Details about the microtransactions in Call of Duty: Black Ops IV have been revealed and they show a game that has learned little from the debacle of other titles like Star Wars: Battlefront II, as it is riddled with payment models and overcomplicated bespoke currencies, all designed to milk addictive gamers for their money. Not only that, but they highlight a game that is designed around a grinding slog of progression, which you can easily bypass for a few (read: a lot) of dollars.
To buy your way to stardom in CoD: BO4 you need to buy COD Points. They start at $2 for 200 and go up to $100 for $13,000, with Season Pass owners receiving 1,000 points as part of that "deal." Points can be spent on Nebulium Plasma for the Zombies mode, as per PCGamesN. Alternatively, you can splash out on Special Orders, which gives you new content to unlock on the Black Market. So you can pay to get additional grinding opportunities to get more unlocks. How exciting.
But if that sounds too much fun for you, you can always just buy the Black Market tiers directly. Why bother playing the game when you can just give money to the developer to not play it?
They start at 100 COD points each, but with 200 levels to go through, you'd have to spend at least $200 to unlock everything. If completing all of those levels is important to you though, you might want to pay for it, as we're told it could take hundreds of hours of grinding to make it to the top otherwise.
Somehow though, it doesn't even stop there. Once you've reached level 200, a whole new tier of unlocks appears to give you that constant drip feed of dopamine that suggests you're doing something, when in actuality you're just giving your time and money to a game and developer that just wants to milk you for all you're worth. Often exploiting addictive personality elements along the way.
