**WE ARE NO LONGER Temporarily Reverting Tier 1 War Ban System**
After further discussion, the game team has made the decision not make adjustements to the ban system.
The previously proposed fix would have resolved the issue for Summoners who are on the cusp of T1/T2 play, and negatively impacted Alliances more securely in T1. Instead, we recommend that cusp Alliances switch to Manual Placement to your members to place the allotted 5 Ban Champions limit there.
Apologies for the back and forth, and for any confusion.
After further discussion, the game team has made the decision not make adjustements to the ban system.
The previously proposed fix would have resolved the issue for Summoners who are on the cusp of T1/T2 play, and negatively impacted Alliances more securely in T1. Instead, we recommend that cusp Alliances switch to Manual Placement to your members to place the allotted 5 Ban Champions limit there.
Apologies for the back and forth, and for any confusion.
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Court rules against Google in Epic antitrust case
jdschw
Posts: 229 ★★
https://slate.com/technology/2023/12/google-epic-games-antitrust-fortnite-app-store-monopoly.html
This is going to get appealed all the way to the supreme court, of course. But I'm curious if those 30% surcharges might get reduced in the meantime?!
This is going to get appealed all the way to the supreme court, of course. But I'm curious if those 30% surcharges might get reduced in the meantime?!
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Which means, effectively, they need to charge us more in order to hit a revenue target.
So if Google and Apple do in fact lose this case in the long run, in-app prices might go down for us. (Or perhaps just not go up for a while.)
The summoner store open, they give u EXTRA PIXELS, for their larger margin.
So, at least hypothetically, if Google/Apple lose these cases, they would not be able to charge these monopolistic 30% fees, which means companies wouldn't need to account for that 30% when they are figuring out the price points they need to charge in order to make their own sales targets.
@BringPopcorn makes a fair point that existing apps would likely just take the additional profit rather than reducing their prices. But, in the long run, as new apps enter the market that set their prices based on revenue targets without having to account for that extra 30% margin, the prices charged across all apps might go down.
I.E $100 for an Odin in either location ?
Prices in general don't change in that manner. Kabam is unlikely to change the price of an Odin from 99.99 USD to 75.59 USD.
There's a couple things going on here. Game economies aren't run like ordinary economies because game economies are balanced around considerations most real world economies aren't. And there's the fact that most of the time prices aren't set continuously: prices are often aligned to "nice" numbers. 99.99 is way more common than 86.47. And finally, prices tend to have a lot of friction behind them. The price of potatoes might fluctuate, but the price of McDonald's french fries doesn't.
I would guess most people would infer that the reason why the web store offers more units for the same price is because the web store cut is lower, so Kabam can "afford" to put more units in there to compensate. But that's almost certainly not the case. Rather, the web store prices are set to be the same as the in-game pricing levels to make them comparable, and then the web store offers more stuff to encourage people to use the web store because Kabam makes more profit from the web store.
And isn’t that why we now have the Xsolla Web Store for MCOC ?
So that is NOT new.
And isn’t this NEW ruling just about the device manufacturers having ability to offer alternate App Stores from other vendors instead, as a means for then (A) downloading apps via that alternate App Store, and thus (B) to then process purchases via that alternate App Store as well ?
So the ruling itself does not prohibit Google/Apple from charging such high rates.
Guess you could *hope* that they will reduce that % as a way to keep Apps dedicated to Google/Apple.
And that you could also *hope* that then the Apps themselves, since they could keep a higher portion of sales, would “out of the goodness of their heart” reduce said purchase costs then.
And also, it said 30% in the article and here at top. But isn’t it 15% for higher volume Apps, and only 30% for other “not so large” apps ?
Epic sued both Apple and Google. Without getting into the weeds on the legal details, Epic accused both Apple and Google of being illegal monopolies, and abusing that monopoly power in various ways. Both Apple and Epic agreed to have a judge rule in that case, while the Epic v Google case went to a jury.
In the Epic v Apple case, the judged ruled that the case revolved around whether Apple wielded monopoly power in the business market of mobile video games, and ruled that it did not. Because it wasn't a monopoly, it could not, as a matter of law, abuse monopoly power. The sole remaining contention was Epic's assertion that Apple violated a specific anticompetitive law in California by prohibiting app vendors from using third party payment systems and steering customers to them, which is still in dispute although Apple has made changes to their policies in that regard.
In the Epic v Google case, Epic argued that the market in question was the Android app market and convinced the jury of this. This then opened the door to Epic arguing that their business tactics were leveraging illegal monopoly power influence. Furthermore, while Apple is essentially a soup to nuts company, manufacturing hardware, software, and infrastructure services, Google works with a large constellation of partners for everything. As a result, Google makes a lot of deals with a lot of other companies, and that means there are a lot of opportunities to do shady things that simply don't exist for Apple. Apple cannot be accused of arm twisting phone manufacturers to put certain software on their phones, because of course not. But Epic was able to show that in many cases Google did just that, which became evidence that Google's treatment of Epic was part of a pattern of unfair competitive actions.
In isolation, the Apple case, however the appeals get resolved, is ultimately going to be about changing small policies. But the Google case has people looking much more closely, because the ruling means it is no longer about Google's app store cut or Epic's ability to sell games on the Play Store. Google has been ruled to be an illegal monopoly. That has potentially dramatic ramifications if the ruling holds up under appeal (which there are people who think it won't actually, when extrapolating from the Apple ruling).
It seems contradictory that the Epic v Apple and Epic v Google cases could resolve so differently, but in my opinion that's because those two cases diverged from the start and became two completely different lawsuits about two completely different things. Epic could not make the case that Apple was a monopoly for anything except the Apple marketplace itself, and that was an unconvincing argument because Apple could counter that Epic was a monopoly force in the Epic market, an obvious perversity. But Google could not easily make the same counter argument, and they had to make it to a jury of twelve lay people, not one judge who would study the issue from a legal perspective, not a lay person's perspective.
The company needs to hit its sales targets to be profitable. In order to do that, they can calculate how much money *they* need to make for each item they sell. If they set a price or just pick a "tier" and google sets those prices, the end result is the same: they need a price point that works for them, and we have to pay more than that price point because of google/apple's surcharge.
Generally, the point to selling stuff is to sell as much stuff as possible, but F2P games don’t have an inventory to move. In fact there are strong incentives to sell fewer things for more money than sell many things for less money when it comes to economy balance and F2P accessibility. So the great irony is that if app stores lower their commission, the net result could be lower prices for the same stuff, or it could cause us to get *less* stuff for the same price, as counter-intuitive as that might sound.
This is a F2P game at its heart. Do they want to make money? Of course. $99 is the most any ever cost in this game. At least until the Webstore came around. Now it's $199. So it's not like they haven't been able to make profit off of those purchases.
If pure sales were the main goal for Kabam, you wouldn't see limits on things like Cyber Weekend. One small change Kabam did make a few years ago was to change the limit from 3 to 5. On the $99 bundles.
The other thing to keep in mind is that when Kabam started, they had a lot more to pay for as a standalone studio. They many games under their umbrella and larger staff. They also had revenue coming from those other games too. MCOC price points haven't changed since the games launch for in-game purchases. That should tell you right there that they're able to make the profit they need.
If the F2P company decides to maintain its revenue by selling fewer items at a higher cost, it's reasonable to infer that it would effectively reduce the fraction of spending players in its game. (Fewer players would spend the same price for the less desirable items).
So the question is: in a F2P model, if we assume the same revenue in either case, is it better to have a higher percentage of spending players that spend less per player? Or a smaller percentage of spending players that spend more per player?
My instinct is to assume that having a higher spender percentage is better, because it means your customer base is larger. But maybe I'm wrong about that. Maybe a smaller, richer spender base is more reliable.
Very interesting!
The *goal* is to improve conversion rate, in other words the percentage of players who spend. Because of course it is. In a localized sense, getting more people to spend equates to having more revenue, it suggests more engagement and interest in the game, etc. But more spenders is in effect a less F2P friendly game, for this reason. If you're a free player and 98% of all the players in the game are also free players, then most of the time you'll be surrounded by free players. You'll be comparing yourself to free players. You'll be competing with free players. But if the game is, say, 50% spender, then you'll be constantly surrounded by spenders. You'll be constantly competing against spenders. You will be reminded of what spending gets non-stop, and it will be impossible to escape the advantages that spending grants. You may find that the game feels hostile to free players as a result, which means the game might attract fewer free players, which could cause long term damage to the longevity to your game.
This is why when people say that Kabam is just out to make as much money as possible, as all companies are, that's a very oversimplistic viewpoint, and on its face it is completely false. What they want, which is also what most companies want, is long term sustainable success. And for a game like MCOC, long term sustainable success means making as much money as possible today *while* balancing the requirements necessary to maintain a sustainable game and playerbase for the future, and those two goals are mutually contradictory.
This is also why people often complain about "inconsistency" when it comes to things like monetization and balance. These decisions *are* inconsistent on the surface, because no one kind of decision is always appropriate. It is really about balancing the need to make revenue with the need to not place too much pressure on players to spend and the desire for the economic balance between spending returns and gameplay returns to incentivize spending enough while not creating too large of a perceived gap with those incentives. The apparent inconsistency comes from trying to keep multiple sides of the scales balanced.
The direct answer to your question is: we don't know. Kabam has numbers and metrics, and based on those metrics they have specific targets they believe would be best for the game. Given those targets, that would determine if they decided to sell more stuff to more people for less money or less stuff to fewer people for the same costs, in this particular situation. But that answer could change for different situations.
Second, your prices have to at least appear reasonable compared to your competition, even if there is no apples to apples way to compare two different games as a service microtransactions. If everyone else holds prices, so can you. But if some start to lower prices because they can, that will force everyone else to consider whether that lowering forces them to follow suit.
In point of fact, I am a company, or rather an owner/officer of one. So I can answer this question directly: when my costs go down, sometimes I lower prices and sometimes I do not. It depends on the circumstances.