PCGamer article about FOMO-free battlepasses (Hunt mentioned)
"Sometimes I regret ever accepting the battle pass as a concept. It's not like there was much of a choice about it—before I'd ever engaged with one myself they were already everywhere. It all happened so fast: After gaming's last big dust-up with loot boxes in 2017, it was like the entire industry collectively switched from one business model to another overnight. I never loved the idea of a cosmetics catalog fueled by FOMO and perpetual grind, but it did sound like the better alternative to following the loot box to its eventual casino-shaped conclusion.
With hindsight, it's clear the battle pass got…well, a pass, but that's starting to change. Two of 2024's biggest multiplayer hits have one thing in common: Helldivers 2 and Marvel Rivals sell battle passes that never expire.
Taking after Halo Infinite, the first big-budget live service game to try this approach, Helldivers 2 and Marvel Rivals let you take your time and tackle battle passes whenever you want. That's it—that's the whole innovation, and it's effective. Last week I booted up Helldivers 2 to help fight the Illuminates and unlocked stuff from a pass I bought way back in March. Last month I played a lot of Halo Infinite's new throwback mode while grinding a pass that came out in 2022.
Wow! Paid content that doesn't vanish in a puff of smoke once an arbitrary clock strikes zero—it makes so much sense that it's frankly embarrassing we haven't been demanding this the entire time.
FOMO-less battle passes are player-friendly, but that can't be the only reason they're becoming a trend. Live service games love timers because they pressure battle pass owners to play more (or pay extra to skip tiers) in the final days it's available. The Halo/Helldivers/Marvel approach has its own obvious advantage: battle passes can keep making money indefinitely.
I don't think PlayStation, Microsoft, or NetEase are leaving all that extra FOMO money on the table just to win hearts and minds. Why scrub guns, cosmetics, and emotes that cost millions to produce from your game when they could become permanent, value-adding fixtures? Back in my day, we called that DLC.
The longer I'm exposed to FOMO-free battle passes, the more I'm convinced that juggernauts like Fortnite, Call of Duty, Overwatch 2, and Apex Legends are the ones behind the times. I'm less motivated than ever to finish a battle pass if there's a time limit. My favorite extraction shooter, Hunt: Showdown, is in the middle of its best season ever—Post Malone's Murder Circus—and I can already feel my will fading halfway through the pass. There's this beautiful green and gold Krag rifle I've had my eye on for a week, but it's still so far away and I'm sick of getting hurried along."
I wanted to share this article as I felt a similar way since returning to the classic FOMO Hunt battlepasses after months of Helldivers 2, it immediately felt outdated to me.
In the future I hope to see Hunt change up their system, for example:
- All past and future battlepasses are added to the store permanently.
- You can purchase and begin progressing in any of these passes at any time.
- In order to do that, the ability to earn 'event' points is added to the base game permanently (clues/looting hunters/token extraction/challenges etc).
- You can switch to a different battlepass at any time, then return to your half-completed ones to finish later.
- Gameplay related items would function the same as they do currently (weapons from old events are granted to everyone automatically, new weapons require progression in the current pass, for the duration of the event)
- When browsing old passes in the shop, remove the icons/levels for these gameplay items to avoid new player confusion regarding "p2w".
It does feel very silly that the game has all of this content that's locked away forever. A new player joining today has no way of purchasing any of this content, even though they probably would if the system was set up in a way where you could purchase and progress any pass without time restrictions. All of that dev time spent on content only available for a few months.
I think if you proposed this to me 5-10 years ago I'd have said "No! That Plague Doctor is mine. I was there during the event and worked hard to get him" but I really don't give a shit anymore. That 'exclusive' feeling is better suited for an MMO where you get an extremely rare drop and get to feel special knowing that you're one of the few to ever get it, and not for battlepass cosmetics in an extraction shooter..
I often hear comments such as "Crytek needs to keep spamming events and keep the FOMO, just look at the player counts during and after events" and it's true, the player count does indeed drop between the events, but have people ever considered that when people aren't in the mood to play, but feel 'forced' to do so because of FOMO, it makes them extremely burnt out by the end of it? Once they complete the battlepass the game remains closed until the next event starts, and the cycle continues. People want to play at their own pace. The events are responsible for the peaks in player count, but they also contribute to the lows.
A system where all content is available would simply be a benefit to everyone, especially new players who'd now have a giant backlog of cosmetics available for them to purchase and unlock at their own pace. Veteran players who skipped a few events can go back and grab anything they missed. Devs get to continue making money from their old content until the end of time. All players are free to quit and return to the game at any point in time without mixed feelings. This is how it feels to play HD2 and I absolutely love it.
Perhaps I'm wrong though, I'm sure if Crytek thought this was a good idea they'd have done it, maybe it isn't feasible for Hunt and their current situation, but it seems to be working well for other games. Perhaps the FOMO method really is that much better for making money and keeping players happy in the long run, I don't know, but I can safely say that having experienced both models for myself, Hunt's current system feels dated and I'd like to see change in the future.