Unfortunately, grinding has become a serious issue in the gaming industry. The developers try to cheat the players by replacing an actual gaming content with the repetitive and honestly boring grind. It damages not only the player experience but the industry as a whole, creating a dangerous precedent when greed encourages developers to make their games worse.
The term “grind” means a specific approach to a gaming process, according to which the success in the game is achieved through the repetitive and routine actions that do not require any resource from the players except time. Grind becomes the only way for the players to obtain certain in-game statuses, items, or money. Though grind can be sometimes avoided by buying valuables, it always damages the player experience and makes games lack creativity and uniqueness.
Massive multiplayer online RPG is one of the genres available at https://gamerall.com/ that suffered from grinding the most. This can be explained by the specifics of the massively multiplayer gaming process, where players around the world compete over the available resources, benefits, and content. In this scenario, grind becomes the way to compete.
Microtransactions that rely on grind
Another feature of the games that rely on grind too much is microtransactions. In this case, the idea is simple: encourage players to use microtransactions to buy some in-game features. These features can also be obtained for free, but for that, the players have to grind for a very long time. This is a strategy of greedy developers, and usually, such an approach turns the game into “pay to win”. “Pay to win” refers to the games, which make it almost impossible for players to succeed without putting money into the game.
Such a strategy can be justified for free-to-play games, but when the product that costs $60 requires the players to invest even more, it is not a good business strategy and damages gameplay.
One way or another, grind becomes a common thing in the gaming industry. The following products were heavily criticized for their devotion to grind for different reasons:
- Star Wars: Battlefront;
- Lineage;
- Fallout 76;
- Call of Duty;
- Battlefield.
The last to points of the list are franchises, as virtually any game that has Call of Duty or Battlefield in its title features lots of grinds (except the early games that were single-player only). Also, all five points feature the games with multiplayer experience, which is logical: grind is simply unnecessary and useless in single-player games.
To conclude, grind has become a considerable threat to the industry. While grinding can be a reasonable limitation of free-to-play or freemium business models, it almost always damages the only thing that actually matters in a game: player experience. In their turn, players either abandon such products or try to find ways to avoid grinding.
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