We've merged together several topics about the same matter so it can be addressed all at once. We understand that this offer isn't going to appeal to everyone but it will to some, just as the next offer may not appeal to them but to some of you.
I don't want to take this out on the forum moderators, but I think a lot of players would like to know if anyone at Kabam knows what a blatant slap in the face this is to 99% of players? Even to those who aren't ready for Act 6.
What I would like to know is why people keep thinking, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the price of the offers correlates to the progress of the players? That seems to be completely irrelevant, like thinking that someone's hat size determines how well they can intercept.
Players keep joining the game, players keep leaving the game. Many of the absolute top players of the game in two or three years might not have even found the game yet. Every single day someone joins the game that would be more than willing to buy those 4* offers to jump start their game play. And every single day there are players for whom the value proposition of the current deals is actually entirely reasonable.
The people who think a 4* champ has some sort of intrinsic value that they can compare to the amount of money the associated offer costs is entitled to that perspective, but they will be permanently bewildered by how this and all other F2P games monetize themselves. It is the people who understand that they aren't buying *things* they are buying *time* that find the offers a lot more comprehensible. A 4* champ is worth time to me: today almost no time, long ago quite a lot of time. That means the offer was worth more money long ago to me than it does now. Today, I wouldn't buy those offers because they don't give me enough of a time advantage: I earn that stuff too quickly. But it might have made more sense to me a month after I started playing. I might still not have paid the cash, but it would have been more worth it.
The stuff inside the offers has no intrinsic value. It only has relative value to different players based on both their current progress level and how fast they can earn things. The idea that any offer is "a slap in the face" to 99% of the players completely fails to understand both what value even is in a game like this, and the fact that the playerbase is extremely diverse, and there is no such thing as a cash offer that is materially appropriate for 99% of the players.
"You don't own things in the game" is not just a legal technicality. It is explicitly how you are supposed to judge cash offers.
99% was clearly hyperbolic, and the slap in the face has more to do with the timing than the price and the value of the items included. Even though the price and the value is absurd as well, regardless of your level of progress in the game, considering the amount of time you could save yourself by investing in other offers
What. The. Hell. Happened here. Why are people going so off the rails about this deal? If this deal had come a week ago we wouldn’t be arguing like this, it’s a rediculous deal and is way overpriced but just the size of the reaction to this deal... jeez
Netmarble is the company that owns Kabam and MCOC now. They're a publicly-traded South Korean company. I took a look at their Q4 2018 results. I wish it was more detailed, but they give a pretty good breakdown.
Currently, MCOC makes up 18% of their revenue. This has steadily increased since the acquisition. In Q2 2017, the game was 13%. The increase could be for a couple reasons: MCOC revenue rising, Netmarble total revenue flat or falling, or a combination of the two.
Looks like it's more a product of Netmarble's total revenue falling. They're also less profitable than they used to be. Ultimately, it's looking more and more like the company needs MCOC to thrive, so expect increased monetization going forward.
What. The. Hell. Happened here. Why are people going so off the rails about this deal? If this deal had come a week ago we wouldn’t be arguing like this, it’s a rediculous deal and is way overpriced but just the size of the reaction to this deal... jeez
If this was any other day of the week this would be a really bad offer and people would complain. But it’s especially incendiary because people are still bitter about the 4* ban.
I just think it's one of those times where the timing lined up that way. People are still reactive about the news, and the Offer came out after. They're not even connected, really. Different target audience.
Granted, I will say that the timing is coincidental, but when you're talking about asking Marketing to verify their plans with Design, that's a whole cross-department mess that's not feasible.
"when you're talking about asking Marketing to verify their plans with Design, that's a whole cross-department mess that's not feasible."
No, it isn't. I have worked in companies that range from small to Fortune 500 size, mostly from the finance side but involved with Marketing at times. Not as difficult as you're making it out to be.
Not the same ballpark. Not at all. There are way too many variables involved with Design. They are most certainly working on something at all times, sometimes months in advance, and nothing is certain until it's as optimal as they can get it for release. Marketing operates at a different pace, with different objectives, and different goals. Inevitably, they would be waiting indefinitely at times for Devs to give the "OK", and that would be a financial nightmare. Totally diffetent deadlines.
So no one in marketing was aware that 4* were going to be locked out of Act 6? No one was aware of the huge amount of outrage surrounding that decision? No one had the common sense to say maybe this is really poor timing and we shouldn't go ahead with the offer at this time?
I had to think about this one for a while. I could tell ahead of time that the content restriction was going to be controversial, so that would be an obvious concern. Would I have advised marketing or monetization to change the offer because of the perception problems associated with the offer relative to the Act 6 announcement?
No.
I'm not saying I always agree with all of Kabam's monetization decisions, nor am I saying I always fully understand them. But I can answer the question of what I would have done given the same circumstances, if I was in charge. Monetization offers go out all the time targeting a lot of different slices of the player population. Simplifying greatly, if I knew Act 6 was going to include 5*/6* progress gates, that would almost certainly be shifting the long term monetization strategy towards accelerating progress below a certain level (probably below the general vicinity of uncollected) and that means we'd be generating a slowly escalating set of offers for 4* champions and the like. There's not going to be a good time to do that because the people who hate the gate are going to use the offer against Kabam no matter when it happens. Changing it would also set the dangerous precedent that players at one progress point in the game were so important that its perfectly fine to take something away from a completely different progress point just to appease them. So I'd make the call to allow the offer to go through, and not disrupt the schedule.
I'm not saying Kabam went through the same thought process I would have. Nor am I saying all game developers would come to the same conclusion. But the idea that it should be "obvious" the offer should have been pulled is not obvious to me, speaking as someone who makes executive-level decisions all the time in my own business, and has some small experience within the context of game development specifically.
Netmarble is the company that owns Kabam and MCOC now. They're a publicly-traded South Korean company. I took a look at their Q4 2018 results. I wish it was more detailed, but they give a pretty good breakdown.
Currently, MCOC makes up 18% of their revenue. This has steadily increased since the acquisition. In Q2 2017, the game was 13%. The increase could be for a couple reasons: MCOC revenue rising, Netmarble total revenue flat or falling, or a combination of the two.
Looks like it's more a product of Netmarble's total revenue falling. They're also less profitable than they used to be. Ultimately, it's looking more and more like the company needs MCOC to thrive, so expect increased monetization going forward.
I don't have relevant work experience (I literally just finished school) but your explanation here is lacking a lot of detail
I took at look at this a while ago myself. Netmarble reports overall revenue and percentage revenue for their top titles. You can do some basic arithmetic to find out how much revenue MCOC itself has been earning for the year or so. Since I suspect most of MCOC's revenue is in foreign currency (Netmarble is Korean, so they report all their numbers in Korean Wan) you can estimate currency fluctuations by converting revenue into adjusted dollars using any of a number of internet sites that have currency conversion history.
Revenue for Netmarble: Q1: 507, Q2: 501, Q3: 526, Q4: 487 Percentage of revenue for MCOC: Q1: 16% Q2: 15% Q3: 14% Q4: 18%
This means MCOC generated 81, 75, 74, and 88 billion Won in those quarters. Converting that to USD using currency historical data, that's about $76.7m, $67.4m, $66.2m, and $78.7m in each of those quarters. The differences could be seasonal for the game: they don't follow the overall revenue line for Netmarble as a whole.
In any case, I'd say that the percentage increase was due to a combination of MCOC making more money in Q4 than average, and Netmarble generating less overall revenue in Q4 from all other properties. MCOC's average revenue per quarter for the 2018 financial year was about 79.5 bn, or about $72.6 million. There's no obvious revenue trend up or down that I can see in the data I reviewed, but there's not a lot of data points available to confirm a trend.
So you are going to announce that act 6 will have a ban on 4*s then release a deal to Max out 4*s with no deal on 5*s in sight I mean sure some people (myself included) still use 4*s elsewhere but if we gonna need 5*s in act 6 why not also release a deal on that
I just think it's one of those times where the timing lined up that way. People are still reactive about the news, and the Offer came out after. They're not even connected, really. Different target audience.
proposing an offer to max out our 4 stars less than a week after making them useless...
Well, either kabam has a dark sense of humor or its time to recruit a real communication manager and commercial to help you with the offers you gracefully propose
proposing an offer to max out our 4 stars less than a week after making them useless...
Well, either kabam has a dark sense of humor or its time to recruit a real communication manager and commercial to help you with the offers you gracefully propose
Or 4*s are only sort of useless for a very small portion of the players who wouldn't buy this deal anyway. And even those players will still use them in content including, but not limited to, back issues #2 which has yet to be released. It's a bad deal. They are all bad deals. The timing is funny but not nefarious. What's insane is how many pages this thread has gone on over just one more terrible offer (that people keep buying anyway) Can anyone on this thread honestly claim that they would’ve bought this deal without the act 6 announcement? There’s nothing to see here.
It’s funny because if it had been a 5* deal the reaction would have been “See? Milk the whales!! 🐳 Told you it’s a money grab!! What a slap in the face!!”
Comments
Here’s 169$ for 4* rank champs, but u can’t use them in act 6..
It’s hilarious they did this offer right before the release. It’s honestly comical to see how this crooked company works
I don't have relevant work experience (I literally just finished school) but your explanation here is lacking a lot of detail
No.
I'm not saying I always agree with all of Kabam's monetization decisions, nor am I saying I always fully understand them. But I can answer the question of what I would have done given the same circumstances, if I was in charge. Monetization offers go out all the time targeting a lot of different slices of the player population. Simplifying greatly, if I knew Act 6 was going to include 5*/6* progress gates, that would almost certainly be shifting the long term monetization strategy towards accelerating progress below a certain level (probably below the general vicinity of uncollected) and that means we'd be generating a slowly escalating set of offers for 4* champions and the like. There's not going to be a good time to do that because the people who hate the gate are going to use the offer against Kabam no matter when it happens. Changing it would also set the dangerous precedent that players at one progress point in the game were so important that its perfectly fine to take something away from a completely different progress point just to appease them. So I'd make the call to allow the offer to go through, and not disrupt the schedule.
I'm not saying Kabam went through the same thought process I would have. Nor am I saying all game developers would come to the same conclusion. But the idea that it should be "obvious" the offer should have been pulled is not obvious to me, speaking as someone who makes executive-level decisions all the time in my own business, and has some small experience within the context of game development specifically.
Revenue for Netmarble: Q1: 507, Q2: 501, Q3: 526, Q4: 487
Percentage of revenue for MCOC: Q1: 16% Q2: 15% Q3: 14% Q4: 18%
This means MCOC generated 81, 75, 74, and 88 billion Won in those quarters. Converting that to USD using currency historical data, that's about $76.7m, $67.4m, $66.2m, and $78.7m in each of those quarters. The differences could be seasonal for the game: they don't follow the overall revenue line for Netmarble as a whole.
In any case, I'd say that the percentage increase was due to a combination of MCOC making more money in Q4 than average, and Netmarble generating less overall revenue in Q4 from all other properties. MCOC's average revenue per quarter for the 2018 financial year was about 79.5 bn, or about $72.6 million. There's no obvious revenue trend up or down that I can see in the data I reviewed, but there's not a lot of data points available to confirm a trend.
Just what we needed
Well, either kabam has a dark sense of humor or its time to recruit a real communication manager and commercial to help you with the offers you gracefully propose