This wasn't talking about upgrades. This was talking about consumables - things that you use up during your play of the game and need to buy more of. That amounts to a continuous need to pay more money to continue the game, depending on how the devs have worked it. Paying for new mods is fair as your paying for someone to work at creating those mods. Paying for consumables is ridiculous because these consumables are just bits in a computer. You press a button and you can create 1,000,000 GP. This isn't the real world we're talking about here where everything takes effort to create. You have to make an effort to write a game that uses up resources, and adding 1 box of ammo or 100 boxes of ammo requires only a numeric input, unlike the real world where 100 boxes of ammo takes 100x the workload and would need to be charged more for. If there's a Sword of Mighty Tree-felling that the developers included in the game, they could release one into the game world and sel it for $100, or just as easily leave it as an item at the end of a quest where every player gets to own one. In the price<>demand model, computer games can only create a totally artificial demand model as it's easy to provide enough of an item to satisfy everyone - items are only rare because the devs choose to make it so.
A-B-C should be fun! If it's a chore but you charge for the player to skip it, there's an incentive not to elliminate these chores but to leave them in and earn some cash on the side. If the game was fun and people enjoyed playing it, why would they want to buy items to make it easier and end their game faster? Also the comments (or rather article, as we don't have MS's actual statement) weren't targetted at MMOs. Those games have their own mad economies, but most games don't. You don't have people selling items on Halo or CON for real cash. Most games aren't designed for such microtransactions. The moment you enable that easily for developers, you're encouraging them to give it a go. They're businesses and will seek to make money wherever possible in the main. So Halo 3 could add an Uber weapon and keep ammo for it rare, where you have to buy it for Live! points. If there wasn't this microeconomy system in place they'd instead just have you looking for the ammo and balance the game based using ammo availability to limit your use of the weapon. One way you have the devs needing to think about the weapon and balance it to add to gameplay, and the other way they throw it in and charge users to use it however they want. One way is trying to create a good game experience, and the other requires less effort and charging people cash to decide their own game experience.
The chances of games being wholesalely ruined by charging for consumables is slim, but the chances of more and more games adding incentive for users to part with cash for what has always been mostly a matter of game balancing is definitely there. It's not going to make gaming a better experience and isn't a move designed to improve games. If MS left this out we wouldn't have to concern ourselves with it, but adding this feature now we have to worry about what way our favourite franchises go. If GOW cost $100 in the store, would you buy it? If it cost $50 on the store but you're charged $1 for every 50 shots and the cost will run up to $100, will you buy it? That latter event is going to be hard to measure the moment you buy a game, unlike a flat subscription fee. You don't know what the running costs will be. Let's just hope this consumer selling is limited to a handful of games. Although if it makes those companies lots of money, I can't see why other would ignore it.
