Whales buy it. For every 1,000 fans upset by this decision there is 1 fan who is rich enough that spending $1,000 on the game is nothing. A lot of these aggressive monetization schemes aren’t meant to make money on the average player.
The sad part is, those preyed upon aren't always necessarily well off enough to afford it.
It's one of those situations where either the microtransactions are in fact small, so the low costs add up over time before the victims realize it, or they're set up to pressure people into multiple rapid transactions, and so they either exploit some people's poor impulse control or gambling addictions, or more often than not, both.
It’s not that this monetization isn’t meant to target the average player specifically, it’s made to entice singular one-time purchases in a similar fashion to how places like Walmart work. Yes, they have the data that shows a few whales will make those transactions worth it, at the same time they are counting on catching the occasional non-whale slacking. Trick enough minnows into a net and you have the same mass as a whale.
I know this is a small difference in context, to a business it can mean millions of additional dollars. So remember: They know whales will pay. At the same time they are expecting to catch more than a few smaller fish in the process.
Yes, they have the data that shows a few whales will make those transactions worth it, at the same time they are counting on catching the occasional non-whale slacking. Trick enough minnows into a net and you have the same mass as a whale.
You’re actually thinking much more intelligently than they do. I was in games for almost two decades, left a couple years ago. The vast, vast, vast, vast majority of money made is from whales, it’s not even close. I’ve worked on games where we had to speak to banks in both Canada and the UAE to allow a man to make six figure purchases per week. He and one other whale were over 75% of our revenue.
Now the intelligent thing to do to make money here would be, as you said, getting minnows to spend – but that takes too long and the people who run these things want it now.
So rather than selling each armour colour or whatever for 50 cents each, they’ll charge 20 bucks for all of it, pricing out 90% of users*, and barely making money on it, instead of a million people buying it making them a tonne of money. (*this is a personal experience tale, this did happen, these numbers are unaltered.)
I was under the assumption this was the case for the mobile market. I didn’t realize this extended to larger titles. I mean, I guessed everyone is whale hunting, just didn’t realize to what extent. I appreciate the perspective!
To be 100% fair here, that anecdote I used was a mobile game, but the same thing does happen in larger PC/Console game titles, it’s just not 75% of (player) paid revenue.
This is especially so in games that have battlepasses – far fewer people buy those every time thank you’d think, and the ones who do are a small percentage of total players, but make up a lions share of the total revenue earned from said battlepass. Those are also the people (the every pass ones) who buy everything in the shop. 50 dollar cape or whatever, they buy it on release.
Exactly. They also have to know the number of “whales” is rapidly shrinking as more and more money is moved to fewer and fewer hands. Eventually they’ll be left with like 4-5 whales and only a couple live minnows.
I think the concern some people have is that it’s a slippery slope. Sure, right now it might not be too egregious, but if this behaviour is just accepted, publishers will want SP games to be designed around mtx. There’s no limit to greedy peoples’ imaginations when it comes to squeezing people for their money, so god knows how they’ll limit your ability to play games without putting in either a lot of time, effort or money.
This has been happening for years. Shadow of war (2017) had orcs in loot boxes, every assassin’s creed since, and including, black flag (2013) has had microtransactions in some form, odyssey (the last one I’ve personally played) had a rotating cash shop in every city. I know it’s another Ubisoft game but farcry 5 had cosmetic microtransactions in a game that is permanently in first person. You could only see your outfit on the change outfit screen. This comment isn’t meant to come across as antagonistic but I do find it strange to be warning about a slippery slope when we’ve all been riding the toboggan for years.
In all honesty, this might be the end of Dragons Dogma if they don’t turn it around. The first game was a commercial flop even if it is a cult classic now, the MMO crashed and burned and now they ruined a good sequel for no reason.
I just don’t see how execs will greenlight another one if this isn’t a success.
The game will likely be a moderate success provided they can fix the performance problems.
Most players (unfortunately) do not care about having microtransactions in a full priced video games or about things like Denuvo. This is party the reason why the triple-a game industry is in such sorry state at the moment.
Also I find it funny that you’re already worrying about sequels when the newest game has not been out for even a day.
I know it’s weird to think about sequels already but this was a franchise that everyone thought was dead for years only to get a second chance and flush it down the toilet at the finish line.
This whole thing has blown up completely unnecessarily. Guys, it’s a SINGLE player game! Everyone one of these things can be easily unlocked in game. If you are against it, here is a crazy idea; Don’t buy them.
The game is awesome, for anyone not blindly joining in on the circlejerk.
i mean havent played 2 yet, but travel in dragons dogma 1 was not fun, especially the number of times you had to cross the stone canyon path between the Cassadarris and Gran Soren got very stale.
I love the first one, janky stuff but mostly great, so when i heard this game is being made, i was ecstatic about it until i learned the game is $70 with no localised price, at that moment i’m guessing the greedy capcom is really back, because their game used to be fairly priced up until MHW. And then this happened.
They were thinking, “Look at what customers constantly put up with from Blizzard and Ubisoft. Our core gameplay is fun and people have FOMO, so let’s be similarly shitty.”
I haddent heard of any of this until i saw the new Mortisimal gaming video, but he didnt get specific about them. Now that i actually see this, its a pass from me for years.
I always thought it was running anti-“anti-piracy” measures before launching the game. I suppose it could be malware too, which seems like what the meme is getting at.
Real answer is just that they’re executing a process without setting the window style to hidden. It doesn’t mean anything other than the dev is lazy / inexperienced.
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