You are both right. Pricing is subjective.
Have they said that? I’d have assumed that future purchases would get X coins but it’s not clear on steam what you get with the base purchase.
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They haven’t outright said that, but they also haven’t outright said that new buyers will also receive coins as part of their purchase either, as far as I know.
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He asked that question however because you made a statement as if it was fact. If they haven’t said that then we don’t know it as fact. That was his point.
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I assume that they haven’t outright denied that they’re not going to add a subscription to be able to do empowered monos either? That’s certainly something to worry about…
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That wasn’t my intent. Sorry If it caused any confusion.
Haha oh man, I sure hope not!
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I guess the MTX shop just isn’t for you … Hope you enjoy your time playing LE!
I like your tack but not every game has to be PoE. And not every game has to be perpetually relevant for the company that owns it to make money. Actually PoE still existing is a good argument for other games to try to differentiate themselves from it. If someone wants to play PoE, they’ll just play PoE. We all know how much money was lost trying to be “the next WoW” or “the next League of Legends.” Offering something unique in terms of pricing and player engagement is a good way to find and possess a niche in the marketplace. PoE has a lot of mileage left on it and I don’t see any real reason to copy their model at this point.
Interestingly, I would say the same thing about variety of other games. Even the one most ripe for replacing, Overwatch, hasn’t successfully been supplanted unless you count other similar types of games that players have moved on to from it. The only thing that has been completely supplanted recently is PUBG getting replaced by Fortnite and that was due to a F2P model, for sure. But it was also due to the fact that the game had a unique and more interesting set of things for players to do than they could do in PUBG.
In either case, I don’t think LE’s destiny is to be a PoE killer, especially with PoE 2 finally being announced and being rolled out sometime in the near future.
Where I see LE living in the universe of action RPG’s is being a fun and interesting single player experience akin to Minecraft, where there’s lots of stuff to do and lots of creativity you can express and expansions coming out gradually to expand on the things to see and do in the game, most of them free but sometimes in the form of full DLC or sequels. Since Grim Dawn is mostly out of the picture and the hype for D4 is happening right now as opposed to later, this seems like the perfect time to be the for-real single player ARPG that you have the option to play with your friends if you have some. This is especially the case because Steam makes it really easy to stick around and keep selling content to an audience that is into that.
That’s what I’m out here hoping for. Guess we’ll see what happens.
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I find that such a strange concept. Why does any game have to be an insert other game here killer? It’s not like people can’t spend time playing different games.
Who cares whether game X “supplants” game Y (unless said game requires a threshold number of players)? Is your (not you specifically) life made better because another game fails?
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Notice, I’m not suggesting that LE should be or that I would want it to be, but it is the case that if two games are very similar and occupy the same space in the industry, people will tend to go with the one that is more popular and the other will get less attention. People who primarily play games socially or due to peer pressure want to play the most popular game because that’s what their friends already play. There is a Pareto Distribution thing going on with that. People have a limited amount of time and one of the ways they judge something to be the best thing to spend that time on is whether or not it has their peer group’s approval. Unfortunate, but that’s the way it works.
This is why you want to avoid direct competition unless you have some kind of disruptive advantage or opportunity to move customers over to your thing from the previous one.
I personally don’t want or need another PoE or PoE-like game. I have avoided that game for a long time despite the peer pressure of at least one of my friends to play it. I’m not a joiner, believe me. I’m with you. I want to play a game because I think it’s interesting or different from the other ones. That’s what my suggestions here are aimed at.
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Pricing is always subject to change.
EHG has gone from a small group of passionate gamers and ARPG enthusiasts to a fairly large studio with 75+ active employees. Their goal and vision for this game is to make it into a successful live service title, to compete with the likes of Path of Exile and Diablo IV.
That won’t happen without monetization beyond the initial game sales.
Hopefully what that means is a modest amount of MTX content and full DLC expansions / sequels when the time has come for them. If it becomes another mill for people with no impulse control, I’m afraid the content itself will suffer for it.
Not the greatest fan on MTX, but is a way to support the developers and the game.
If you compare one to one, in effort needed, or even value, with the cost of the game, the cost of an asset vs an entire game… The cost would be less than a cent.
I’m fine with current system.
when microtransactions are no longer micro
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What stopped me from purchasing supporter packs was that the amount of Epoch Points in each pack didn’t increase with the price. It feels weird that I can’t differentiate a return value for the price points; they all seem to be the same thing. If they all cost the same amount, I would probably buy them all simultaneously because they’d be structured as different choices on the same tier instead of being priced as if they were different tiers, which implies they have different values.
Brains are weird.
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I think this is a completely misguided understanding of product and monetisation. The game is the product but the product doesnt necessarily need to be the monetisation. Yes, it is MTX that is being sold to me at the end of the day, but do you think that if the game is not good that people will buy MTX? The game being good directly raise the value of MTX. What is the general consensus of when POE have good supporter pack sales? It is not when the supporter pack is pog or value for money. It is when the league itself is considered well-designed by the player base.
Let me also give you some familiar examples outside of games. Facebook and Google sell ads but ads is not the product. It is the monetisation. And if people no longer think Facebook helps them connect with friends or Google is a good search engine, you think they can still sell ads?
LE should differentiate itself from POE. In it’s core gameplay experience. You are conflating adopting a successful monetisation strategy with the product itself again.
That is me too. But this thread is not about the product. It is about the monetisation. And I hope I have made that clear enough for you.
I see this alot. But just because someone has purchasing power and is able to buy things which you think is not necessary of value, does not make that person lacking in impulse control.
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That was well said, I have really nothing to add. I guess it all comes down to what the devs vision going forward is. When I hear seasons, my mind automatically goes to PoE as it is the only game I play on pc that is season based , so I imagine LE as a self sustaining game that will be here for us years to come. Of course, my expectations are exactly that, only mine. For all we know, LE ends up being like GD, which is fine as well.
That was a good read, thanks.
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It’s like this for Warframe too. When that game’s updates at the time were really good the Nidus deluxe pack that came out around the same time ended up being their most sold one yet.
People love buying cosmetics to look cool, but they also like rewarding good developers with money for doing cool things and making a good game.
Also this, yeah. There’s a massive difference between allowing players to use real-life money to buy cosmetic skins that they choose versus creating a gambling slot machine that rewards dumping money into it and taking advantage of addictions.
Protecting consumers with impulse controls have almost always been centered around gambling services disguised as something else, but that’s not what LE’s current cosmetics are.
You put in money and buy exactly what you want. No gambling. No predatory taking advantage of people’s addictions and impulses.
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Yeah, the slot machine mechanic is predatory garbage. I live in Vegas, and know the destruction this can cause all too well.
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That’s why it baffles me when people firmly believe LE’s monetization scheme amounts to a mortal sin, as if ethical transactions (cosmetics) are somehow evil and impure. I mean, I get it, the integrity of the game is at stake when the developers choose to design fancy paid cosmetics and ignore the non-paying crowd, but it’s either that or, what? Paid DLC to fragment the playerbase? Monthly subscription? P2W mechanics?
I think some people are forgetting that Last Epoch is going to be a live service game primarily.
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Which tends to forget the fact that EHG fully intends to give every single unique and set item it’s own 3D appearance to match the art, with some of them having really cool visuals.
PoE’s non-paid gear visuals look really gritty, which if that’s your thing you’ve won the lottery of video games, but if you want to look like an endgame badass it doesn’t give you that option.
EHG isn’t going to only work on buyable skins. You can totally make your toon in LE look like a badass endgame character once all unique item skins are in the game.
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