Microtransaction hell intensifies as Mercedes turns improved car acceleration into a subscription
$1,200 a year to use the engine you paid for to its fullest.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Mercedes is taking on the hellish tactics pioneered here in the videogames industry by offering owners of their Mercedes-EQ electric vehicle line the “opportunity” to pay a huge yearly fee in order to make their car go from 0 to 60MPH faster. You can get this on either the EQS or EQE cars, where it’ll provide something like a 0.8 to 1.0 second increase in the acceleration from 0 to 60.
As reported byThe Drive, Mercedes isasking$1,200 a year to “Accelerate more powerfully: increase the torque and maximum output of your Mercedes-EQ.”
To be clear, this is unacceptable and absurd in the extreme. It’s something I’d expect out of a parody of corporate greed. This is charging for a software update that more optimally tweaks the car’s torque by fine-tuning the electric motor. It’s not some expensive, expansive cloud-computing service that needs moment to moment calculations delivered to the vehicle. It’s artificially limiting the power of a machine someone paid for unless they pay a subscription.
Mercedes' cash grab comes after controversy earlier this year when BMW wanted people topay to usethe heated seats in their vehicles. A physical feature of their car. A piece of simple physical equipment. People responded to this bypirating their heated seats.
Both of these are madness-inducing, and I hope that these sociopathic “innovations” don’t make their way back to PC gaming. Imagine how excited Nvidia or AMD would be to sell you a service that makes your graphics card “go faster”? How thrilled would Intel be to run a subscription that “unlocks two cores!!” on your CPU? Wait,this kind of already happens?
Frankly, I’m upset just thinking about it.
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he’s not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.
Ayaneo’s announced its new AMD Strix Point handheld PC and you can bet CES 2025 is going to be awash with new AMD and Intel options
Five things I always tell people before they buy a new gaming PC
I desperately hope Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Baldur’s Gate 3 and Disco Elysium inspire more RPG devs to reject the traditional drip, drip, drip of DLC and expansions
