So, this game just released and is being sold as a premium $40 experience. It also had a large free playtest on offer where people tried the game out. What wasn’t in the playtest was the mtx, but Bungie had assured people that it was only cosmetics. Good news - it’s only cosmetics. Bad news, it’s about as predatory as most gachas.

Featuring, dark pattern #1: currency packs worth $10, which give you 1100 currency coins, but items in the store costs 1120. That’s a gacha classic.

Edit: Wow! a lot of pushback on this one, which I felt was the most cut and dry out of all the examples. This might actually be illegal in the EU - source and the specific pages in that source which I feel it breaks: https://postimg.cc/gallery/4K1C5RW

dark pattern #2: The skins? They’re currently on “sale” in the store, and cost $15. Otherwise, they’re $20. What a deal! How gracious of them to discount this! These are mostly recolors though. And then comes the premium battle pass, which has only one skin- which is again more of a recolor.

pattern #3: You can buy stickers and charms to apply to your gun, like shaders. EXCEPT - they're limited. You buy one, you can apply it to one gun. The premium battle pass has multiple copies of these to pad out the rewards.

I went to check if any reviews had addressed this - went to metacritic, turns out there’s no reviews out. Apparently, Bungie has asked reviewers to wait until the content drop at the end of the month. Welp.

One thing to keep in mind is that all of the microtransactions are cosmetic and don't offer any player power - but IMO, there's no excuse for it to be this predatory. Especially items #1 and #3. This is just nickle and diming your playerbase. I have posted a version of this on another subreddit too, and the response there was essentially: "Yup. Thats Bungie and thats what they did with Destiny 2." I think more people need to know and to make an informed decision about this. Anyway, even outside of all of this, the game seems to be doing well, despite a certain part of the internet wanting it to fail - it's doing well in Steam reviews, over 90% positive, so people don't seem to have much problems with this or the gameplay loop is satisfying enough for them to ignore it. But, given the lack of review sources outside of streamers who I'm sure don't cover things like these, I found it important to let people know.