level, so it's one-for-one if you keep clearing levels.
but level 350 is fucked up. it's a gauntlet of 5 bosses back-to-back that will pretty much one-shot you unless you make no mistakes. you get 3 chances a day. you can watch ads for 3 more chances, and then you have to spend gems to try again. it's a total wall, and it's the first time i really felt the hard edges of this thing. "You need to be stronger" the game was saying "and the only way to do that is by spending moneyyyyyyy." but by this point, i was thoroughly enjoying the game for what it was! the combat is satisfying, i had learned the enemies' patterns, i had a gameplan and knew how to tailor my build for specific scenarios. this new challenge was ugly, for sure, but my stubbornness would win out. after maybe a WEEK of play, and a few (freely earned) gems were spent, i got lucky and made it through this power-check. i'm sure there's another one just down the line, waiting for my money.
wading into the game's official discord, i saw player asking for a nerf to this specific level because it's such a roadblock. there were people saying "i've spent a lot of money in this game and i shouldnt be roadblocked like this" and other players basically responding "too bad! you simply need to get good at the game" it's bad out there! where is your anger that spending so much is possible at all!!!
games like this ARE evil. i believe that. they are built to prey on people and the price tag on some of the stuff in this game is absolutely galling. but what's particularly gross is how late the screws start to turn. how the game will capture the people eager to spend money early, and has mechanisms throughout play to capture more and more people. if you're not the kind to shell out right away, we will let your habits form, let you spend hours in this game and then ask you to spend a lil to get past this challenge, maybe spend a lot. you like this game right? it's worth it, if you've already got this much time invested!
this game is fun, but you should not play it! not if you have any inclination to spend money on something this predatory. perhaps even my no-money playing is reprehensible. maybe engaging with something like this at all is tacitly supportive of these practices. certianly saying that i think this game is good has some negative karma associated but i suppose i'm just shocked that this game is engaging in spite of all this bullshit. its a game where precise, smart play is possible and actually plays like a roguelike as good as Isaac or Gungeon. sorry, sorry.
and, im certain this is a tried and true winning formula. i had similar feelings of "i'll never need to buy anything" when i dabbled with Genshin Impact (a game that, thankfully, wiped my save after playing for a weekend). i'm sure this slow boiling is extremely common in this genre(?) where the most important thing is time invested. but seeing it, feeling it first hand was different, and it's hideous!
i suppose my thesis is something like "damn mtx games are extrememly fucked up! and they're even more fucked up when they're actually good!"
go read a book, or yell at me in the comments.