Rusty's Real Deal Baseball is probably one of my favorite eshop titles ever. The minigames are fun and the sound design is absolutely phenomenal, with every crack of the bat registering. It's one of those rare sports titles that I like to call "For Love of The Game" games, that sell themselves not on realism and accurate simulations, but on the nostalgic, childhood love of the sport. But this thread isn't about that.
Rusty was most famous for how it handled microtransactions. The game was, as Nintendo calls them, "free-to-start": you could download it for free and play a limited number of minigames. It was more of a platform, really, that sold you minigames $4 a pop... with a catch.
Normally, the "catch" is bad, but in this case it was...different. Playing through the game's story allowed you actually haggle each minigames' prices down to $1.50~$2 with Rusty, the store owner. You helped him get his groove back all in the name of a good deal.
Now this is a pretty big inversion when it comes to microtransactions. Normally, it goes "pay some money to continue playing this game that you have invested your time in" to "invest your time in this game's story so you don't have to waste that much money."
At the time, Nintendo had some pretty interesting takes on MTX. Pokemon Picross, for example, had a spending cap that meant that after you bought an X amount of premium currency, it could be mined infinitely for free. Now, six years after Rusty, it seems that, unfortunately, the traditional model has taken over.
That said, would you guys like to see other weird takes on monetization like this one? If Rusty gets a sequel on the Switch, should they keep this aspect of the game? Will Nintendo come back to this?
Rusty was most famous for how it handled microtransactions. The game was, as Nintendo calls them, "free-to-start": you could download it for free and play a limited number of minigames. It was more of a platform, really, that sold you minigames $4 a pop... with a catch.
Normally, the "catch" is bad, but in this case it was...different. Playing through the game's story allowed you actually haggle each minigames' prices down to $1.50~$2 with Rusty, the store owner. You helped him get his groove back all in the name of a good deal.
Now this is a pretty big inversion when it comes to microtransactions. Normally, it goes "pay some money to continue playing this game that you have invested your time in" to "invest your time in this game's story so you don't have to waste that much money."
At the time, Nintendo had some pretty interesting takes on MTX. Pokemon Picross, for example, had a spending cap that meant that after you bought an X amount of premium currency, it could be mined infinitely for free. Now, six years after Rusty, it seems that, unfortunately, the traditional model has taken over.
That said, would you guys like to see other weird takes on monetization like this one? If Rusty gets a sequel on the Switch, should they keep this aspect of the game? Will Nintendo come back to this?
