Some gamers have complained about the microtransactions in For Honor after it was revealed that it would cost about $732 to buy all the items in the cash shop. Others did some calculations and roughly estimated that playing the game casually would require about two and a half years worth of play-time to earn enough in-game currency to buy everything in the shop. Ubisoft’s response? They didn’t intend for you to unlock everything in the game anyway.

According to Techspot, game director Damien Kieken talked about the microtransactions in a live-stream, saying…

“We never had an intention for you to unlock everything in the game,” “First, that doesn’t truly make any sense. We applied RPG mechanics on top of a fighting game, in a PVP environment, but it’s like in an RPG, like in World of Warcraft: you would never try to unlock everything for all the characters of the whole game. Same for any MOBA, you’re not trying to unlock all the content for all the characters in the game.”

Kieken explains that they only expected people to play one or up to three different classes across the three warrior categories, and that they didn’t expect or intend for gamers to unlock everything.

Back in the day, people used to play games to unlock everything, but that was before games were sold as a service to pad the pockets of shareholders.

Microtransactions only exist to fill out the revenue for the quarterly margins of a big corporation, otherwise they would sell the $60 game, have a bunch of unlocks, and allow people to unlock everything within a reasonable time frame… just like every single game made during and before the sixth generation of gaming.

Obviously, some people were angry that Ubisoft would suggest that they designed a game where you can’t unlock everything within a reasonable time because that basically certifies that they intended people to buy anything they didn’t have time to grind out with real money. Others were fine with this revelation, defending that Ubisoft has to sell microtransaction so they can keep making money on For Honor post-release.

Of course, the real issue isn’t so much that there are microtransactions or that there’s a lot to unlock, but mostly that there’s an artificial grind designed so that people who don’t want to spend real money have to play a lot longer and a lot harder in order to get what they want.