Once upon a time, there were two types of free-to-play games. There were mobile free-to-play games – glorified casinos designed exclusively to prey on vulnerable people – and console free-to-play games, which had the decency to be ashamed of their microtransactions. These games only monetized things like cosmetics, battle passes, and XP boosters, and were never, ever pay-to-win. Spending money was totally optional, just something you could do if you wanted to show your support while wearing a fancy hat.
Enter Disney Speedstorm: a free-to-play kart racer that brings everything you hate about mobile games to your favorite console. Forget about cosmetics, Speedstorm lets you buy upgrades for your characters that improve the base stats of their cars. Everything from handling and boost to acceleration to top speed can be improved by earning, or buying, upgrade materials.
Let me explain just a few of the things you need to acquire to be successful in Disney Speedstorm. Every character can be improved by spending upgrade materials to raise their level. At low levels you only need one or two Racing Flags to level them up, but eventually they’ll require more and more different kinds of materials to level up. You can earn these materials by completing objectives throughout the single player campaign, but you do not earn them at the rate you would need them to keep up with the level requirements as you go. You can play one race to the next for a while, but eventually you hit a brick wall because all other cars are simply faster than you. At that point you can go back and grind any missions you didn’t finish all the challenges on, or you can do what the game is encouraging you to do and just buy the materials. Don’t bother trying to level up multiple characters either, you’ll just run out of materials for both of them and have no way to progress.
That’s just the beginning of Speedstorm’s high-pressure microtransactions. Every character has a star rating out of five that determines their power scaling and skills. Speedstorm has item boxes like Mario Kart, but the types of items you get is determined by the skills your character has unlocked. The more stars they have, the better items they’ll get during a race. To increase your star rating, you have to open boxes that contain a random number of shards. Shards are specific to each character and each box pulls shards from a pool of characters, so you can’t directly buy shards for your character, you just have to pull the lever on the slot machine and hope it lands on the character you’re trying to improve.
Every character also has a secondary progression path called the Crew. Each crew member increases your character's stats based on their own individual star ranking. Characters have four crew slots and crew members can be upgraded five times. Crew shards come in the same boxes as character shards.
What I’m describing is a mobile Gachapon game. If you play mobile games, all of these mechanics should sound familiar to you, and acceptable by mobile game standards (if there is such a thing). But we’re not talking about a mobile game, we’re talking about a game on Xbox, Playstation, Steam, and Nintendo Switch. This is a competitive kart racer for the core gaming audience and it's absolutely exploding with pay-to-win bullshit.
Single-player progression is gated by your stats, but multiplayer is not. It only takes one race with other players to see the effect that the microtransactions have. The fastest car has the biggest advantage, and no matter how well you drive there’s nothing you can do to catch up.
The advantage isn’t just a consequence of stat increases, it’s baked into the design. Speedstorm doesn’t have catch-up items like Blue Shells or Thunderbolts, which allow players who are well behind to slow down players at the lead. All of the items in Speedstorm are close range, designed to only affect those near you. There’s barely even a point to playing the race at all. The game could just sort players according to who paid the most and skip the gameplay. Skill is barely a factor, just call the highest level player the winner, and the outcomes would be exactly the same.
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Obviously Disney Speedstorm isn’t the first gacha game to find its way onto consoles. The most obvious example is Genshin Impact, which is huge on both mobile and console, and as far as we know is still coming to Switch eventually. Genshin deserves a lot more criticism than it gets, but this is Mario Kart with Disney characters. I’m struggling to think of a more dystopic game than Mickey Mouse Race Car Slot Machine. People that argue on behalf of protecting kids tend to act in bad faith, but this is clearly indefensible. Maybe Disney should be less time worrying about how queer content fits the brand and more time interrogating the ethics of the studios it licenses its characters too.
Disney Speedstorm is in closed beta right now so you can’t actually spend real money yet, but the familiar Gachapon systems are all in place. We don’t know what the reaction will be to Speestorm yet, but if it isn’t as fierce and furious as the reaction to Star Wars Battlefront 2’s loot boxes was, then consider this a door cracked open for more pay-to-win games. Maybe developers don’t need to be so shy about monetization. Maybe you just need to buy the best car, or the best gun, or the best fighter, and automatically win. Sports games have been doing it with little scrutiny for years, Disney Speedstorm is just the next step towards the inevitable future where people win by paying the most, not playing the best.
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