you are likely correct. but i would say its magnified to a much greater effect now that kraftons on top
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With the population down to a peak yesterday of only 1300 players none of this is going to matter unless we can get eyeballs back and each week it’s just getting worse and worse.
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sadly thats where its going. the only way LE can survive is by taking a few hits for a year or 2. but i m not confident that krafton is going to allow that.
i m pretty sure LE can be saved, but the effort required is substantial that i m not confident krafton is willing to further invest to fully push LE to where it needs to be
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Yeah, plainly spoken I still can’t quite wrap my head around why Krafton actually acquired EHG. Sure… for us it keeps the game going… but for them?
Obviously they think it’ll turn a profit in the future, but from my perspective I can only see it as a ill-advised investment.
First off… the state of the company in terms of experience and setup, they’re not well suited to providing a quality product still.
Then we got the type of product, in direct competition with absolute monoliths.
And even worse the timing with PoE 2 going extremely well, and PoE 1 catching up on QoL massively, all while TL:I goes decently well and D4 is at least existing.
All in all it would even be under good conditions a struggle to provide a profitable product, but just so many aspects speak against it to become one long-term instead of being ‘buried’.
That’s obviously taking the acquisition amount into consideration, it was a substantial chunk of money which has to be remade, and especially a company like Krafton usually doesn’t go beyond a 5-year plan, commonly even lower because of the heavily shifting market sentiment, which makes it a bit… ‘odd’ to see. I don’t see a way to recover this sheer amount of money in a relatively short timeframe, expanding into consoles will not change that.
Which I think is what they built upon, to get the shelf-price income from there before the product starts ‘fizzling out’ afterwards potentially.
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As of now we are under 1000 people a day…
900 people yesterday with lows in the 600s… Brutal
Cosmetics don’t feel worth it in LE because they are ugly. It is simple as that.
Early PoE cosmetics were also ugly but they got better with time. I don’t believe the main source of money from PoE is cosmetics, I think it is stash tabs.
I can with nigh guarantee say ‘it’s MTX’ which is the primary source. But yes, tabs make up a large chunk of it as well. And the other things like leagues, divination cards and character slots round it up.
Also the reason for the cosmetics not ‘feeling worth it’ isn’t only because they’re ugly… which quite a few are. It’s also variety… there’s basically nothing cohesive in the store. Stuff feels as fragmentes style-wise as the mechanics of the game to each other at times.
the art direction of LE is something that can be debated to no end. but its easy to just summarize it as “not conventionally attractive”. NRFTW has a very unique art design. i find it beautiful in its own way but its easy to see how most of the public could easily handwave it away and call it ugly. this applies very strongly to LE.
and if i m being honest some of the newer mtxs look real cool. but is it enough to make people buy em?
i do agree strongly with what you mentioned about variety and cohesion. theres not enough variety and they cant be easily mixed and matched.
tho, i would point out that D4 on release lacks a huge lot of variety and their mtxs were classlocked. yet still made a fortune. personally speaking, despite not buying any d4 mtx, d4 mtx LOOKs really good. and makes me WANT them. it pulls me. and if i cared more for the game/devs i would have just impulse bought em. LE on the flipside. despite the mtx looking cool doesnt have the same pull. and i just buy mtx in LE to support the devs more than “i want that mtx”.
i m currently playing WWM. the mtx are expensive AF but a lot of them give me the I WANT THAT MTX feel. when it comes to cosmetics, looks are everything. its in the name “cosmetics”.
That’s the other side of the equation, D4 has such a large audience (many millions on launch) that some would buy the mtx. Plus D4 had a box price & some more expensive versions so it’s easier to make a fortune from all of that.
yeap, and one reason why it has such a large audience is because the game appeals to them. one such appeal is visuals. d4 artstyle is more conventionally attractive. people who see value in mtx will buy stupid expensive mtx.
as a poe whale, i’ve spent stupid amounts of money on poe mtx. i’ve even dropped 100 usd or so on tli on some BS gacha lootbox. i would get d4 mtx despite “not entirely liking d4” if it was not classlocked. but all that goes to show how art direction can play a huge part in making people want to buy mtx. i seriously never really feel like i want any LE mtx and could live without em and spent considerably less. on top of that LE cosmetics are much cheaper than poe/TLI/d4 and yet i skimp out on em.
having a large base helps a lot but having products people actually wouldnt mind buying is required. in poe and d4 one hot topic is “MTX costs too much”. people talk about that because they saw something they like but it feels too expensive. they really want it that bad that they would bitch on the forums about it.
whens the last time ANYONE opened a thread on mtx costing too much on LE forums? i cant remember seeing one.
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Yes, exactly.
As I think I mentioned before here (if I remember right, too late and hence too lazy to read up) there’s 2 ways to make a profit:
Quality or Quantity.
You can either flood your shop with mediocre products and the design will speak sooner or later to someone simply because of the sheer variety.
Or you can design the few pieces as top-tier ones.
Obviously optimally it’s both… but EHG doesn’t have the resources to compete with a Blizzard design-team, that’s just not realistic. Indie games can look style-wise very good… but when it comes to pure fidelity the abilities available (and squandered most of the time by now… available doesn’t mean actually used) are somply on a different level compared to AAA games.
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i guess this is a very strong point that i stubbornly wanted EHG to improve on. but if its not feasible then yeah, i guess the next best thing is just to make tons of variants.
tho i would say, this would only get sales from the existing playerbase which is very small… and if i m being honest, if the artstyle is going to remain the same. i m more inclined to spend my disposable income on an overpriced wwm skin rather than a cheap LE one that i barely like.
If it cannot compete on quality, then it need to compete for value.
Another point I want to make is art has a lot to do with talent, and good character artists are the most sought after. LE artists didn’'t even get the body Proportion right (lack foundation in Antonymy) . The characters look like scale up dwarfs (same can be said about Poe1 characters).
I said this a an hobbyist character artists 3D print artists for 2 decades.
i’ve always felt the proportions were off. the primalist looks… goofy if i m being honest. sentinel looks better. the characters seem to glide on the floor rather than actually running on em. and the colour pallete reminds me of blurry crt early 2000s games for some reason. reaper form looks a little better now compared to on release but still looks more like a shade rather than a menacing avatar. and if i m going there. poe’s summon reaper minion looks much better than LE’s reaper (then again most of the time cant see shit in POE). but that said, theres so much more work needed to entice players.
just the other day i saw some dude trying to hatebait showing how d4’s palladin armorset at base are so much better than whatever shit you have in poe2. he has a point even tho its a very bad comparison. i would recognize poe and d4’s art direction as actually generic. LE has a very UNIQUE and DISTINCT artstyle which honestly is something to be appreciated. but that said, appealing to the masses is more important if you want more players. poe2’s beggar looking armors isnt something i like too much but i like the generic art direction that i can enjoy.