When a game with microtransactions, especially a free to play game, introduces a new item or system that takes an exceptionally long time to complete, there’s always one reaction you can count on: people calling it a cash-grab.

People will say that clearly the developer only made it so grindy because then more people will have to pay for it, and thus the game is making more money. But according to Warframe developer Digital Extremes, not only do particularly grind-heavy items not make more money, they sometimes even make less.

Loading

Speaking at GDC last week, Digital Extremes Live Ops and Community Director Rebecca Ford said that more grind doesn’t mean more profits for Warframe. Ford’s panel was about some of Warframe’s biggest ‘hit’ and ‘miss’ moments over its five-year history, one of which she said was a resource called Oxium that angered players for being overly scarce at its release.

“ Something that has a high grind cost doesn’t actually sell any better than the things that are easier to make.

“There’s often a point from the community where they’ll say something like ‘you guys must be raking in the Platinum [Warframe’s premium currency] because you made this so hard to get’, and that’s actually not true,” Ford explained. “A lot of the data that we’ve looked into for this says if you look at something that has a high grind cost, it doesn’t actually sell any better than the things that are easier to make. So we’re not really benefiting from it at all.”

I asked Ford to elaborate after her panel, and she said one specific weapon is potentially the best example of this: the Hema. “This is a weapon that has a very notoriously grindy acquisition, that players think we don’t change because of the Platinum it’s making us,” Ford said. “When I looked at the release of that weapon with everything else that released at the same time, it actually sold less than the easier to get content. So it doesn’t even have a correlation to a larger platinum income.”

Loading

It’s a somewhat unintuitive discovery, and even Ford isn’t sure what to attribute it to. It could be that people are spurred by the challenge of harder to acquire items — for example, Hema is so difficult to get that it’s become sort of a badge of honor to have farmed it, even spawning a subreddit dedicated to proving you’ve done so — but it could also be that Hema just isn’t a very appealing weapon for one reason or another. It’s hard to say for sure.

Ford said that there are exceptions to this rule and that she generally only looks into things that they think might be an issue, but the data they have seen at least shows that making an item grindy doesn’t directly benefit Digital Extremes’ bottom line, and could potentially even hurt it in some cases.

Ford says that claims of grindiness being added to increase Platinum sales are usually taken as a sign that the community isn’t happy with the balance of something, and they generally strive to fix those misses. And whatever Digital Extremes is doing is clearly working, as it just recently hit the 38 million registered players in time for its fifth anniversary

Tom Marks is an Associate Editor focusing on PC gaming at IGN. You can follow him on Twitter