Video games are a huge part of many people’s lives these days. According to Polygon, who surveyed 4,000 households nationwide, “63 percent of U.S. households surveyed include at least one frequent gamer.” This is a huge amount of people that play video games and just proves how much video games are a staple of life. We all love the accomplishments we make in video games and that’s one of the main reasons we play them, but what if it was almost impossible to beat or get something in those games? There’s one way you can make it easier to beat or get something, and it comes at a cost. You have to pay with real-life money.

A lot of games these days are something people call “pay to win.” This means that the game company sells bonuses and premium content that gives players an advantage in the game through online transactions. This can make a game very unbalanced because some people can buy extra stuff and others can’t. If some people have something specifically designed to outperform other normal items in a game and others don’t, it makes the game unbalanced because somebody can have the best items in the game and another person might have something regular. If this is the case, then the person with the best commodities can just beat everyone in the game, over and over again.

This can be highly frustrating for most gamers because it gets very repetitive to keep dying over and over again, or to not be able to get something. For example: in “Star Wars Battlefront II” there are special characters, such as Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader, that are extremely powerful. If you want to be these characters you have to use special points that you earn by doing different multiplayer sessions in the game. According to CNET, these characters cost 60,000 points to play as them in the game which would take about 40 hours of gameplay to use them. If you wanted to be able to play as these characters even quicker, than you could pay real-life money to earn those points.

You shouldn’t have to pay money to get something easier in a game, though. The point of a game is to have fun and achieve means on your own. Also, some people can barely afford the game as it is. However, on the other hand, “Star Wars Battlefront II” shouldn’t make it so hard to get to play as iconic characters such as Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, or any other special character in the game. Some improvements have been made this week, however, According to EA, they are changing the price of special characters by 75 percent, which will make Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader cost 15,000 credits instead of 60,000 credits. This is great to hear, especially after all the outrage about the game’s “pay to win” feature. “Pay to win” games in general are ridiculous and shouldn’t be made anymore. It’s really selfish and rude for game companies to be doing this; they could also potentially be losing sales because people get really outraged about these things. Hopefully, since this game got so much outrage about their “pay to win” feature, future games won’t include it.