Metal Gear Survive hits the ground running with microtransactions, including a particularly pricey fee just to play a second character. When players first load up the game, they'll find that they have only one character slot available to them. To have the ability to create additional characters, they will have to pay 1000 SV Coins, a currency that can only be obtained with real world money. To get those 1000 SV Coins, you'd be spending about $10.
SV Coin purchases are all over Metal Gear Survive. 200 SV Coins can be used to buy a Premium Boost Pass, gaining a 24-hour boost to the energy you get from defeated enemies. Energy is used to upgrade your character, effectively making it a way to pay to grow faster. They can also be used to upgrade weapons storage or buy more multiplayer load outs. For a game that already costs $39.99, the amount of microtransactions available is alarming to many players.
As of now, there is no way to earn SV Coins through actual gameplay. Over the past weekend, Metal Gear developer Konami was giving free SV Coins to players who log in on a daily basis. But even then, the maximum amount that a player could get through that promotion was 120 SV Coins. That's not even enough for the 24-hour Premium Boost Pass. It's always possible that more SV Coin giveaways will occur, but at the current rate it would take a long time for players who don't want to spend more than $39.99 to get just one additional character slot.
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This isn't the first time Konami has put microtransactions in Metal Gear games. Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain offered players the chance to buy MB Coins to upgrade their base. Metal Gear Online was also infamous in the fandom for charging money for extra character slots. Still, it's never been on the scale or frequency that Metal Gear Survive is pushing on players.
This move seems particularly ill-planned after the gaming world was in an uproar over EA's attempt to put mircotransatctions in Star Wars Battlefront II. The game initially featured the ability to buy crates that allowed players to unlock powerful characters and weapons upgrades from the start, giving players who put down cash a huge advantage over those who didn't. However, when fans created a massive amount of backlash that severely affected Battlefront II's sales, EA removed the microtransactions from the game. Yet here we are with another company trying to force microtransactions into a full-price game. Perhaps this will be gaming's trend in 2018.