How i think LE should be monetized

General
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facts

  1. following GGG’s monetization model does not work.
  • GGG built up its playerbase and when it first started off, players were content with a league mechanic being a silly box that spawns monsters. the development costs to make those leagues were low and they made leagues more fledged out as their player base grew.
  • GGG has a huge player base now so they can afford to make a league that can feel like an entire mini campaign.
  • GGG started when they barely had any competitors. it was the only d-like doing actual league mechanics and constantly introducing new skills and items.
  • LE came into a saturated market where players know what they want. theres much more different types of entertainment around too competing for our time.
  • LE simply does not have the same playerbase/numbers
  1. Cosmetics in LE dont feel worth it.
  • one can argue that LE has a unique artstyle. i agree, in fact i find it sometimes beautiful. but in comparison with POE1/2, D4, LE’s artstyle is … lacking. and that is me being VERY generous with my words. you can argue all you like and you can say that in your opinion, LE looks the best. COOL then buy all the MTX coz most of the player base isnt buying them.
  • price point wise LE’s mtx is one of the cheapest. which is on surface level a good thing. but the reality is, we’re really picky people nowadays. speaking for myself and most people i know, if i see a shirt thats dirt cheap but i dont vibe with it, i wouldnt even give it a second glance. in fact if given free, i d probably where it at home.

suggestions

  1. stop trying to make mtxs a thing. its not a thing.
  • as mentioned. most people dont feel like buying the mtxs as they dont feel worth it. i bought mtx’s in LE to support the devs more than anything else. i’ve never looked at any mtx in LE and felt like damn! i want that! POE and D4 has tons of mtx that look cool and have so much detail that make me go FUUUUCK its expensive but i want that!
  • so save your dev costs. focus on making more content on the game.
  1. Scrap all notion of F2P and go all out paid content (paid expansions)
  • the game is already not making money and a lot of the playerbase are already pissed at whatever EHG is announcing.
  • just focus on making paid expansions like GD.
  1. Screw the entire seasonal model.
  • you dont have the playerbase numbers to do this.
  • seasonal content takes tons of time and resources.
  • be humble. even blizzard cant nail seasonal content but they have a lot of “backup money” that you dont.

the live service model isnt working. this reminds me of how blizzard tried to force heroes of the storm into an e-sport. in fact its quite similar. Dota and LoL exists as major players and blizzard tried to squeeze in to get a share of the market. then when they realized that the interest was not “impactful enough” and that the existing playerbase was generating “not enough income” they axed the entire idea of making it an e-sport.

replace LoL and Dota with D4 and POE, and replace HotS with LE. same thing.

at this point what else can EHG lose?

then again we dont know what krafton will do. if they inject resources into beautifying LE, it could boost a huge lot of interest.

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Follow classic Diablo 2 and Grim dawn models.

Boxed game and paid expansions. Ladder reset every 3 months, with some balancing/bug fix.

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yeap thats practically what i m suggesting.

also, we can see the true fans of the game are roughly 1-2k players who keep playing the game past season launch.

its really not much and it really shows that its not worth keeping it as an online only game.
assuming 2k users are people who actually play the game, if 10% spend 30 usd per expansion. thats a measly 6k USD. if instead 2k players spend 30 usd for every expansion, thats 60K usd.

i will point out, krafton really made a bad business deal buying LE. PUBG appeals to a very large audience. D-like lovers are a niche market, and LE enjoyers are a niche of this niche.

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That would be a bad idea.

The issue is quantity.

As you said:

So you need a lot of variety to have something you personally vibe with, right?

Same thing with MTX. There can be hundreds in a store and you don’t like any… but the more variety there is the more likely someone goes ‘oh cool, that’s neat, I’ll buy that!’.

Creating MTX also costs basically nothing. A 10€ MTX costs around 500-1000€ to make in work-time, which is peanuts. 100 sold copies over a 2 year timeframe with a playerbase of around 250k individuals as LE has? That’s easy.

That’s what got them in this situation in the first place. ‘We first want to provide a solid finished game before filling our MTX store’.

Nah… you don’t do that. You always provide something along the line already and expand. The moment you are finished it needs to be rock-solid already.

They made no money because they provided us with barely anything to spend money on. Go and see for yourself exactly what the store provides.

At minimum there should be a single MTX per skill available. We don’t have that many after all.
There should also be at minimum 10 different sets of gear available, optimally with a few pieces of alternative style… more bulky helmet… more sleek helmet, that kinda thing in the same style-direction though.
Simply retextures are not a viable thing… the price-tag above I mentioned? That’s with simple effects, not a model with a texture solely, that would be even cheaper. Complex stuff goes high. But effects need to be visible. Hence properly sized and flashy enough to stand out along the effect-vomit ARPGs are. A tiny footstep barely bigger then the foot itself just doesn’t cut it.

I would rather say ‘especially’ :stuck_out_tongue: They’re so detached from reality that it’s a miracle that company is still actually standing.

Don’t you have a phone? :wink:

It’s not the seasonal model that an issue, it’s reliability and community mechanics lacking (which are the reason for live-service).

I’m on your side with expansion costing something and the box price, the end. Provide MTX on top like other games and that’s it, you’re right there.

But it wasn’t the problem that people don’t buy it… it’s still that nothing is there to buy.

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to these 2 quotes. as i said, most people have a general sense of what they like. for sure i dont vibe with LE’s art choice. but i bet a huge lot of people also dont vibe with LE’s mtx.

almost any random armor set from d4 could look much better than LE’s mtx. in a different post i pointed out how one of POE’s challenge mtx rewards that players could get for FREE looks significantly better than any mtx LE has to offer.

so when you say quantity, it doesnt really hit anything. quantity definitely is good, but in LE’s mtx case, all their mtx seems like white drops. you can have a huge quantity of them but people dont want to even pick them or even hide them from the loot filter.

and yet here we are. EHG got sold off. if things were as easy as you said they were then why didnt it work?

agreed but then again the game looks ugly. if you remove your bias for a while, show POE/D4 /LE mtx to some of your gamer friends and ask them to rate them. i wouldnt be surprised if many didnt prefer LE.

i m with you on MTX but only if they make the mtx look worth it. and in order to do that, they have to change the entire visual to match the competitors.

currently i m playing WWM. even tho its not a direct competitor to LE. the mtx there are certainly not cheap. but it still dips into my “fuck money”. so when i make a decision, do i buy an mtx from WWM or LE. LE looses out. this is true even with POE. i would rather buy POE mtx than LE. LE’s mtx suffers from the art design not being appealing enough.

until they push up the standards to where people are more willing to spend on mtx. as is, its simply undesirable.

edit: btw. if i come off sounding frustrated. i slightly am. because I really do want LE to succeed and i m saddened with its current state. my post is kind of a “in hindsight” post. where its all up to krafton on how they want to go moving forward.

if i sound antagonistic, i apologize.

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Which has to do with the effect quality.
A simple retexture as mentioned doesn’t do it after all. It needs effects. Every MTX does basically.

Cause they didn’t provide us any to buy! :stuck_out_tongue:

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As I said in other threads. Milk everything you can without what you said in the past. Chest MTX, different looking NPC’s, optional housing you can use instead of of going through the monolith like a peasant maybe even shards in the end of time floating in the backround so people can see what kind of nice houses and decor thereis. There are plenty of options but for starters sell good looking stuff and you’ll sell more.

Ask the community what they want. Heck they made a survey about mid season patches why can’t they make a survey about “What do want so we can start to understand what the hell we are needing to do.”. And for the love of god don’t ask your useual people they will only tell you:

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I think a part of the problem with the MTX sales isn’t simply the quality or quantity but simply that LE has a shelf price.
Some people that are big supporters (like most people on this forum) will still buy supporter packs and MTX, but most people won’t buy MTX on top of a shelf price.

If your average player is playing PoE (we’ll ignore the convenience of stash tabs that incentivizes them to buy those), having fun, and they see some notification that there is an MTX sale going on, they’ll likely think “Yeah, why not? I’m having fun and it’s a free game, I’ll buy some of what’s discounted here”.
In contrast, your average player having fun in LE will see the same notification and go “Nah, I already paid for it, not going to spend more”.

MTX and supporter packs work better on a F2P model. People are more incentivized to buy them that way. When you already paid for your game, players are more reluctant to spend more on top of that.
Some people like us will be fine with buying MTX/packs in LE as though it were a free game because we love the genre, but that’s not the usual experience.

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I’m not a big MTX buyer but I don’t care if there is a box price if I realy, realy, reaaaaaly want an MTX. Heck I even bought some overpriced D4 MTX because some looked VERY nice while feeling like scum to to give Blizzard extra money.

I will not buy a supporter pack for LE because I don’t want to support them right now. My trust in EHG is broken no matter how much I want LE to become a good game for me again. I don’t run on hope or copium.

I only bought stuff I needed in PoE so I threw 50 bucks at them. I never was big on buyinf MTX from them because I always thought they made their normal armor look fugly and want to milk MTX so my toon isn’t looking like he delivery eyecancer left and right.
In LE it’s the other way arround most normal stuff looks far better then anything I can buy in the shop so why should I even care at all?

If the game was good I would spend more but to me it’s a 4/10 sorry I reccomended this game once friends. Fun part some people realy wanted an apologie because they thought of LE in even worse ways then I do and they deem it beyond rescue.

Sure people feel like they are generous because the game was free. This is an easy psychological trick.

As I said above it’s just tricking peoples brains. If you feel like you already paid why would you pay again and again?

Looking at the market LE would’ve been in a better place… at least not between a rock and a hard place… if they didn’t said outlandish things like “Buy once…” and instantly falter after beeing bought by Krafton that has a terrible name in the gaming world. EHG ,ade their bed and now has to sleep in it.

They could’ve done stuff much differently and actively let the community be part of the process but it wasn’t important to them or they asked the useual suspects that would eat a poop sandwich as long as it was made by EHG.

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This is actually another important factor. The base models of PoE are very plain (or even ugly) so people want to buy MTX to look better.
In LE the base models are actually pretty (on average) so most people don’t feel the need to buy MTX for them, even if the MTX were better.

Well, there are 2 points I’d like to point out there:

1- Judd said the last 3 seasons were a financial loss. That was before the Krafton acquisition and before any rumour even of changing the monetization. So that clearly didn’t work even before Krafton was involved.

2- It’s not likely that the monetization change was something Krafton imposed on them after buying. It was almost certainly a part of the discussions before the contract was signed and likely something Judd himself had been thinking about already, considering (again) that the current model wasn’t working.

Yes, this was the major downfall, in my opinion.
Before all this, Judd should have addressed the community, explaining how the current model isn’t working and what the community thought about how to change that.

After all, their model was decided after a huge community discussion about it back in the day. The community gave their (very exhaustive) input on how they felt things should be handled, monetization wise, before the kickstarter.

So if Judd had simply addressed the community with their problem and their concerns things would have been completely different.
Maybe they’d be fine with a paid expansion. Or with paid something else. Or even with the current model they’re going for (unlikely, but still possible). Hell, maybe even with the acquisition.
But only if the community were a part of that discussion.

Judd and Mike always liked to say that the community has a seat on the decisions table, but lately it doesn’t feel like it.
They failed the communication (for over a year now) and a lot of the backlash they’re currently suffering is 100% because of that.

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Yeah… it really isn’t at the absolute bottom line. But it plays into the willingness for people to open their wallet definitely. See it as a multiplier a little bit below ‘1’.

That’s because they have likely spent on a supporter pack to… ya know… support… and have the points simply sitting around.
So now the lovely message of ‘look at cheaper shiny!’ shows up and they shrug going ‘I already got the points, can use em there I guess’.

In contrast in LE there are no sales of MTX since there’s no MTX to make a sale with :stuck_out_tongue: Not to speak of supporter packs being not supporter packs but oddly named packs of MTX which phase out.

And that’s the bottom line overall, exactly.
If there’s no trust then there won’t flow money.
First recover trust… then hope for money.

And trust is only recovered by actions, not by words. Trust can easily be broken with words though.

Yeah… if you got 1 season being a financial loss despite large player numbers maybe… just maybe you should ring all alarm bells and focus on monetization and quality improvements?

I’ll be lenient in my thought process and think it is… because otherwise the breach of trust would be even bigger in my mind.

It’s better having to do something bad under duress then doing it without being basically forced to.

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I hardly could call it lately. It’s more then a year now.

I think it was obvious LE ws slowly crumbeling the numbers just aren’t that good. Beeing able to point it on Krafton would be a tad bit reasuring. Then again even if RHG missmanaged their first game it could be something that happens. Afaik other companys have whole departments or outside sources that check the market and help out with studys and stuff. I guess LE never bother with such a department.

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I actually think it’s the opposite. The vast majority of players don’t buy supporter packs before the season starts. They will buy one once they see something for sale they might enjoy, especially with a discount.
And the first pack they’re likely to buy is the first blood one, since that’s the one that gives more for your buck.

After the first purchases, you’re then more likely to start purchasing more, even supporter packs. But supporter packs are for a more “advanced” type of player that already bought stuff before (or for whales that don’t care).

It’s not likely that it wasn’t a part of the acquisition agreement. Especially when you consider that the console+expansion announcement was just a short time after that. It was already planned.

Whether it was a concession Judd had to make to Krafton when negotiating or if it was something they already planned on doing is something only he might answer, which is not likely.

Yeah, by lately I mean post-launch, especially after Season 1.

My guess is that EHG simply expanded too much and too fast. They tried to capitalize on the launch success to grow their team by a lot and try to churn out more content to keep players happy.

GGG had a more stable and slow growth over time. By the time they were significantly bigger their internal processes were already fine tuned.
EHG simply became bigger too fast while their internal processes weren’t still optimized, which leads to a lot of “wasted” time.

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My guess is they needed new talent because they moved in a snails pace and they can’t afford to stay still for another year. I can only guess but to me it looks like they took a gamble and infused themself with work power and still, from my point of view, underleivered big time. So they put themself in a position where losses are even bigger.

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The first is true!
The second actually less so.

GGG managed to create a expectation in the community to ‘buy our packs if you like what we provide’. This has happened via their content creators, which is why a large portion of the playerbase - as they got a massive content creator space - follows the same thought processes there.

It’s actually a rather unique thing they managed to do.
It’s uncommon for other games to follow this line of thought for customers.

Yeah… but lets be realistic here:
Any talent which actually is talent and not dead weight has value. And who with value would start working at a sinking ship?

Anyone they’ll currently get will be sub-par solely on the basis that they are bad at decisionmaking, which has a very high (but not guaranteed) chance to show in their work too.

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Contractors. But they’re expensive and that’ll just run 'em into the ground even quicker.

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You want to say who is more experienced then some guys from reddit who make their first game in unity? Well like everyone who already knows the drill and worked 1+ game already. They needed manpower for an otherwise undoable ammount of work. If this explenation is more to your liking.

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speaking as a poe whale, heres my thought process.

first of all i cant actually afford to whale. whenever i buy an expensive pack, i suffer financially for 1-2 months before i stabilize. so if i ever buy anything its because i really wanted it.

there are practically a few factors that weigh heavily on my purchase

  1. do i like the look/fomo
  2. do i think the devs deserve the money/is it worth the money spent
  3. YOLO lets just buy some shit to support the devs

in poe’s case

  1. many mtxs make me go FUCK THATS SO COOL I WANT THAT.
  2. its GGG of course they deserve my money… but if its too expensive i ll reconsider and hesitate. either i cave in or i dont. if its cheaper or on discount, the hesitation is reduced.
  3. in many cases especially during the early days of POE’s history i became accustomed to random mtx just to support the devs. i no longer do that as i have too many mtx that i realize i end up never using.

D4

  1. holy shit, some armourset/piece look just so damn good and i really want em!
  2. due to me not vibing with d4, primarily because its very focused on seasonal content (season characters have access to seasonal powers while eternal realmer only have access to their OP gear. seasonal characters with decent gear tend to be competitive or downright better than eternal players thanks to the seasonal powers. also their cosmetics tho VERY HIGH QUALITY, are only for one class so to me its not worth it.
  3. NO YOLO, fuck blizzard

LE

  1. some of the mtx looks cool, but never to the point that i felt FUCK I MUST GET THIS. even now most of the mtx doesnt appeal to me
  2. i dont feel the mtx is worth my money. its like buying a sticker for a bike that i only use once in a month and then again i’ve lost most interest in biking.
  3. YES, i have bought mtx just to support the devs. do i feel its worth my money? fuck no. but i recognize that they’ve created a great game.

as for timing, i would say its VERY reasonable to assume MOST people buy new mtx/packs near any new league announcement/release.

new league announcements are a great way to market mtx and make older players check out the entire catalogue to see what they’ve missed. this is how i actually end up buying mtx. i’ve bought supporter mtx on league announcement day several times. it really depends on if the mtx looks nice.

on a different note, back when i was going hard on poe, league announcements didnt matter. i YOLO bought mtx if i felt like it. in fact i had normalized “supporting POE” at that point that it didnt really matter.

adjacent to this yolo spending is how people buy stuff on clash of clans. i dont like the game but i know how some people with disposable income, dont mind paying the devs a few bucks here and there but ends up to 20-70 usd a month. and talking to these people, its more of “spending spare change on things they find worth it”. in CoC, theres a huge amount of p2w. to these people speeding up a buildings progress is valuable enough to them to spend money.

there are many reasons why people buy mtx. but to me a huge part of it depends on whether or not players find the mtx worth it. and thats the crux of my thread.

i simply dont find anything worth buying in LE. and most of my friends tho they like LE’s systems dont like how LE looks like to begin with so they dont even care for mtx as its to the point they dont even feel like playing the game for too long.

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Personally? I don’t buy cosmetics. I’m probably a minority in that regard. I still haven’t even used the box price store money yet. Expansions being free with classes being something extra feels the safest way to go about things given their initial intentions. If they are legitimately not getting the money they need to achieve their plans, let alone keep the lights on and not have to make a stand alone/P2P client, they had to pick something from the sounds of it. They are in an unwinnable situation, so as long as they intentionally release the paid classes a bit under powered maybe they can keep the complains to a minimum.

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thats the problem. the game as is has content that around c500. there definitely are a lot of builds that can do that but there definitely are many pitfalls that players can fall into which make them have a harder time. i dont believe the game is balanced enough to begin with. member back in s2 when sentinels were all the rage?

as for paid classes being under powered. the obvious problem is, why bother buying them if theyre underpowered? you might struggle more if they are so theres literally zero incentive to buy them.

also i heard the devs use maxroll build guides to play their game. do they even know why certain builds work better than others? i really have low confidence that they can balance things out as its already S3 and classes still dont feel equal enough.

as for not buying cosmetics ever, i used to be like that too, and if i m being honest, i m leaning towards being like that nowadays. i m more tight with my wallet at the detriment of the devs. gamedevs have POE to thank for that as i dumped a huge load of cash on them only to end up with a game that i dont really enjoy playing.

but that said, if you really love a game and the devs, try and support them by buying their stuff.

its funny, in WWM i actually bought some paid cosmetics but i m being very stingy with my purchases. the game stays a float because they have different tiers of cosmetics.

5-10 dollar tier - for regular folk who want to support the devs
100 ish dollar tier - for people with more disposable income
40K dollar tier - for those who have so much money that they dont know what to do with it.

no one shames freeloaders, nor the whales there. in fact i find it wholesome that a lot of people actually thank the 40k supporters as the gamers there are mature enough to realize that they’re helping the game be free for those who cant afford/choose not to spend.

and as a disclaimer, i only encourage you to buy mtx to support devs, no shaming. you dont have to justify why you dont. theres nothing wrong with not buying anything extra.