rare armor or weapons in the game got those through skill and not by "a deep wallet". While initially they had offered cosmetics through loot boxes within the game, the team opted to remove them following criticism towards the growing trend of loot boxes that was raised in October 2017; instead, they allow players to directly purchase cosmetics with real-world funds for monetization purposes. Houston, who had previously worked with Electronic Arts on Mass Effect 3, one of the first games that introduced loot boxes, said that they wanted to give players "a clearer relationship to the content that [they're] purchasing" in their decision to eliminate these. Instead, Phoenix Labs opted to use a battle pass system using Hunt and Season passes, providing a rotating set of cosmetics and emotes. Dauntless was initially planned for a personal computer-only release, but Phoenix Labs have been in discussions with publishers for consoles, and would like to support cross-platform play if they do publish to these systems. Houston said that his team was not worried about potential competition from Monster Hunter: World, which was announced to be coming in 2018 for personal computers and consoles during the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2017 in June 2017. Houston said "The more AAA products that are coming into this genre, the wider it’s going to get", and believes that Dauntless differs itself by being tuned to a co-operative experience and using free-to-play mechanics. The studio later affirmed in May 2019 that Monster Hunter World had initially dipped some of its player count, but Dauntless has since steadily grown thanks to the interest in this style of game created by the success of Monster Hunter World, and was around 3 million total players at that point. At The Game Awards 2018 in December 2018, Phoenix Labs affirmed that Dauntless would release for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in early 2019, and with future plans for a Nintendo Switch and mobile platforms. Phoenix Labs wants to offer a One Dauntless system to players, with their progress being saved through a single account regardless of which platform they play on, as well as for cross-platform play, and worked with Sony and Microsoft to work out these details. By January 2019, Phoenix Labs announced the game would be migrated to the Epic Games Store and into the Store's account systems. This helped Phoenix to support cross-platform play through Epic Games' previous