Last week’s Capcom Showcase was pretty uneventful. Aside from a bit of new Dragon’s Dogma 2 footage and the announcement of a new Ace Attorney collection, the show was pretty forgettable. If you only caught the recap, you may have even missed that a new Mega Man game was announced… sort of. Mega Man X Dive Offline is a re-release of a mobile game that’s shutting down service later this year. The new offline version has been stripped of its heavy focus on microtransactions and will presumably be sold as a one-time purchase, rather than a live-service free-to-play game like the original.
This seems to be part of a new trend in free-to-play. Last year’s Chocobo GP, a Final Fantasy kart-racing game that ended service barely a year after launch, has just been re-released as a full-priced game without any of the microtransactions it previously had. The original Chocobo GP was built around burying new character unlocks in lengthy paid battle passes that were such an unreasonable grind that you were heavily incentivized to pay even more money to skip it. That model led to the game's early demise, but now it’s back from the dead in a more reasonable and less expensive format.
There are some reasons to celebrate these kinds of re-releases. From a preservation point of view, it’s good to see these publishers making an effort to keep their games from vanishing. When a live-service game shuts down, it’s typically erased from existence completely. These offline mode versions are a way to ensure these games will continue to be available forever.
These are also fundamentally better versions of these games. Removing predatory microtransactions and manipulative marketing from games is a good thing. People that were interested in Chocobo GP before but didn’t want to deal with the microtransactions will now be able to play a version of the game that isn’t being dragged down by its poor monetization. It’s kind of hard to criticize a publisher for eliminating microtransactions. That’s something I would like to see more of.
At the same time, I can’t help but feel like this whole scheme is incredibly cynical. If we flock to these offline rereleases and praise these publishers for making them, what message does that send? If this kind of thing is successful, it mitigates the risk of releasing a microtransaction-filled, hyper-predatory mess of a game. If it succeeds and you end up with the next Genshin Impact, you’re going to print money. If it fails, you can just repackage it as a buy-to-play game, and your players will thank you for it. There’s really no downside to being as unethical as you want if you can just reverse course when it doesn’t work out and get clout for doing it.
I don’t know what the answer is, but the whole thing grosses me out. I’m glad that Mega Man X Dive Offline and the new version of Chocobo GP exist, but I wish the older versions never had. I also want publishers to suffer financially when they invest in a crappy live-service game that fails because people don’t like the way it's monetized. If they can just remove the microtransactions and pretend like nothing happened, it seems like they’d be foolish not to at least try to rip off their players first, just to see how it goes. These games failed for a reason, but if they get a second chance in offline mode, there’s no lesson to be learned.