GAMESCOM 2024: Arena Breakout: Infinite Confirms 2024 Launch, Players Still Divided Over Monetization

Arena Breakout: Infinite had a window of opportunity to captilize on the extraction/survival market when Escape from Tarkov made their cash shop misstep earlier this year. The team even started taking shots at Tarkov as it all went down. The problem with taking those kinds of shots is that you then have to make sure your own game isn't planning on doing anything crazy with its F2P monetization when the title releases on PC by the end of the year.

Yes, that "end of the year" window is the best we have so far and it comes from a new trailer that dropped at today's Opening Night Live presentation at Gamescom. If you really want to play now, though, you can hop into the early access over on the official site. No, you can't do early access via Steam, at least not yet. Discussion on the game's Steam page speculates that there's no Steam early access because reviews wouldn't do the game any favors yet.

I've placed the new trailer below for you, but if you head over to the post on YouTube, you're likely to see some concerns with monetization in game game already. The main sticking point is the fact that you can literally buy the game's "in-game" currency, Koens, using real life cash. Yeah, that survival game that requires you to farm up Koens will also just let you buy them.

How much that impacts things come launch remains to be seen, but it's certainly a choice that was sure to cause a backlash to some degree. We'll have to see how it plays out, but I'm guessing that it won't exactly go over well...particularly if the game makes the earning of Koens feel slower than it should be so they can just "happen to" sell you the solution to your woes.