Buying Lives Was Just a Bug, Apparently

Multiversus has been receiving a fair bit of criticism after its recent launch. Many of them concern the actual gameplay and balancing, as the seemingly revamped game is riddled with bugs and issues that can effectively ruin a match.

But, while it's good that these problems are getting some time in the spotlight, the shadows they cast have helped to conceal the game's aggressive F2P monetization practices. One of such cases that people have brought up is that MVS offers players to pay for extra lives in its single-player PvE mode.

This PvE mode itself is a part of a Battle Pass style timed event where players have to finish Rifts, or simply set paths of PvE battles on various difficulties while changing up their loadout around the game's conditions.

On easier paths, you can simply play the game, but on higher difficulties, the game will ask you to reach a certain gem level. These gems are your single player power-ups that come in 3 different flavors, with each allowing you to add additional attunements and gain levels.

Arguably more acceptable than buying lives, yet still raises questions when the game offers you to buy Gem XP as a time-saving measure, a staple of F2P monetization that became so popular in various mobile games and then made it over to bigger titles.

After this issue gained attention, MVS Twitter acknowledged it in one of their tweets, saying that buying lives is a "bug."

The wording is outright deceptive here. While it is a bug, it's also very much an intended feature in the game, you don't add a whole UI element with functional buttons and code to withdraw premium currency in exchange for lives. That's like assembling an IKEA table and making a fridge by accident because you messed up the instructions.

The actual bug is that this feature was seemingly available on Insanity mode, while intended to be exclusive for Looney.

Another feature of the rifts that has been drawing criticism is that while optional, pieces of the rift are tied to owning specific skins, further incentivizing people to put money into the system. Of course, most of all this will be chalked up to the game overall being free, but there is something else to consider.

The game's quality notwithstanding, will this type of monetization be accepted by the playerbase? With Smash Bros. and many other platform fighters being a one time purchase or being much more welcoming in terms of their MTX practices, can MVS afford to add more friction between the player and the game, without losing the former?