Who at kabam tought this was a good dealπ
DiscoNnectKing
Member Posts: 529 β
β
β
Almost 300$ for not even a titan and 2 7*π
34
Comments
They happy, we happy, Kabam happy, Youtubers who rate offers happy. Even the people not happy are probably happy they can complain about being not happy. No losers here.
You must be a joy to go shopping with.
next deal will be $60 for a full 7 star, and 7500 titan shards... and it will be a "bargain" in comparison.
Then you have the economy balancing issues that come from every deal needing to be great value and then there is 0 hope for ftp to even think about competing. As an example, let's say that every deal has been great value for spenders, then the whales who actually spend on these types of offers, would have gone from, lets say 30 r3s (which is probably close to what it actually is right now) to having anywhere from 60-90 r3s. However, the ftps still would only have the same number of r3s as they do right now. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to be facing people with a full BG deck of r3s at probably a high sig too for all of them.
That's the main issue that comes when you want to inject better offers into the economy.
There are two fundamental models for massively multiplayer online games. There's the subscription model, and there's the microtransaction supported model, which is largely congruent with but not exactly synonymous with the free to play model.
In the subscription model everyone pays, and everyone pays basically the same amount. From a game-economy point of view this is the simplest model, because the game economy can be designed as if money doesn't exist. Because everyone spends the same amount, everyone sees the same game. All rewards can be awarded based solely on game play. There are no whales, no pay to play, no spending disparities.
The problem is: not everyone wants to pay. In fact, even the notion that everyone "pays the same" in a subscription model is flawed, because while that might be true in a literal sense, it isn't true from the perspective of the spenders. A millionaire business owner paying twenty bucks a month is not paying the same amount, on a relative basis, as a minimum wage student. The former is paying essentially nothing, the latter is paying a substantial portion of their discretionary budget. Relative to their propensity to pay, the first one is getting off easy while the latter is being asked to make a huge sacrifice to play the game.
The free to play microtransaction model allows everyone to pay for free, and then sells incremental benefits in the game for money. In this model, most players play for free, because in reality most people don't have tons of discretionary money to spend. A few do spend, and of those people some spend a lot in absolute terms, because they can afford to. This is the harder model to design for, because your in-game economy has to account for the monetization of the game. To make enough money to survive, you have to convince people to spend when they don't need to. You need to offer them things they are willing to spend on. But you also need to make sure that the things you offer them aren't so overwhelmingly beneficial that you convince the free players it isn't worth playing the game anymore. Ideally you want to sell things that the spenders thing is worth it, but the non-spenders equally think don't really matter.
You might think these are extremes, and there are lots of options in the middle, with some subscription fees and some microtransactions. And you'd be right. However, it seems like most successful games exist at the extremes, either trying to offer as level a playing field as possible with subscriptions, or trying to implement as unobtrusive microtransactions as possible by making concentrating spending among a minority of players.
What happens if all the deals are a) affordable and b) high value? Then most players will spend. Which will leave the few who don't at a disadvantage, and what's worse they will be at a disadvantage not just to a few whales, but to almost everyone around them. When you don't spend, and neither does most of the players you know, that's fine. When you don't spend and it seems like you're the only one, that's a hostile environment that most would soon leave.
You can force everyone to spend the same amount with subscriptions. Or you can allow most players to play for free, surrounded by other free to play players, with only a small minority spending a ton of money that everyone else can usually safely ignore. But anything in the middle creates additional problems.
In a recent live stream on Vega's channel, Kabam Crashed more or less stated his position aligns with the idea of "sell as little as possible to as few as possible" when he said almost exactly those words when describing his monetization philosophy. Crashed is, among other things, one of the people responsible for monetization in MCOC.
And what does the myth of capitalism have to do with it?
Itβs people playing the game with easy to get disposable income.
I'm referring to
"tHaT's nOt cOmMunIsM"