Likely because they don’t know how much it costs & the only people telling them are the developers, some of who are, not entirely trustworthy…
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This is too ironic to be real right? You mention people come in with hearsay, you said you didn’t need documentation for a money related issue.
Here are the numbers, in 2 years Elden Ring sold 12 million copies at 60$, that’s 720 million dollars in gross revenue, let’s say they lose 30% of that in taxes or fees. 504 million dollars against their budget of 200 million dollars (yes, 200 million dollars to make Elden Ring, that’s a lot of money, more money than I would assume “not a lot” to be). So in the years since Elden Ring has released they have (in assumption) 304 million dollars left over. to pay employees and run servers. But these numebrs ignore investors, stock holders, etc.
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FromSoftware (and any big enough studio) get investors to pay upfront for their costs. Most AAA studios have shareholders that also infuse money into the company.
If that were as linear as you say, everything everywhere would be sold at production cost. The fact that it doesn’t happen should be enough to tell you that things are never that simple.
Following on the things are not so linear, there is an optimal line. As I said before, even if they sold MTX for 1$ or even for 0.1$ most players still wouldn’t buy them. So it becomes a balance between how many new players will buy it if I lower the price and how much total money I will get. If you’re selling for 100$ and 5 players buy them you make 500%. If you lower it to 50 and only 8 buy them, you only make 400$. And if you lower them to 1$ and only 300 buy them, you only make 300$. So things aren’t as linear as you seem to think with your economic knowledge.
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100% and that was a point I was kinda gesturing towards. Making arguments of authority is something a lot of people do and it’s disheartening. “Oh the company said this so that must mean they’re telling the truth” as if the company doesn’t have something to gain.
Chris Wilson seems like a good dude but with the price of his shop and number of items, I’m waiting to hear about his secret Lamborghini collection offshore.
You’re right and in my comment I said “virtually linear”. There is some falloff. I mean I also said they could sell their products for “any number under the sun” and that’s not true but you get what I mean. They also couldn’t sell for too cheap because there are a limited number of players on the server so you’re right. They would have to find that line and I’m saying I can tell you with certainty that this is not the line. I’d be interested to see what kind of sales they make if they sold everything for 50% cheaper for 2 weeks.
I’d be interested to know what your authority is to make that claim. I have no idea what that line is and I’m pretty sure if you got 5 economists to study it, they would come up with 5 different values anyway.
You mean what PoE regularly does? You are aware that that is a sales tactic? They make things more expensive than they really are so that not that many players will buy them in normal circumstances (though some still will) and when you make a half off sale you have a lot more players buying it because it’s a bargain. In fact, you get players buying it at half price that would have never bought them if they were always at that price.
It’s the same thing fast food restaurants do with their menus. You always have 3 prices where one is, for example, 10$, another is 18$ and another is 20$. The 18$ one is there only so that most people end up buying the 20$ one.
Yeah I’m just making common sense judgements. I’m not saying I’m an expert and I’m not saying I know the numbers within EHG. But it’s common sense that a small 3D model of a pet doesn’t cost $20 in the same world where an entire game costs $35. It’s really not complicated. MTX are to ensure fiscal longevity. The beautiful thing about it is that the more cosmetics they have, the more items they have to sell, the more money they can make. The game grows with the company at least to some degree. New players will inevitably come in and find things they want to buy. It’s not a coincidence that EHG chose to follow the exact pricing style as GGG: it’s because EHG want to make as much as possible and because they know GGG is making bank far beyond they needs of the employees and the company.
It’s also common sense to say that an airpod doesn’t cost 300$ in the same world where an iPhone costs 1k$, and yet they have a HUGE team of economist and analysts and they figured out that was the price that was best for them. Would they sell more if they lowered the price? Certainly. Would they make more money? Probably not.
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I just want to clarify that I’m not defending the prices as they are. I don’t really know if they should be changed or not. I’m just arguing about your assumptions of “common sense”.
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Prove it 'cause…
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A couple things:
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(Obviously) you don’t have to buy anything beyond the base game
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The in-game item appearances look really good already
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The shop structure & costs have been re-established previously to be more fair to consumers
Not saying that your concerns are invalid, rather these are 3 major points to consider when interacting with the in-game shop and choosing how you spend your money.
Funny.
I’m confused. If all you’re complaining about is the mtx prices are too high, why are you saying LE is ripping off the monetization scheme of POE. Just say outright you think the prices are too high and should be lowered.
I don’t think you’re right but there’s no need to conflate your opinion in semantics and arguments for the pricing scheme since people will pay what they’re going to pay.
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I dont personally thing they are too high. I won’t buy too many more simply becuase I’m content with what I have (and finances suck, but that’s a separate issue). Price points are fine, and as was mentioned here, they’ll use sales as a tactic to get more purchases.
There have been countless studies and statistics already, but just to mention one. This is for F2P games, so you can expect that people are even less likely to buy stuff after having paid for the game.
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lol.
This is utter nonsense. A $60 supporter pack gives you a full armour set and 600 points. Over 80% of the full armour packs are priced at 420 points or less. You could get two full armour sets and have enough left over to buy any skill gem effect.
If your car payment is less than or equivalent to only $150, cosmetic MTX were not made for you. You are not the market for them, period. They are made for people who have money. A <= $150 car payment very likely means you do not have money to spend on frivolous things like pretty hats in a video game.
Meanwhile, you’re proving yourself wrong when you say silly stuff like this:
You are complaining about the idea of spending five dollars, an amount so low it isn’t even money, and calling it “daylight robbery”. You aren’t willing to spend money now. You’re not going to buy anything if they lower their price point. And neither would enough other people to justify a cost reduction.
If lower MTX costs resulted in higher total revenue due to increased purchase volume, MTX costs would be lower. Everywhere. It’s peoples’ entire jobs to figure this out based on billions of transactions worth of data, and what they’ve figured out is that broke gamers flip their lids when a game costs $70 instead of $60. In other words, broke gamers don’t buy pretty hats no matter how little they cost. So they don’t try to sell pretty hats to broke gamers, they sell them to not-broke gamers, for whom dropping money on a pretty hat is an unnoticeable cost for something they’ll get dozens of hours of enjoyment from. This:
Is not an objective fact, it is your opinion, and when you’re running around calling $5 daylight robbery, that opinion isn’t worth even the fraction of a penny it took to transmit it from your computer to the forum servers.
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It’s important context that that study was done not just on F2P games, but on mobile F2P games. The base level of buy-in on a mobile game is incredibly low (as Swrve’s data showed) just because of the nature of the platform.
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Ill agree to a base argument of “are the mtx 2 expensive”, yes, imo.
But not aggressively so. Have you looked at the D4 shop for example? I think remember seeing simple back things also being sold for 20 bucks but I could be wrong.
At the end of the day, thats just how these games work. League of legends sells 35 dollar skins and churns out dozens and dozens of skins each year. I wont comment on how easy they are to make, I dont do art for a living. I also dont buy league skins, I can get 1-3 decent little indie games for the money I could spend on skins.
That being said, they dont always offer terrible deals, going from my standard purchase to ultimate cost me 20 bucks, I got 2 armor sets, 2 portals, and a bunch of pets. For 20 dollars thats quite a good deal.
I wont spend 40 dollars on the supporter pack, as for me the quality does not line up with the cost. however they did offer me a deal that felt worth purchasing value wise. and im sure they will do it again in the future.
And for the early comment about PoE mtx, I buy a supporter pack maybe once a year? Ive never once felt bad about my PoE purchases. I dont buy the 350 dollar armor sets. I dont need them to be happy, hell I dont even use my supporter pack armors that often. I use the 60 dollars worth of points to buy skill mtxs on sale. PoE is actually fairly decent when it comes to mtx for me because for 60 bucks I can get 6-8 skill mtx that make shiny colors and big booms for the 300+ hours a league I will be playing said skill.
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I’m sorry the filthy poor person (if they can even be called that) is getting in the way on your internet, I’ll have the bouncers rough him up a little then tjrow him down the stairs a few times with gusto to make sure he doesn’t offend you with his very existence ever again.
Is $20 “not even money” as well? I’d be happy to take some “not money” several times an hour from you if you’re not going to miss it.
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My main issue with how the packs are setup is the value. Bare minimum each pack should contain its value in points, because as it stands there is no reason for the packs to have a difference in price at all. Unlike POE, the packs have remarkably less value the more expensive they get. Why would the average person be motivated to spend 50 bucks on a pack to get effectively the same exact thing as the person who spent 20 bucks?