Angry Birds Go is Free to Play With $125 DLC

The folks over at Rovia games are launching a new Angry Birds kart racing game, and they’ve decided to go down the same road as Forza 5 and make the game microtransaction heavy. One transaction definitely stands out as not quite so ‘micro’– the $125 premium Big Band Special Edition Car.

Now before you go throw that Angry Bird plushy on a bonfire, there’s a few things you should know. The game doesn’t officially launch until December 11th, and this transaction is only present in the soft launch version, available in New Zealand. 

Besides the ridiculously overpriced car, your racer will also fatigue after a couple races. This leaves the player with either the option of waiting for their stamina to go back up, or pay to refresh it. Alternatively, they can switch to another bird if they’ve been unlocked/purchased.

There is also a “pay to win” model, where players can pay to be able to use your racer’s special powers more often during a race. This isn’t considered as upsetting the game’s balance since there is no multiplayer mode.  

So naturally as this news broke earlier today, there’s been a pretty vocal outcry from the internet. So much so, that Eurogamer contacted Rovio and got an official statement:

“Angry Birds Go! is currently available early in certain regions as part of a soft launch,” Antila commented. “That said, early feedback from the press and community is important to us. We’ll definitely be taking action on some of the points raised.”

That is their way of saying they wanted to test the limit of how far they could gouge players by launching the game in a very limited market. Rovio claims they will change the microtransactions before the game launches in America.

Considering how much money the original Angry Birds made from just being a fun game… I find this shake down approach from Rovio to be pretty deplorable. There’s no word on if anyone from the soft launch that actually paid for the Big Bang Edition car will be issued a refund. Like I said in the article about the Xbox One microtransactions, as long as there are people out there paying for these rip-offs, developers will continue to put them in games.