When I think about how we plan the Contest...
... In order for us to continue to play this game, we need a number of things: ( this is not an exhaustive list but I think these are the three most important requirements)
- A sufficiently large player base to support the game at scale
- Enough development resources to keep those players entertained and engaged so they don’t leave the game (what we call churn)
- Things to sell to those players so we can make revenue and pay for the development resources
If at any point in time we don’t have any one of these three things, we risk entering a death spiral where a negative feedback loop results in fewer players, which results in less revenue, which results in a smaller team, which results in fewer players …. you get the picture. This is how pretty much every successful mobile game eventually dies.
So I spend a lot of my time thinking about how we can make sure we have enough of these things...
...If our goal was to make as much money as possible on every offer, it would indeed be dumb not to follow that advice, but that isn’t our goal. Our goal (or at least my goal) is for us to keep making this game for the next decade and beyond.
The infinite game is really a marathon, not a sprint. It isn’t enough to just think about us having enough players, resources and revenue this year, but we need to think about it for at least the next ~3 years or we definitely would run out of something important be it players, developers or things to sell.
How does player sentiment impact the infinite game?
When I first started working at Kabam three years ago, I was hired as an economy designer. One day I proposed an offer to the Live Ops team which they agreed to build and put in the game. I was pretty confident there was a market for the offer that I had uncovered in our data. The day the offer went out, I looked around to see if players were talking about it and was absolutely devastated by what I found. There were threads on the forums talking about how out of touch Kabam was to make such an insulting offer. There were multiple YouTube videos with titles like “Whichever Kabam Employee Made This Offer Should Be Fired!”
The next day I started work expecting to see that I had proposed the first offer in the game’s history to be bought by nobody, and looking at our revenue dashboards I discovered that, not only had the offer been bought by some players, it had significantly overperformed our revenue estimates. It was, for lack of a better phrase, broadly very popular.
That anecdote is just one example of something I have come to learn over the last three years: there is no consistent correlation between player sentiment in our social channels and short-term revenue. Our engaged players are really really good at a lot of things, including our game, but their opinions on how we make money have little to no predictive value.
To be clear I’m not saying players are always wrong. I remember one sale (I think J4 2023?) in which there was a lot of chatter about how Thronebreaker players were getting shafted, and the Thronebreaker offers in that sale did indeed perform well under our expectations. Sometimes players are spot on. But what I am saying is there is no way for us to see player reaction to an offer or sale on the Forums and YouTube and know if those opinions will impact revenue or not.
I have long had suspicions as to why this was the case, and one of the reasons I wanted to wait for the analysis before making this post is because for the first time our data science group is working on exactly this question. There are a few interesting results from that work, but
the key finding is pretty simple: players engaged in our social channels are not a representative sample of our player base. This should be obvious to everyone reading this, but I’ll be honest the more I dig into this, the more differences I find between what the Forums, Discord and YouTube talk about and what our average players care about. We make the majority of our revenue from a much more casual group of players that are often not represented in these channels.
Kabam Crashed
A feedback thread -
First of all, I feel like I am of the "more casual group not represented in these channels" that spend significantly on this game for 10 years, playing in the back ground, watching YT to find a way to beat the guy or do the thing that has to do damage to the the dude... not a top skill player just a customer trying to enjoy the game. I am 7.7 mil account -1430+ champs- Valiant player my roster is significant and robust but my skill is very average, champ knowledge is mid. Cant dex worth a damn.
Do you all like the intentional design of bosses and nodes that make your roster useless, not doing any damage at all for the first two minutes, fights that you cannot do any damage, nodes that cancel your champ abilities, that you cannot practice duel any bosses?
Yes, you can grind units easier than before but now, you must use many more revives and potions or units than ever before to complete content.
Are the design trends of no damage nodes and boss fights the new norm?
Is making your entire roster investment meaningless the gold standard now? to get you to use many more units, revives and potions to even do a quest?
In my opinion, It is ok to still have vanilla content like the EQ, SQ (pretty straight forward content) and the 10 yr Chronology Quest (had no nodes) that allow your champs and abilities to do what they are intended to do against defenders.
You know, Fun content that just allows my champs to wreck **** the way they were designed.
The complexity, champ knowledge needed and skill required scale is getting way out of control for the average paying customer that wants to just play a marvel fighting game with good graphics, collect and rank up champs and have some fun along the way.
Remember the good old days , play quest , get stuff, spin crystals, get new dudes, play more stuff , get more stuff, level up and rank up your dudes , repeat!!!.. you know, fun stuff, big yellow/red numbers and champs that played at their full potential without BS nodes or damage protection while you smashed, tapped and swiped while chatting it up with the wife watching TV.
In the Kabam Crashed post mortem post (excerpt above) he mentioned player sentiment and churn as a concern to the longevity of the game, but yet later (paraphrasing in the context that I took it as) takes the attitude of well if you are player A whose happiness depends on B then this content probably isn't for you because its not going to change and will only be more of the same in the future. Sort of a sorry but, get used to it or don't play it attitude
full post here:
https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/comment/2736166#Comment_2736166All one needs to do is go to the App Store and filter the comments to the critical low star reviews to understand player sentiment is waning.
I’ve have spent money on this game for over 10 years and unfortunately I think I'm done doing so. The last couple years I frequently feel scammed and want a refund after you make what you sold me worthless in new content or remove farming a resource that others had for years (revives farming) or nerf something after 10years (power boosts and EQ bundles). The last couple years you removed revive farming, shrunk the ability to store and earn revives, made content harder to require many most folks to use multiple revives and unit spending to complete. You call it skill based. But you cannot lower the difficulty, you can only pay to continue or lose out on the rewards (FOMO) if you’re not the top 1% skill player that can do it cheaply. You can now watch even the most skilled player YouTube creators now have to use revives and potions to clear stuff. Everything is intentionally designed to create a FOMO and have you chasing crumbs only to find out the crumbs change nothing, because you cannot do any damage or champs don't work on this node.
You will need more revives and units to get anything done in the best content/rewards. Most players will have to use Unit man to complete anything with good rewards. Even if i suck, my champ should do a decent amount of damage even if its reduced by something, it should never do zero damage because i can line up the skill hoops to do so.
It’s masochistic and not fun. It used to be fun when your champs did Damage no matter what, when their abilities you bought them for actually worked and were not cancelled by the node. Grief content is not fun content.
Imagine you buy a car sold to you by Kabam. They promise you all the latest and newest upgrades and accessories. Some time after you buy it, you realize you will need to get the oil for it to run, then the gas for it to work but you can only buy it from the special Kabam gas station and only pay for it with special Kabam money that you have to buy or earn by grinding out some part of the game you don’t enjoy. Then you will need to upgrade the tires, the engine and the infotainment center, after 3, 6 months or 12 months when you have done that , your car is outdated and you need to get the new one. You can use all your old cars to go on the dream vacation they created for you this month where you can get the best rewards to upgrade all your cars but all your old cars won’t work. They went by your house one day and swapped the engines to a lesser engine and told you it’s better. To complete this vacation trip, You will also have to drive in reverse the entire time, a can only go max speed of 5mph even though your cars top speed is 200mph, you can only make left turns, and only when the traffic signal is red and then you also will have to stop every 10 miles to refill your Kabam gas, with Kabam money for the entire 700 mile trip if you want to get the rewards. So no matter what fancy car you bought or choose to use, you all have to pay for this vacation as you go, in order to get the rewards. Sounds like some B.S right?
Sell you a champ this week and make it worthless in the next thing they create by either making you use less than ideal champs to get rewards or a node that is immune to all your abilities. They remove or change how you can obtain all the lower progression items that should stockpile and contribute to your overall resources as you progress, and they continue to find ways to make your entire roster worthless in new content that contains the best rewards or rewards you need to be competitive.
It’s free to play, but very pay to win. In Battlegrounds, one persons fun (the winner) cannibalizes the other persons fun (the loser) so you will eventually get tired of losing and quit that too, unless you enjoy grinding losses for meaningless shard crumbs.
In 2023, 2024 and 25 they continue to intentionally design and over tune champs, and new content so they can sell you revives/units and maybe later the so called hard counter to a miserable defender they create.
They continue to make boss fights that you can not do any damage no matter what champ you use.
There is no way to practice or duel these bosses either, you must pay and use your saved resources over and over until you learn the desired skill or give up.
If you choose to pay your way through a boss fight it’s very expensive and mentally frustrating beyond gamer rage (not fun). But you must beat this boss that you cannot Damage in order to progress. So pay to play or miss out.
Endure the pain and frustration to maybe enjoy the in between stuff.
You can choose not to do the content, or wait until someday that you may have enough revives to try it or higher ranked champs. but even higher ranked champs wont do damage. then there is new new content and the rewards you waited to do are no longer even relevant.
They have sucked all the fun out of this game and try to convince you ‘it’s supposed to be challenging, grief content or Everest end game content. Well it’s supposed to be fun at its core. Fun for the masses that aren’t skilled as the top players like MSD. If top players are using revives, units and potions to complete one run at something then what do you think the rest of the population has to do, save up 50,100 or more revies to do one run at 25 or so revives a month is one path every one or two months so by the time you complete anything the rewards are not worth the time and unit cost.
Now they starve you for revives because someone thought farming was killing the game.
You have to grind units, so they now make you go back and play arena continuously if you want to play this game at all.
If you hate to grind units then you must buy them and they of course know that most players HATE GRINDING ARENA, so eventually you will need to buy units if you don't stay FTP.
FTP players will either get tired off grinding units and spending them to keep up and leave the game or they will have to pay for units.
In the current state of this game , YOU WILL SPEND REVIVES and/or UNITS to complete content and boss fights. Or you make one attempt at content and fail then have grind some more units to try again.
Soon only CCP, YouTube players, Discord and Forums folks will be playing and Kabam will have an over tuned game with and under tuned economy that tries to please only the top, smallest population of most skilled players and the content creators from their CCP that need to make a video. The ones that have already proven to not be the majority opinion of the player base - so Why tune the game to this madness.
I hope those players spend enough to keep the doors open because this could be a great forever game with the right direction. If you want my money, it’s supposed to be entertaining and what you sell me should always work. What you sell me is supposed to do damage (all the damn time) If you want my money. The game is also not supposed to break every time I update it if you want my money.
If you want my money , get it together Kabam!
Respectfully, Your Customer
