f2p players deserves better

they are not even trying to hide it anymore that event is jus p2w and prople who spend money on this game will get lots of reward while f2p just have to grind while those guys good rewards

Comments

AmaadAkira

Why do some people feel the need to gaslight others into believing all game developers were broke pre-2010? Before microtransactions, the gaming industry was booming, what are you even talking about? I guess the people who made Elden Ring, Baldur's gate, No man's sky etc. are all working out of a homeless shelter.

BringPopcorn

Yes true, also a lot of them went out of business..

KØNG

…why would they try to hide it? You pay more, you get more. Why would they give equal rewards to players who don’t support them over the one who do? Everyone seems to make F2P such an elite status. It’s your decision to be as such. The rewards you want are there for the taking. Just get off that high horse of yours.

Dirty_Dozz

You mean purchasing.

AmaadAkira

And how many mobile games that have MTX are going out of business every day by releasing a trashy game and selling their 'features'? So your point is?

KØNG

Yes. I do. It’s a choice. You buy = you get those rewards. You don’t buy = you grind or miss out. I personally will be missing out on a lot. But I’m not complaining about it. I don’t expect to be treated just for showing up.

BringPopcorn

Why are you asking me for my point when I am questioning yours in the first place?.
Since they are succesful they have to be charitable? They have to give more free stuff?
They don't work from a homeless shelter; but they dont have a big bowl of f2p sweat for breakfast either do they?..
Its the way the real world works.
Also yes a lot of trashy games go out of business, how many mobile games do you know that have been running for 8 years?

Stature

Those are not free to play games. Every player paid for them. You cannot have it both ways - F2P option and no microtransactions. Overall, MCOC is extremely F2P friendly, there is almost nothing of significance which is behind a paywall and every event has at least some options for F2P players. Only thing that separates F2P and spenders in the game is time. Given how much of the game is solo content, most F2P players have a very good game experience.

HungaryHippo

Imagine having this game for free and still whining about it. If there were ads, people would be complaining about that too.

BringPopcorn

No skip button so they suffer more

AmaadAkira

Correct, they aren't F2P games. But MCOC has also made a ton more money than many of those games, so this point is moot. Even if everyone was instead charged a $40 price to play MCOC, the game wouldn't have made NEARLY as much money as it does today. So what are you arguing here? The constant development cost isn't even an excuse when games like No Man's Sky exist. This is PURELY about increasing profit margins. Let's stop acting like these developers will be living out of cardboard boxes if they didn't exploit their customers with loot boxes. It's disgusting to try to justify it.

Btw, this isn't about the F2P vs P2W model, or about the Cap event. It was in response to the other commenter who unironically believes without MTX, game developers would be starving to death.

Demonzfyre

Explain to me how they exploit customers with loot boxes.

While MCOC makes money, they aren't swimming in cash at their headquarters. They're owned by Netmarble. Netmarble funds MCOC.

If you make a purchase, the devs aren't putting that directly in their pockets.

KØNG

You make it sound like trying to increase profit is an evil corporation motive. I think most businesses do that. And still, it’s on the consumer’s end to bite. It’s in no way their fault if people do.

Blackjack555yy

Yes that's true, and while that also makes this whole thing more lame, there's the fact that most of those f2p's are casual players, who don't interact with these forums, and mostly don't care about things like these, or at least enough to say it.

AmaadAkira

I'm not saying 'evil developers'. I also acknowledge there are people above them likely forcing their hands with profit margins as an excuse.

If we can all acknowledge that, how about looking up when finding people to blame rather than looking down at the consumer?

Loot boxes are a science, and trigger the same dopamine mechanics as gambling does. Blaming consumers for succumbing to gambling mechanics in games that are aimed at kids too is hella silly, ngl. Let's pretend you didn't say that.

BringPopcorn

What a quoting mess i made on my post lol

BringPopcorn

Arcades do the same thing with their ticket system, carnivals do it too.
It is basically gambling.
Not exactly sure what it has to do with the main topic of f2ps asking for more, they could give you 50 Paragon crystals and all you get is 50 4* champs for all you know.

KTPrimal

There are a lot actually.

Blackjack555yy

No they don't really do the same, though arcades have this thing of making you pay for retrys, they are not really gambling, you pay to play it and you play, it's more similar to buying games, and while you could think that's a great example, that is one of the reasons people have moved away from them and gone into directly buying them, obviusly among others.

and for carnivals, each time you pay, you get on the complete ride, if you wanna get on it again, you pay again, so not really as well

BringPopcorn

I will share a story with you.
I went to Vegas with my nephew, they told me he is underage he can't be walking in the casino area.
I took him to the arcade, they had great games like hoops, a punching bag for points, a rolling game, tons of games. Of course you has to pay to play them, and as a reward for performing the machine would give you tickets. Later on you exchange those tickets for rewards. 20k tickets and you could even take a bicycle home!!!.. As a thinking human being, do you see what they did in there? Its gambling the only difference is that you spend money to not win money and exchange it for a prize worth money

BringPopcorn

You are confusing arcade games with coin games and carnival rides with carnival games. Its not the same

Killdisplayed_

Are you saying f2p should stop playing? Or am I missing your point.

Demonzfyre

You didn't answer the question. How are loot boxes an exploit?

Is a Kabam developer sitting next you holding a gun to you saying you have to buy things?

People aren't addicted to the loot boxes, people are addicted to taking the easy way which is to buy their way though content and advance quicker.

You're also wrong in blaming the developers. They're paid a salary. A dev could care less what microtransactions are in the game. Offers and what not are from the economy teams and part of the U.I.

Again, you're not be forced by anyone to buy anything. It's your choice. These are businesses. Without MTXs it's unlikely this game would still be around. Ads are the only other way to generate revenue.

You're upset because companies want to make money and you think the consumer has no fault in the choices they make.

DNA3000

I was there during the rise of microtransactions and the F2P model for online games. Online games used to support themselves with subscriptions. When microtransactions first arrived, they were scorned and derided. On game forums. However, in terms of attention and money, they became very successful very quickly. MMOs were essentially forced at gunpoint to adopt them, and most of those who didn't lost business to those who did. And they didn't just roll over either. They tried different models, the VIP model, the hybrid model, but the F2P microtransaction model simply muscled them out of the way.

Prior to the rise of the F2P/Microtransaction model subscription games could easily survive, because they were not competing with F2P games. But once F2P arrived, they had to compete on two different fronts. For most players they had to figure out how to market their games when their game cost money and their F2P competitors were giving it away for free. And for players willing to spend money they had to convince spenders to spend $15 a month and get what everyone else gets when they could spend $25 a month in a different game and get more.

Just exactly how many game developers did you know in 2010? How many did you discuss this transition with, back then? Even before the F2P model really started taking off, back in 2008, I stopped buying used games from Game Stop. Why? Because I had a conversation with a game dev who told me he opposed Game Stop's business model, because the used game market deprived game developers of revenue. Ten different people could play the same game and the game developer would only collect revenue once. In terms of trying to support good game development, buying used games had the same effect as direct piracy. I have never bought a used game again. Because economic game models and putting my money where my mouth is to support game developers is something I didn't just discover yesterday. I've been there for as long as there has been there.

I know how it all happened, and I know why it happened. I played the games, I saw the business models evolve, and I saw the games fall, and take their dev teams with them. And I know who's responsible for it all. We are.

We can blame the game publishers for being greedy, but their greed does not allow them to invent player motivations. We tell them what we're willing to spend money on, and then they try to make as much money as possible selling it to us. And we don't want games where everyone pays a little. We want games in which almost everyone pays nothing and a few whales pay for the rest of us, so that we can play for free and blame the whales for the fact that the game isn't fair.

People still spend around $300 million USD on this game. When subscriptions went the way of the Dodo, they had dropped from an average of $20 USD to $10-$12 USD per month. If you think you can find two million people to pay twelve bucks a month to play MCOC, you're delusional. And the day the Kabam devs take their eyes off the ball and decide to become humanitarians, Disney will take the Marvel license away and give it to someone else with more business sense. And they can't all pay the rent making Flappy Bird clones in Godot.

There will always be exceptions. But Elden Ring isn't one of them. Elden Ring is not a games as a service. Elden Ring is not free to play. Elden Ring is an original IP and doesn't have licensing fees. And while it does have a multiplayer mode, it is primarily a single player game, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. If that is the sort of thing you're interested in, great. Go play that. Single player closed-ended content games can support themselves in theory without recurring fees, because there are no substantive recurring support costs. And in fact, I am in general opposed to microtransactions showing up in those kinds of games, because that is a completely different business model than the free to play massively multiplayer online gaming one. We're talking about MCOC, not Monopoly. A game like Elden Ring can estimate the cost of the contents of the box and charge for the box. And it does not compete with games as a service like MCOC. And that's why there is essentially no price pressure exerted by either game upon the other. No one says Steam games cost $50 so our microtransactions have to be some fraction of that. And no one looks at MCOC in-app purchases and says well, if they are doing that, we need to sell our game for this. They are completely unrelated markets.

DNA3000

If you count them on your fingers, there's a lot. But in terms of percentages, most games vanish less than a year after release, in terms of losing all their paying customers and becoming unsupported. There are statistics floating around on the internet that i recall where among all paying apps (which include apps that are not games) more than 95% of all apps lose essentially all their paying customers within 90 days of release.

Most games fail, and fail quickly. Surviving for over eight years puts MCOC in the top one percent of the top one percent of the top one percent of games. It used to be a common past time on the forums to compare MCOC to other games. This game has better offers. That game has better graphics. Those games have better mechanics. Most of those games no longer exist. I specifically remember all those people who used to say that the only reason MCOC survives is because of the Marvel license: any Marvel game would last because it would have a guaranteed market. That statement certainly aged well.

ReignkingTW

Remember shareware?

Oh wait you don't because no one paid enough.

startropics

people absolutely are addicted to loot boxes. plus sunk cost fallacy.

KTPrimal

You're right. That still does not mean that mcoc is the only mobile game that has been supported for as long as it has been. Even in the past when the game was around the 4 year mark, and the same was being said, there are plenty new mobile games that have reached their 5 year mark. Mobile games have been huge over the last decade and it changed the industry. So much so AAA games have adopted a version of the F2P/MTX model.

Jaycray81

Event is for the hoarders and the whales.

DNA3000

I still play Boom Beach (2013) and Clash of Clans is still going, even though I don't play that one any more. But they are the rare exceptions. MCOC is not the only mobile game that has lasted as long as it has, but the fact that it is in the vanishingly small minority, regardless of how many other survivors there are as well, points to the extreme risks involved and how narrowly they have threaded the needle so far. There is no way to know which design decisions Kabam has made over the years that were the critical ones, but we can say with reasonable certainty that had they consistently made other decisions, like say the popular ones on the forums, they would not likely be around any more. And personally, I think their monetization model should get most of the credit. The game play is not terribly unique, the Marvel license as previously mentioned didn't keep many other contemporary games afloat, and other factors like game complexity and skill level have varied wildly over time. But in spite of all the complaints over the years, the monetization strategy for MCOC has been pretty good. There are no substantive paywalls. The ability to earn premium currency through gameplay is extraordinary among F2P games. Progress is not throttled harshly (cf: Thronebreaker in a week videos). I think almost every bad thing people complain about with regard to the monetization system is actually a good thing in disguise. For example, the low value of most cash offers is seen as a bad thing, but it prevents runaway power inflation at the top. Spenders get big advantages here as elsewhere, but here those advantages are limited by the value of most cash offers. In effect, Kabam is giving spenders the minimum necessary to keep them spending, which is extremely generous behavior towards the F2P playerbase. They just don't get credit for it most of the time.

Their success is due to something, and that something has to be a something they do differently from their competition. It isn't the Marvel license, it isn't game addiction, it certainly isn't their rock solid game platform. I believe it is the very careful economy balance between the free to play players and the spenders.