I hate to say it, but I think battle passes are here to stay. I wish it wasn’t the case, and that we could bully them out of existence the way we did loot boxes and time saver microtransactions, but until someone invents a more palatable and profitable way to get players to re-up their investment into triple-A games with outrageously bloated budgets, we’re just going to have to live with season passes being the norm.

This is a conclusion I came to after looking into the Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora leaks last week. According to the leak, Ubisoft’s upcoming open-world Avatar game will feature both a season pass and currency packs. We likely won’t find out whether or not the leak is true until the company’s not-E3 presentation in June, but it isn’t hard to believe that Ubisoft is putting live-service microtransactions into its single player (with drop-in multiplayer, if the leak is accurate) open-world game. It's a pretty standard thing for Ubisoft to do.

The more I think about it, the more it feels like a signal. Ubisoft has become one of the industry’s biggest punching bags as of late, and given the financial situation it faces and the fact that it’s almost completely cleaned its slate of upcoming games, there’s a lot riding on the success of this game. Likewise, Avatar is an IP that people love to hate, and there’s no guarantee that Frontiers of Pandora will be a huge success the way the film series has been. Ubisoft knows as well as anyone else how much bad press battle passes and live-service systems get these days. Put it all together, and you’ve got a recipe for mockery. This could be the game that finally unites humans and gamers. The concept of an Ubisoft Avatar game with a battle pass ignites a sense of disdain shared by all.

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Which just tells me that battle passes are here to stay. Either they're so wildly successful and generating additional revenue that Ubisoft is willing to continue being the butt of the joke, or it's just become an obligatory type of microtransaction because no one has any better ideas. In either case, it seems like this is just the way things have to be, and no amount of negative feedback is going to change it.

In the past, we've been able to convince companies to do away with a lot of predatory and low-value monetization. EA famously yanked loot boxes out of Battlefront 2 soon after launch, and even Ubisoft has backed down on some nasty XP boosters you could buy in Assassin's Creed Origins. Some think that the negative reaction to Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League provoked WB to delay the game so the battle pass and other live-service systems could be removed, but as I've argued previously, it's far too late to cut anything major from the game. Likewise, there's no way Ubisoft could react to the Suicide Squad story for Avatar, but this is not a new story. Battle Passes have been maligned for years, and yet we're seeing more of them than ever.

I don’t think they’re a necessary evil, but at the same time, it's easy to understand why battle passes have become so common. The arms race to make the biggest, most technologically impressive games, mixed with the overall lack of structure and stability within the games industry, has caused budgets to balloon and development schedules to extend out of control over the last few years. Games that take half a decade to make and cost hundreds of millions are really scary investments, even for huge companies, so it makes sense that they would want to find ways to increase revenue beyond the $60 price tag and better ensure success. The clearest evidence we have that we’ve reached a point of no return with microtransactions is the fact that Sony, the world’s most prolific maker of prestige single-player games, is making a huge investment in live service over the next few years. It’s pretty telling when the next game in The Last of Us series is a free-to-play live-service game and not another microtransaction-less single-player experience. If you don’t think Faction 2 will have a battle pass, you’re out of your mind.

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I don't mean to be fatalistic about it. There are plenty of new and upcoming games that abstain from battle passes even when their inclusion might be considered acceptable. Redfall, Arkane's new multiplayer, class-based, always online open-world shooter seems like the exact kind of game that would have a battle pass in 2023, but it doesn't. Gotham Knights didn't have one either, so there's at least one nice thing you can say about it. Some of the biggest games of the year are Resident Evil 4, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Final Fantasy 16, Starfield, and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, and none of those games will have a battle pass.

Of course, the other big games in 2023 are Call of Duty, Diablo 4, Street Fighter 6, Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Counter-Strike 2, Avatar, EA Sports FC 24 (formerly FIFA 24), and Suicide Squad (maybe), and all of the games will almost certainly have battle passes, or at least some form of pesky monetization. Throw those in with Fortnite, Apex Legends, Destiny 2, and every other major live service game, and it’s clear that battle passes are only becoming more common as time goes on. I wish it wasn’t so, but I don’t think we’re going to be able to free ourselves from the grip of timed progression rewards you have to pay upfront for. If brink-of-death Ubisoft isn’t afraid to put them in an Avatar game, we’re pretty much doomed.

Next: Suicide Squad Devs Clarify Battle Pass System Following Leaks