Loot Boxes Cause OpenCritic to Include Business Models

OpenCritic has decided to take a stand at making the intentions of game companies more transparent. They announced via Twitter that they will soon incorporate ways to view business model information for games.

For those unfamiliar, OpenCritic is a game review aggregation site similar to that of Metacritic. Whereas Metacritic will give certain reviewers more leverage to the final score than others, OpenCritic aims for complete transparency in its algorithms and methodology behind the scores. The OpenCritic team values honesty in an otherwise unreliable industry.

Due to the recent onslaught of loot boxes in video games over the last few years, players are further beginning to question and distrust developers and publishers for their intentions in their games. To combat this, OpenCritic will be implementing a way to see what the business model for a game is when looking at the OpenCritic page on it.

Knowing how the company intends to profit off a game can be a major influence in how the game is built, advertised, and maintained. Will the gameplay be catered towards unlocking items through a random loot box? Are they going to push people to buy these as microtransactions? Or do they intend to release paid DLC in the future to promote additional sales? Soon, it will be easy to quickly see what kind of things to expect from a game.

I think this is a great step towards recognizing unhealthy game purchasing decisions and am glad someone is making an effort to bring it to greater light.