Monetization overload

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Monetization overload, or over-monetization, occurs when a company prioritizes heavily monetizing a product or service, often at the expense of consumer engagement or even the product's functionality. Over-monetization may manifest in various forms, including advertising overload, microtransactions, unjustified subscriptions, and locking core features behind a paywall, among others. While it's 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 is it a problem?

Genericide

When a product, more specifically a live service game, focuses excessively on monetization, it retroactively dulls the experience of the product, even going so far as to devalue the product itself. This can especially 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 genericization through monetization, publishers are biased against development on core features and even bug fixes, instead opting to implement more generic or unrelated products to sell on the in-game storefront. For example, the Call of Duty Squid Game promotion overshadowed the spotlight on the game's development, rather than the development of the game's anti-cheat, despite promises from Activision.

Monetization Bias

Often, when a product is over-monetized, the development of that product tends to be biased towards features that increase 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 were once normal and free to access for consumers could also be monetized in absurd ways. Free-to-play (F2P) titles could see experience progression slowed down to encourage purchasing "experience boosts".

This can be further applied to mundane monetization, where products may have barely different variants being sold simultaneously. This is especially evident with cosmetics for games, where even a simple reskin or shader could be sold.

Advertising Overload

Main article: Advertising overload

To generate revenue from consumers, companies may integrate advertisements into their products. This can become adverse if the company is hasty to incorporate advertisements.