Monetization overload

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Monetization overload, or over-monetization, is when a company focuses on heavily monetizing a product or service, usually at the cost of consumer engagement or even functionality. Over-monetization may come in the form of advertising overload, microtransactions, unjustified subscriptions, locking core features behind a paywall, etc. While its understood that products and services require compensation in some form, even when they're "free", the degradation of quality, limits of functionality, and loss of consumer engagement are often symptoms of excessive monetization of the product or service.

Why it is a problem

Genericide

When a product, more specifically a live service game, focuses extremely on monetization, it retroactively dulls the experience of the product, even going so far as to devalue the product itself. This especially can damage the core purpose of the product, since an event entirely unrelated to it could effectively block consumers from the full functionality of their product.

Often when a game faces genericide through monetization, publishers are biased against development on core features and even bug fixes, instead opting for implementing more generic or otherwise unrelated products to sell on the in-game storefront. For example, the Call of Duty Squid Game promotion overtook the spotlight of development for the game, rather than the development of the game's anticheat, despite promises from Activision.

Monetization Bias

Often when a product is over-monetized, the development of said product often ends up being biased towards features that increases transactions from consumers or advertising promotions from other companies. This kind of bias also does not favor developing features and fixes that do not directly incur revenue for the publisher, including but not limited to patching bugs, tweaking balance, repairing product defects, and moderating communities.

Monetizing mundane features

Some product features that may have been normal and free to access for consumers could also be monetized in absurd ways. Free to play (F2P) titles could see experience progression be slowed down to encourage purchasing "experience boosts".

This can be further applied with mundane monetization, where products could have barely different variants being sold at the same time. This is especially seen with cosmetics for games, where even a simple reshade could be sold.

Advertising Overload

Main article: Advertising overload

In an effort to make money from consumers, companies may integrate advertisements into their products to generate revenue. This can become adverse if the company is hasty to integrate advertisements.

Examples

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