Analysis: For Honor unlocks cost $730 (or 5,200 hours)

At this point in the evolving history of video-game economics, we're used to free-to-play games that make you pay exorbitant sums or grind for a ridiculous number of hours to unlock a bunch of digital trinkets. But Ubisoft's For Honor is the latest game to add a ridiculous number of paid and/or grindy unlockables on top of a pay-up-front games. It asks for over $730 or over 5,200 hours of gameplay to unlock everything.

The particular math here comes from Reddit user bystander007, who calculates that unlocking all the emotes, executions, effects, outfits, and ornaments for a single character in For Honor costs 91,500 in-game “Steel.” That includes the most recent batch of emotes which cost a hefty 7,000 Steel each just for the benefit of taunting your opponent in a specific manner. To unlock everything for all 12 in-game heroes costs nearly 1.1 million Steel. That's roughly $732 (£610) in real money at the current best exchange rate of $100 (£83) for 150,000 Steel.

While you can also earn Steel for free during regular gameplay, earning enough to unlock everything in For Honor would take a good long while. Bystander007 estimates a dedicated player could earn about 23,500 Steel in a full week of insane, 16-hour daily grinds through Duel matches and regular Contract rewards. Even at that rate, it would take about 11 months (326 days) to earn that 1.1 million Steel to unlock everything. For players that can only play a couple of hours a day, the amount of grinding time needed is astronomical.

Pay to play, then pay some more

Of course, there's nothing forcing players to pay so much time or money to unlock all of these cosmetic items. For Honor is still perfectly playable and enjoyable right out of the box, without unlocking. Even players who want to invest in cosmetic upgrades may be perfectly satisfied focusing on a single preferred hero, who can be fully decked out with a much more reasonable time/money investment.

That said, seeing the sheer scale of extra content already available in For Honor laid out like this is striking. And For Honor isn't alone, even among games that charge full price at retail. Getting every cosmetic item in Overwatch requires opening approximately 750 Loot Boxes, which costs about $600, or thousands of in-game matches. Getting the best possible set of "Ultimate Team" cards in FIFA 17 costs about $630, according to one analysis, which helps explain why the popular mode brings in over $650 million a year for EA. Even back in 2008, Namco added $120 of optional planes to Ace Combat 6 on the Xbox 360.

Other big-budget traditional games, such as Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Dead Space 3, have started letting players pay for the convenience of skipping the usual in-game grind for levels and equipment. Evolve similarly made unlocking certain characters instantly a bonus for players that pre-ordered the game. These kinds of offers, which essentially let players pay to play the game less always make me suspicious about what's really going on under the hood.

All of these microtransactions and time-based, ultra-grindy unlocks used to be primarily the province of free-to-play games—a kind of hidden cost built in to the business model keeping these titles afloat. At worst, this kind of content forced poor game-design decisions on players in order to maximize publisher profits. At best, though, unlocking things as cheaply/efficiently as possible in a free-to-play title could become a game in and of itself, adding an extra layer of self-imposed challenge.

Now, though, more and more publishers seem to be realizing that the same kind of grind-based, microtransaction-heavy unlock design can also be layered on top of games that already charge players a standard price up front. On the one hand, you can't blame publishers for taking advantage of the opportunity to take in so much continued revenue after launch (especially if and when it's just cosmetic content that isn't necessary to enjoy the base game). On the other hand, the sheer amount of created content that most players will never be able to access in games they paid for can be staggering.

I know I can be something of an absolutist when it comes to letting players unlock things in their games as easily as possible. Even if you don't take that position, though, requiring thousands of hours or hundreds of dollars to unlock all the content in a game you already paid for approaches the realm of the absurd. As long as this trend keeps making money, though, we can expect it to continue.