Fragpunk’s monetisation is absolutely wild. There are so many different currencies, both premium and free-to-play, in the game. Fragpunk coins, which are the default premium currency, but also Glunite Coins, Gold, Ultimate Materials, Membership Coins, Battle Pass Tokens, Ranked Coins, Club Supplies, Curiosity Pop Cans, Weapon Skin Keys, Lancer Skin Keys, Sticker Packs, and Original Pop Cans. You’ll spend the first 30 minutes after loading up Fragpunk just staring, gobsmacked, at the amount of things in the menus. This isn’t unusual for mobile games, and I should clarify there are plenty of games with lots of MTX, but I don’t expect it in a shiny new 5v5 hero shooter currently only available on PC.
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Not all of these are premium currencies, and you can earn a good chunk of them just by playing the game. However, the important stuff, like Lancers, are locked behind hefty paywalls. Five of the thirteen Lancers are available at launch, with the others costing 20,000 Gold or 488 Fragpunk Coins, the equivalent of $5 each. This isn’t dissimilar to how other games do this, namely Apex Legends, but it’s still not very fun. You can probably earn a couple of hundred Gold a day, although the challenges and events do seem to provide more as you play.
Things get more egregious when we take a look at the monthly membership. This isn’t a battle pass – don’t you worry, there are more than one of those as well – which costs $9.99 a month. This gets you access to the Premium Battlepass and some premium currency, all the Lancers for free, and some weapon skins. That being said, you might get the Premium Battle Pass for free, but the Ultimate Pass is an extra $20. That comes with some extra fancy skins. The Lancers you unlock via the subscription will also disappear once your membership expires.
There are also gacha mechanics. I’m not kidding: it costs around $300 to get your hands on a special knife. I spent thousands of Fragpunk coins with the free currency the developers gave me on the pre-release version of the game just to test how much you’d need to spend. Don’t worry, I didn’t get to keep it. Like all gacha, the game drip feeds you currency to roll on the knife, with plenty of fluff rewards packed into the pool to thin out your odds of getting something good.
The fun doesn’t stop there. Head into the Events part of the menu, and you’ll find a number of “rebate” events that reward you for spending premium currency. There’s even one event, the Construction Event Rebate, that rewards you and your clubmates for spending currency. If everyone spends lots of money, you’ll get some extra rewards. At least you get a bonus for spending money, I guess.
Players will always react negatively to this number of microtransactions in a game. Steam reviews are already demonstrating that. It’s a shame, because Fragpunk is a well-polished shooter with some fun mechanics. The game itself is very enjoyable. I can see it filling a niche (albeit short-lived) space in the shooter market, although it’s in direct competition with Valorant, and by extension NetEase’s other hit shooter, Marvel Rivals.
This level of guff added to the game for no reason really doesn’t get Fragpunk off on the right foot, especially for those who aren’t willing to wade through it all to actually get to grips with the game. All of these menus and currencies detract from the overall experience. Every time I leave a game I’m bombarded with things to click on, sticker packs to open, weapon charms to check out. It’s a perfectionist’s nightmare trying to remove all the loud “NEW!” stickers from the interface.
I’ve been playing Fragpunk for a few hours now, and I’m still having fun. There are still plenty of things you can unlock just by playing the game, and everything is very smooth, even when you’re wading through multiple menus to get there. It’s a shame more people will be put off of the game because of its microtransactions, which, for the most part, can be completely ignored. Give us all the Lancers, though, NetEase. That just sucks.
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