War Rock: An entire game sold via microtransactions?

By Jared Rea
Nov. 8, 2006

The old phrase, “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” has taken on a new meaning for gamers across the pacific. The seemingly endless array of free to play Korean PC games tends to allow players to pay only for the content they want, and in most cases, the content they need to survive. In those cases, microtransactions take the place of, well, transactions, and the nickel-and-diming of customers has proven to be quite profitable. Enter K2’s War Rock, a “free to play” tactical online shooter heading to the U.S. (currently in open beta), with a heavy emphasis on charging just for what players want out of it.

As a multiplayer shooter in the same vein as EA’s Battlefield series, War Rock aims to give players a tactical experience in just about all shapes and sizes. Your average game comes in three different styles: Mission, Infantry Combat and Vehicle Combat. In a Mission game, the maps you’ll battle through are on a small scale and players only have one life per round. Infantry takes away the limit of life and instead throws in more players, a few vehicles and much more open territory. The final gameplay style, Vehicle, is an all out war featuring mass amounts of players, jet fighters and just about any type of vehicle you can think of.

Whichever style suits your fancy, players of War Rock will find themselves in control of the same soldier throughout every battle. Taking a queue from modern day online role-playing games (or perhaps even Rainbow Six: Lockdown), War Rock features a persistent character system that allows players to earn cash towards better equipment, as well as gain higher ranks in order to wield said equipment. The key word, cash, has now been uttered. This is where it starts to get hazy.

While War Rock is indeed free to play, there will be a tiered membership structure -- Bronze, Silver and Gold to be more specific -- if you want to buy in to get rewards. Upgrading to a paid account will add features such as built-in voice chat, custom tournaments and other such useful items.

Where it gets interesting is you pay real money for in-game cash, and the higher your membership the more in-game dollars you will get for a real life dollar. We don’t know the actual ratio at this point, but you can also earn in-game dollars by playing the game. So if you want, you can play nonstop all day and likely earn enough in-game money to get you the weapons you want, or you can take the shortcut and pay real money.

Things get a bit more complicated in that you are not actually “buying” these guns -- you are “leasing” them for a month at a time, which presumably is intended to continually get money from players over time as they re-buy each weapon they want each month. Yeah, we have our doubts about that part of the system as well.

Another interesting part of the release plan is that there will be multiple SKUs in stores, and each one will contain a special exclusive gun that you can’t get elsewhere until down the line. And there’s also the idea that every month, the developers plan to add new vehicles, maps (even player created ones), and guns for players to try out, so there are going to be something like 30 vehicles at launch and that number is going to keep rising. It’s all very different, and some of it sounds good while we have our doubts about other parts.

The success of K2’s payment structure rests solely in the hands of gamers and with War Rock currently in open beta, potentials are free to download the client and hop right into a game. With a strong sense of community and easy to grasp mechanics, there is definitely a place in the multiplayer landscape for a game like War Rock, but it remains to be seen as to just how many players will bite the bullet.