Nine to Five Suffers from Pay-to-Win Issues

In recent, years pay to win problems are rarely seen outside of gacha games. However, this does not mean the problem is gone from other game genres. Nine to Five is a recent early access title from Redhill Games, the game is a 3v3v3 FPS where each standard match consists of 3 rounds where each player has one life per round. With the game currently being in early access, it features two maps and a limited selection of guns, armor, and gadgets.

The game supplies players with a couple of guns and three armor types, the rest will need to be purchased in order to be used. Prices for the weapons and armor range from 30,000 credits for a pistol up to 280,000 credits for a sniper rifle. The issue with these prices comes from the number of credits you can gain per match.

Although the number of credits you gain can vary greatly depending on how many rounds in a match you win and your overall performance, the highest amount of credits you can earn per match seems to be around 3,000. However, you can normally expect to earn around half of that for your average match. You also earn credits every time you level up and the amount earned increases with level. However, the level cap in the early access is 10 so those large credit gains are limited.

With the expected credit it could take 20 matches just to unlock a pistol. If you wanted to buy the other sniper rifle in the game that is not given to you when you first start the game, it would take over 100 matches to get the credits.

Of course, if you don’t want to wait that long to earn the credits you can just buy them with real currency. Nine to Five offers a premium currency that you can purchase, and then spend that premium currency on credit packs in-game.

4,000 credits will cost you 100 platinum and you can buy 200 platinum for 2€ or about $2.36. you can get a better deal on platinum and credit packs if you buy in larger quantities but the prices will still be in the same area if you were to buy the smallest packs.

The cost of weapons and armor combined with the ability to just pay real money for them creates this skill gap that can only be filled with money. If two evenly skilled players were to face off against each other, but one had spent no money on the game and only had the starting gear while the other had the best gear, the result would be obvious. The player that spent money on the game would win nine times out of ten, just because they would have more armor and do more damage than the “free to play” player.