Let us begin with a number.

£70. That is the base price of a new AAA game in 2026. Not the complete price. Not the price that gets you everything. The price that gets you in the door, at which point the real transaction begins.

There is the season pass. There is the premium cosmetic currency, sold only in quantities that don’t align with the prices of anything in the store, so you always have some left over and always feel, faintly and correctly, that you’ve left money on the table. There is the battle pass. There is the limited-time collector’s edition, which contains the base game, three skins, a digital artbook destined to survive in a downloads folder until the account is eventually forgotten, and forty-eight hours of early access to content that should simply have been in the game.

The £70 is the entry fee. The complete experience costs more, delivered in portions, on a schedule designed by people who read psychology papers professionally. You are not buying a game. You are beginning a subscription to the idea of a game, with the actual game arriving in instalments over the following two years, each one accompanied by a limited-time event and an event-exclusive skin that expires before you’ve had time to decide if you want it.

How did we get here?

The Reasonable Proposition

In the early days of online gaming, the transaction was clean. You paid money. You received a complete product. The publisher made one attempt to earn your money, at the point of sale, which meant their commercial interests were aligned with yours: make the best game possible, sell it to as many people as possible, done.

The subscription model was the first disruption, and it was entirely reasonable. World of Warcraft charging a monthly fee for an online world requiring constant server infrastructure, community management, and regular content updates made obvious sense. The fee funded something real. Players understood this and broadly accepted it, because it was a fair exchange.

Image credit: Riot Games

Then came free-to-play, and for a while it was genuinely good. League of Legends, Team Fortress 2, and their contemporaries offered complete gameplay experiences at no cost, with cosmetic purchases for those who wanted them. The pitch was honest: play for free, pay only if you want to look different. The model worked because the cosmetics were optional in a real sense and the gameplay was unaffected. This period, approximately 2009 to 2015, represents the best version of what games monetisation could be.

And then someone showed someone else the loot box data, and everything went sideways.

The Psychology Experiment Begins

Loot boxes didn’t arrive as a cynical manipulation. They arrived as a natural extension of cosmetic sales: rather than buying a specific item, you bought a box containing a random item from a pool. This seems unremarkable until you understand what it exploits.

Variable reward schedules are more compelling than fixed reward schedules. This is a foundational finding of behavioural psychology, documented extensively in gambling research, and the reason slot machines exist. The dopamine release associated with potential reward, the moment before you open the box, is larger than the dopamine release associated with certain reward. You are not being manipulated by accident. The compulsion to open boxes is the product. The item inside is the excuse.

The lesson the industry took from this was not “stop doing loot boxes.” The lesson was “stop putting gameplay advantages in loot boxes, and stop being that obvious about the economics.”

When Star Wars Battlefront II launched in 2017 with loot boxes containing statistical gameplay advantages, the response from players was so severe that it became front-page mainstream news, which is not a thing that happens to games. EA’s stock fell measurably. Regulators in Belgium and the Netherlands investigated and subsequently banned loot box mechanics as gambling under consumer protection law. The public reckoning was genuine and produced real consequences.

The lesson the industry took from this was not “stop doing loot boxes.” The lesson was “stop putting gameplay advantages in loot boxes, and stop being that obvious about the economics.” Cosmetic-only loot boxes continued substantially undisturbed. The FIFA Ultimate Team pack, the Overwatch loot box, the Apex Legends Apex Pack — these remained in place because regulators had not, at that point, addressed cosmetic-only random reward systems. Some jurisdictions have since moved further. Others have not.

The Battle Pass: Monetisation That Looks Like a Feature

The battle pass arrived as a clean solution to the loot box problem and is, in most respects, fair. Fortnite popularised the model in 2018: pay £7-10 at the start of a season, complete challenges during that season, unlock cosmetic rewards progressively. Fixed cost, predictable rewards, no randomness. Reasonable.

The criticism is subtle, which is why it’s worth making explicitly. The battle pass is designed around FOMO — Fear Of Missing Out — as a primary engagement mechanism. Season rewards expire at season end. If you don’t play enough to complete the pass, rewards disappear. If you miss a season entirely, those cosmetics are gone permanently. The system creates a recurring obligation to engage that a traditionally sold game never did.

Image credit: Epic Games

“I feel like I have to log in every day or I’ll miss something” is a sentence no healthy entertainment relationship should produce. It is the language of compulsion rather than enjoyment. The battle pass model manufactures that sentence deliberately. The engagement is the point because engagement is what the seasonal content calendar sells to advertisers, partners, and investors.

The secondary issue is economic. Fortnite players who engage seriously with seasonal content are spending more annually on a technically free game than they would spend buying four traditionally priced games. The optionality is theoretical. The social architecture of live-service games, where cosmetic identity is how other players see you and peer engagement with the content is built into the experience, makes “just don’t buy it” a less meaningful prescription than it appears.

The Content Calendar and Its Discontents

The battle pass enabled the games-as-service model in which a single game title becomes an indefinitely extended platform with content released on seasonal calendars designed to maintain engagement and revenue indefinitely.

Image credit: Bungie Inc.

Destiny 2 is the canonical example. A game launched in 2017 that, by 2026, has accumulated so much seasonal content that the studio had to start deleting (“vaulting”) old material to prevent the game from becoming administratively ungovernable. If you took a year away from Destiny 2, you returned to find content you had paid for removed from the game, story context you had missed permanently unavailable, and a meta-game that had shifted entirely in your absence. The game did not merely move on. It actively punished absence.

This model produces a relationship with entertainment that feels less like leisure and more like maintenance. Players describe live-service obligations in terms that would be alarming if applied to anything other than a video game. They log in not because they want to play but because they cannot face the consequences of not playing. The entertainment product has produced anxiety in its users. This is, to put it diplomatically, not what entertainment is for.

The Counter-Arguments, Taken Seriously

The industry’s defence of modern monetisation is not entirely without merit.

Live-service games genuinely require ongoing funding. The servers that run Destiny 2, the development teams creating seasonal content, the community infrastructure — these are real costs requiring real revenue beyond a one-time purchase made years earlier. The economics of modern game development at AAA scale are genuinely challenging, and a one-time £50 purchase in 2016 cannot fund eight years of ongoing development.

Though it is worth noting that the same period has seen GPU prices reach levels that would have seemed satirical in 2020, suggesting that the cost of being a PC gamer has increased significantly at every level of the stack, not just software.

The fact that live-service games are expensive to maintain does not obligate players to accept monetisation systems

Additionally, adults can make their own financial decisions, cosmetic purchases are optional in a technical sense, and nobody is required to buy anything. Also true.

The counter to both: the economics argument conflates a business problem with a consumer problem. The fact that live-service games are expensive to maintain does not obligate players to accept monetisation systems designed around variable reward schedules and manufactured scarcity. There are other funding models. Some studios use them successfully.

The “nobody is forced to buy” argument ignores that the social architecture of multiplayer games creates real, if informal, pressure that transforms theoretical optionality into practical obligation. Children playing Fortnite among peers who have current-season cosmetics are not in a free, pressure-neutral environment. The choice is optional in the same way that keeping up with fashion trends is optional: technically true, socially complicated.

The Signs of Recovery

There are reasons to be cautiously optimistic, and they deserve acknowledgement.

The commercial success of Elden Ring, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Hades — all complete products at fixed prices with no live-service component — has demonstrated that the market for finished games without ongoing monetisation remains enormous. Larian Studios’ decision to release Baldur’s Gate 3 as a complete game rather than a seasonal service was publicly stated as a philosophical position, and the commercial result vindicated it entirely.

Regulatory pressure has increased. Belgium and the Netherlands moved first on loot boxes. Further jurisdictions have investigated. The UK Gambling Commission reviewed gambling-adjacent game mechanics. The legislative environment has already changed publisher behaviour in markets where regulatory risk is material.

Baldur’s Gate 3 proved gamers were willing to pay for premium, non live-service experiences (Image credit: Larian Studios)

Player awareness has increased considerably. The 2017 Battlefront II moment was a turning point because it happened at sufficient scale and visibility to produce genuine accountability. The gaming community, on balance, understands the psychology of these systems better than it did ten years ago, which makes the systems somewhat less effective and somewhat more embarrassing to defend.

The Verdict

Gaming monetisation isn’t reverting to the economics of 1995. The revenue differentials are too significant, the industry too structurally dependent on recurring income, and the live-service model too deeply embedded in how major studios plan their businesses.

But the evidence of the last three years suggests a more honest equilibrium may be forming — one in which complete product games and live-service games coexist in a market that understands the difference, where regulatory pressure constrains the worst excesses of variable reward design, and where studios who treat players as customers rather than revenue streams find substantial commercial success.

The test is simple. Does playing a game feel like entertainment or obligation? Does it produce enjoyment or anxiety? If it’s entertainment, whatever the monetisation model, it’s working for you. If it feels like maintenance, if you are logging in to avoid missing out rather than because you want to play, something has been done to you by the design that you did not consent to.

The reasonable proposition became a psychology experiment became the product. Whether it can find its way back to something that respects the person playing is the question the next decade of the industry will answer.

Either way, PCZ will be watching, complaining, and probably buying at least one battle pass out of morbid curiosity. We are only human.