38 minutes ago, meganoth said:
Depends on the definition. Many consider the horse armor skin of Oblivion the first example of a microtransaction (including Wikipedia which says that MOST examples of microtransactions are conducted in in-game shops). If TFP were selling a single horse armor skin as DLC I would have a hard time explaining what the practical difference would be.
But eventually, as a DLC grows in size there has to be an end to calling it "micro" and it just becomes a small addon that you could buy or not.
Real microtransactions are made for the purpose to lure especially small kids into paying x times of what they payed for the game through **many** small transactions, a single or even a handful of DLCs simply can't do that.
Fair enough. Most are in-have transactions intended to get you to buy something while playing when you are invested in whatever you are doing. Price is small enough for each item to make it seem cheap so you will buy one, then another, and another, until as you said, they pay many times the cost of the game itself. And yes, I would agree that if they sold a single outfit as a DLC, I would probably consider it a microtransaction even if sold outside of the game.
Either way, calling a cosmetic DLC a microtransaction is nothing more than sensationalism intended to get a rise out of people.