Gears of War 4 eSports Supporter Pack 1 Pricing is a Rip Off

Microtransactions are a common occurrence in AAA titles and become fairly accepted provided they don’t provide the buyer with an advantage or additional content compared to other players. Honestly, the microtransactions in full-priced releases should be resigned to cosmetic items which cannot impact on a particular game’s balance. Recently, Gears of War 4 launched on both Xbox One and PC and received fantastic reviews. Also, the PC version is optimised to a glorious standard and scales beautifully on a wide range of hardware configurations. Unfortunately, it’s not all positive and the eSports Supporter Pack 1 has rightfully caused many fans to feel extremely disappointed. The details can get a little confusing if you’re not into the game but thankfully, the Reddit user B8ZZ has compiled a fantastic explanation:

“So the eSports Supporter 1 pack costs €9.99 / $9.99 / £8.49.

Here’s the description of the pack.

In it you can get either an Escalation Bounty for 50CR OR an eSports emblem, then 2 guaranteed Black Steel skins. Then 2 cards from the normal Card pool, including Commons.

Only JD, Del, Reyna, Oscar and Kait are characters that can get the Black Steel skin, and the 14 weapons, that’s 19 items to complete the set. Did I forget that you can get duplicates? You can only scrap them for 600 scrap. With no duplicates, it costs at least $100 to get all the skins. You can even get the same weapon twice in your first pack!

To even make this more disgusting in OpTic Xplosiive’s stream he spent $500 to get all the skins, since the Lancer wouldn’t drop. But that’s not it, JackFelling was in chat encouraging all of this because spending $500 to get all the skins is logical in her and TC’s world.

The pack should be 5 guaranteed Black Steel skins, not 2 a Bounty or emblem and 2 normal pool cards.

I’m all for supporting the Gears scene, I did it for UE by buying the 2 Prism bundles and the Sweaty skin, but this is atrocious. I’d rather just donate directly to one of the pro player’s streams than supporting this. This is pack 1 aswell so there’s gonna be more of this coming.

Another spit in the face from The Coalition.”

The comments section also gives us an insight into the community’s reaction. Firstly, the Reddit user Kendrixk argued:

“K I been defending them and I understand you don’t have to buy them but $10 per pack is ridiculous. I wanted to open some but not now…”

After this, Strollo replied with the following:

“Im in the same boat as you. Ive taken so much crap for defending them and then they do this, and I just have nothing left I can say.”

KrejciTrain also added:

“I’ve been defending the microtransactions in the this game and catching a lot of shit for it. I honestly don’t think they detract from the game, I really don’t…. but this pack is just fucking gross. I love this game, I’m fine with the way it’s set up, but the degree of blatant cash-grabbing is getting piggishly in-your-face. I mean, I just won’t buy shit like this, so I’m fine with it, but this thing where they come out with a new outrageous pack every 12 hours is a real turn-off. This whole thing should have just been a $50 dlc pack.”

stickoftruth1 couldn’t believe how the game was treating fans given the $60 price tag:

“Wow.

Thank you for this, I was on the fence between putting some money into these esports packs or Overwatch for their Halloween event.

Easy choice. I’ll support the game that doesn’t treat me like I’m playing a fucking f2p mobile game.”

The idea that it costs at least $100 to acquire all the skins without duplicates is awful and discourages those who want to support the game post release from spending their money. Of course, you could argue, simply don’t buy the packs but I really think the pricing and deployment is quite distasteful.

Do you think the microtransactions in Gears of War 4 are fair?