Fallout 76 has, after all of its content updates and patches, revealed itself to be a fair game, but its microtransactions are nothing to scoff at. The latest refrigerator fiasco is all about an in-game fridge that costs $7 in real-life currency.
Naturally, fans are flabbergasted with this development, but what adds oil to the fire is the fact that Bethesda has added the fridge following a thread on Reddit asking them to do so. Presumably, adding it as a microtransaction wasn’t what the author of the thread originally had in mind.
“I would really like some sort of fridge/freezer for our Camps,” said the thread that Bethesda responded to. The author cited fast food expiration rates and the inability to store some of it, which are understandably an annoyance in a survival game. Bethesda responded with: “Heya! We’ve seen a couple of you post this suggestion now, and have passed it on to the team. Thanks for sharing :)”. This interaction happened six months ago, mind.
Either way, the only related development we got on the subject is the all-new $7 fridge that you cannot get outside of spending money. More precisely, the working fridge in Fallout 76 costs 700 Atoms - the game’s special currency that isn’t obtainable through normal gameplay. This sum of Atoms roughly corresponds to $7, which is where the price tag comes from.
For a particularly egregious example, Fallout 76 fans on Reddit have compared the $7 fridge purchase with that of 2016’s Fallout 4: Automatron. There, $7 got you a new quest, a new location, new enemies, new armour, new weapons, and more. The comparison is interesting, to say the least.
