Best Of

Getting units was hard few years ago, so top sales costs 18k units
Then units gain got easy, so top sales went to 24k then 36k and now this year's top sale item went for 39k.

So if Kabam buff Arena, top sale item will go for 50k next July4

That’s not exactly true. The amount of stuff available for sale for units is based in large part on how many units players have available. It obviously does not make sense to put things up for sale no one can afford to buy (and the notion that this will compel players to spend to buy units is somewhat faulty, because most players don’t spend: this would at best encourage players who already spend to spend more, and there’s only so far you can push that). The amount of units players have available is based on two things: how much units are available in the game, and how much units players spend.

While units available has gone up over time, and the rate at which they can be earned has also gone up over time, the far larger impact has come from how players spend units. Or rather, don’t spend them. Once upon a time, players spent units on all kinds of things. They spent on crystals. They spent on potions and revives. They spent on small offers and medium offers. But over time, players have become far more focused on their spending. We tell players not to spend units on crystals constantly, and new players quickly learn this. We tell them to only spend on potions and revives on certain content. Above all, we tell players not to spend units at all, and save them for big sale events. And they listen. As a result, the average stockpile of units the average player has available to spend on offers has gone up over time.

Now, the average player doesn’t have 36k units to spend, but neither did they have 18k units either. But the sales don’t just target the average player. They target a wide range of players. There’s some number of units the average player has, and somewhere in the big sales is a bucket of stuff that roughly costs that much units. But it is somewhere in the middle, and everything else is everything else: there is stuff for the players with far fewer units, and stuff for the players with far more units. The top tier stuff has gotten larger because the average has gotten larger, and everything else has expanded in proportion.

There’s other factors: unit depreciation at the top due to saturation, for example, but I believe this is the single largest factor in why the big sales have expanded over time. Kabam would actually rather we spend more constantly and in a more varied way, because no company wants most of their revenue concentrated into just a few make or break days. But the players have learned to focus on those days, and Kabam has no choice but to respond in kind and load them up with currency sinks.

Basically, Save for Blade killed the featured crystal (in terms of mindset, not necessarily that specific champ), and Save for J4 makes J4 bigger and bigger in response.