Where’s my physical copy of the game? Where can I buy it?
So nah.
As said, one-time verification process. Verify, move to offline location, enjoy content verified already.
Business programs use the same method as well, look at things like AutoCAD, which costs as a single license over 2000€ per year… full license without any reductions.
Verify… move away… use offline.
Regarding the thousands of DLCs, it would be easy to sell it as a “cosmetic pack” that would be priced “reasonably” based on the amount of cosmetics in the bundle rather than as individual dlcs per cosmetic. “season 1 cosmetic pack” or something that would include all the cosmetic MTX released as of Season 1 launch (or conversely release the pack at the end of the season containing any cosmetics added during the season.)
As for the previously purchased cosmetics, it shouldn’t be hard (annoying, yes) to find out what accounts purchased MTX and issue them keys for the dlc bundles and then separate them going forward.
the 30% fee profit loss to Steam obviously isn’t that big of a deal given that EHG is already selling dlc through steam in the supporter packs
Not necessarily. If I were an accountant in a small games company, I would not want to have to deal with lots of tiny transactions (Dave spending 5x £1 to buy a 5 small MTX versus 1x £20 for a bunch of points) because Merchant Services providers can charge a % (which is fine), a flat fee or both per transaction. Having larger value “packs” of points means the flat fee is less of a bite out of the income.
I’ll tell my boss that when I ask for a 30% salary increase…
But lots of people don’t buy packs, they buy individual MTXs. That would simply make it so that you could buy MTX online that you can’t buy offline unless you buy a huge bundle (which would likely cost hundreds of bucks).
That just means that they are taking the fee into account when creating the price for the supporter packs, which they don’t have to for every other MTX (but which they would now have to increase to reach parity in price).
You know what also fulfills that purpose?
A wallet.
Simple as that. No premium shit needed, just a plain old simple wallet. ‘You got 50€ in it, be free!’ and that’s it. And if you don’t want it anymore? Withdraw what you’ve got leftover.
Fees on the side of the customer, not the company hence, simply withhold the percentile when pulling it out and include the percentile as extra costs when filling the wallet.
Not the first company which would do that, it was relatively common decades ago before the premium crap was implemented.
Not even needed, what speaks against 5000 DLCs? Nothing.
Already we’re guided to the Steam page for buying packs anyway, so have the orderly sorted view on the website and the in-game store… and then simply link over. No need to go through the massive list hence.
Solely a UI issue with Steam, not a functional issue.
Neither hard nor annoying. Write a program, link it with billing and with the authentification. Done.
Needs to be done anyway so it’s really not a big issue, already the server knows your MTX anyway, right? So why not call that info, you got the data available.
When you got a service which provides a massive security feature, functionality and customer reach then yes… those 30% are warranted.
If not use GOG, less cost, less customer base, less functionality.
‘Oh, but we have to use Steam since all our customers are there!’ Mhmm… yes, that’s why it costs more, because it provides you with more. Make use of those systems properly.
I don’t see an issue, as mentioned above, 20 DLC… 20000 DLC… as long as it’s properly linked what’s the deal?
First of all… it’s done anyway, coherent pricing strategy, unless EHG is utterly incompetent, then they wouldn’t do that. Why? Because the supporter packs have to be the best deal out of them all. For the reason that they’re supposed to be the highest turnover individual items as well as people not enjoying 100% of the content anyway, hence a reduction in price is mandatory anyway.
How much MTX is EHG currently selling? (Again, I play offline). We’re not talking about PoE with it’s thousands of MTX, we’re talking about LE. If LE added 15 cosmetics in a season, priced at or around $2 per cosmetic (usually I see this stuff at like $1.99 USD unless it’s Blizzard selling horse armor for $100 for some god forsaken reason). That’s $30, give a $5 bundle discount and then bump it 30% to cover Steam’s cut and that’s $32.50 before tax. Or do the 30% first so $39 per bundle, $5 bundle discount for $34 for a 15-cosmetic pack for that season.
That’s not a bad deal imo as people will readily pay $8 for an emote pack in Monster Hunter when they only want 1 of the 4 emotes.
Edit:
If your boss isn’t taking profit margin into account already, I absolutely would not bring it up because you’re only going to get paid less. I work in a position where we do work for the USG and I’ve seen the bid breakouts we sent where we say “we’ll have these labor categories working this many hours at these rates.” and could see exactly what the government paid my company for the work I did, and it was significantly higher than what my company paid me.
Using the current thread, EHG already prices DLC bundles with the 30% fee, so pricing new bundles with a 30% fee included wouldn’t be anything new for them.
There are games like that. Fantasy Grounds VTT is one such game.
The deal is simply one of player perception. Most people looking at a game that has thousands of DLCs will probably skip the game entirely.
You seem to have missed the point.
My point was that they calculate the pricing strategy, then add a % to it to make up for the steam fee.
Which they don’t do on single MTX, since those don’t go through steam. But they would have to if it did.
I’m not sure how many they have, but I think they added at least 50+ this season, between armor cosmetics, skill cosmetics, portals, pets, etc.
PoE has thousands of MTX because they add about 50-100 per season, as an estimate.
50 points in LE is €4.39. Most cosmetics cost 50 or 100 (with some costing 25 and others 150), so that’s an average of around 7€ per MTX.
So 50 seasonal MTXs would be somewhere around 350 euros for the pack.
I see a problem with that statement.
I can see that for a brand new game.
For a established franchise I don’t see this issue.
LE is not a new game anymore, it’s a well established game in the sector with massive reach.
As said if they don’t already do that for single MTX then they’re incompetent as it would break price coherency.
A negative for the customer can nonetheless be a positive in perception. Nobody goes 'Oh, your supporter packs are so expensive!
I would rather go ‘Why the actual fuck does one of your wing attachments cost damn 15€ currently?’
The prices for MTX in LE are atrocious, they aren’t 2-3€, they are 2,5€ minimum for a dagger and going up to 25€ for an armor set.
25… damn… Euros… for a single MTX. That’s a damn full-price game.
If they aren’t including it already then they can plainly spoken piss off, their prices are atrocious for single MTX anyway.
The only acceptable prices are the supporter packs.
If someone buys ‘mostly single MTX’ rather then supporter packs then they’re out of their mind in this game anyway. Obviously their sales are atrocious. It’s been proven from a myriad of games beforehand that low prices MTX cause such a significant increase in volume for sales over time that they outperform high-priced ones.
And you can’t tell me now ‘but they can’t afford to make them and keep their server running otherwise!’ because I’ll call pure BS.
How much does creating a single armor set cost? 1500€ or so for the work-time? 500€ extra at best for the design stage? Priced at 25€. If we reduce it by 30% it’s still 17,5€. That means a total sale amount of 115 is needed to go even. Anything above 115 units sold is pure profit, for a permanent addition to the store. That’s ridiculously low numbers, especially since in most countries you can count the active development cost of the MTX into a separate aspect and be expempted from taxes until you grow even.
Permanent addition to the store I’ll once more remind you. It isn’t ‘gone’ after 3 months… 6 months… 2 years. In 5 years people will still buy it. Increase the count accordingly for a wide spread and you increase the amount of people buying as ‘something tickles the fancy’ and hence causes sales to happen.
We’re talking about a game which has a 150k peak playercount. Wich means to achieve that we would need less then 1% of players paying anything at all which we all know that’s unrealistic as 1-2% of players are commonly so called ‘whales’ which indicates the involvement in any sort of payment to be substantially higher then those 1-2% of players.
Using that number, 5 cosmetics per pack, 10 packs per season 35 euros per pack (before bundle discounts/30% fee to Steam)
You don’t, but many players do.
If I look at a game that has 20+ DLCs I’ll assume I’ll need all or most of them for a “true experience”, so I won’t even dig further and skip it entirely.
I will also assume that it’s a studio that, rather than address and fix issues, would rather sell them to you.
It doesn’t have to be true of all games in this situation, but it certainly is true of enough of them that I certainly will be skipping it.
You still don’t get my point.
Let’s assume a supporter pack consists of 10 MTX and that each MTX will always cost 10 bucks (to make math simpler). That means that the pack cost would be 100 bucks. So you make a discount for being a pack and price it at 70 bucks.
But now you’re going to sell it via steam, so you actually sell it for 85 bucks instead (and still be losing money).
Likewise, the single MTX cost 10 bucks each because they don’t go through steam. If you turn them into a DLC and make it go through steam, then you’re going to be increasing their price up to 12 bucks each (and still be losing money).
Going through steam means that either players pay more, developers make less, or both.
Funnily enough, they are basically half the price of the ones in PoE, where most MTX cost 150-250 and they sell their currency at pretty much the same prices.
There is still the issue that packs give you in-game currency to spend on individual MTXs. It’s how I buy most of them. I get a supporter pack, then with the currency from it I will buy whichever strikes my fancy, usually a skill MTX for whatever build I’m running, a pet or a portal.
You can’t solve MTX with packs. Players will often want individual MTX so they can be tailored to their likes/dislikes. Forcing to buy a pack just means many won’t buy it if all they want from it are 1-2 things. And if they want 1-2 things from 3 different packs, they’d have to pay a lot of money to have them, without the chance of having individual choices.
Not that this would fix things anyway. You’re just reducing the amount of DLCs by 5. Meaning that after 10 years, instead of 3k DLCs you have 600.
Honestly, I feel like this shouldn’t even be discussed. It’s way too much effort and way too much clutter when you have a lot of easier solutions you can use. Especially because no solution will ever prevent piracy, so you just have to discourage the average player from being tempted into using it.
The majority of gamers nowadays which aren’t ‘tourists’ and hence play non ‘AAA’ titles (which is surprisingly few still) actively do watch content creators of some sort, be it Youtube or Twitch.
That means they have a pre-formed notion of a game rather then going completely blind into it.
Mind you this specifically upholds for large community based games like modern ARPGs and MMOs. Single-player games are a bit different still, mostly being marketing. But even then a substantial change is commonly seen when a single large-scale streamer puts forth content as several smaller scale ones follow up allowing a broad variety to be seen shortly after.
This has been ongoing since around 5 years now and has become the new norm.
It’s past the ‘Sims 3’ times.
Nah, I get your point, you’re missing mine though.
If EHG doesn’t already price single MTX in relation to their supporter packs - which they do - then they would be incompetent.
This means that even with the 30% revenue removal from Steam costs it would still stay the same price, as it’s adjusted towards the 30% revenue aspect there and not the other way around.
So single MTX are prices accordingly so packs bought through steam still uphold the major value aspect.
Which we can also see with their pricing actually, EHG made a major mistake with their supporter packs actually.
Look at what PoE does, you buy a supporter pack for 30 and you get 300 points. Buying 300 points would cost… 30.
What does that mean? For buying a supporter pack you get all the MTX for free and actively buy points, that’s their deal.
What does EHG do? ‘Here, have those MTX for money’.
That’s not a good business strategy, hence their supporter pack sales are substantially lower. Someone not interested in the MTX will still buy the supporter pack in PoE since it allows them to get the MTX they actively are interested in. And I’m intentionally ignoring the stash tabs here because they’re another thing entirely to take into consideration and shouldn’t exists to buy.
To combine the points with the supporter packs it makes it a ‘2 for 1’ deal. That’s something people lean into heavily… because they ‘save’ money (which is entirely wrong nonetheless since they spend money for things they have exactly 0 use for, so nothing saved, only spent, but still.) and hence have the points left to spend on MTX they actually want. That’s not done by EHG, which is not the best business for them, but their method works as well, just not as good.
Depends, given that the vast majority buys points solely through supporter packs and never standalone we can factor the value of the supporter pack stuff inside.
If we take the 60€ supporter back from GGG we get: The soundtrack (roughly 5 value), a full armor set (20), A weapon effect (5), a character effect (5), a back attachment (10) and some little nicknacks. 45 value. Which means 60€ points + 45€ value of MTX, music and nicknacks which would come to the remainder to the 60, but I’ll say 40 here for a 66% easy math aspect.
That means we can inflate the relatively value accordingly for the points themselves. 600 points hence aren’t ‘60€’ but instead 20€ of value… unless you buy em separate which nigh nobody does.
So the 200 points are suddenly worth a whole lot less perception wise. Why? Since you already got a boatload of value from the pack! The points are simply ‘Leftovers’.
But in general I agree, atrocious prices as well. Never said they are better.
And it’s absolutely rampant in the industry as well. You basically don’t see anything else then awful pricing anymore. That was different 10+ years ago, cosmetics cost 10% of the current price often back then. And a magnitude of 10 in price increase? That’s simply not acceptable, never was.
We’re speaking of dlc packs that contain the cosmetics for offline players. Since the actual MTX for Online players uses a currency conversion. The idea was to bundle those cosmetics for Offline Players to purchase the same way other offline ARPGs like Grim Dawn handle their cosmetic bundles since the issue was “how to allow offline players to access cosmetics without server authentication” the idea was to use the same method as Grim Dawn and have them purchase cosmetic packs as DLC that would unlock them in-game even without connecting to EHG servers for authentication.
Online MTX would still work exactly the same
So I get that many have moved on the conversation past “is MTX in this game annoying or not” to the topic of how to exploit it, but as someone who finds it annoying to see MTX for a game I have paid for, any amount is annoying. What I have seen is:
I also get the first response that was made to me about how MTX props up devs. That is a topic I do want to address, as this is, sadly, a common idea I see pass around gaming circles. I find it utterly repulsive that somehow some portion of the gaming sector has found a way to exploit emotions and people’s good sense or being nice to coax some out of more money. I get on a spectrum of evil publishing company CEOs who try to vacuum up all the money so they can buy a yacht to park in their bigger yacht to the small indie dev company, that the former is far more evil than the latter.
I am old and cynical enough though, that despite one being unquestionably eviler than the other, that when it comes down to it, paying for MTX to support a developer company is still paying to support a company. First, most likely you have Steam taking their cut, then the publisher taking their cut, then the developer company taking their cut, then the lowly developer human being probably isn’t even getting equivalent to pennies on the dollar to every MTX sold.
The human being is the only one that I really care about. The developers who created this game did a good job, and made some good decisions so I wanted to send some encouragement with my original post. The actual company EHG though, probably will eventually go evil, get bought up, or close. It is just how things go, I don’t want to contribute to either of the first two and I can’t prevent the last no matter how many skins or recolors I buy.
So when I see gamers standing up for MTX because “it’s helps out the devs” I get even more annoyed that poor person has been duped in a far worse way than someone who just buys a skin they think is cool. The person who just buys a shiny will only buy what is trendy or impresses them. The other has developed a cult of personality, which makes me sad as now they are convinced giving up their hard-earned money is somehow a noble thing to do. That money, will barely help the poor dev get off living from paycheck to paycheck. MTX is stacked against both the human developer and the gamer.
Yes, these are the thoughts and beliefs I have going through my head when I see the shop button or the sticky message above chat to see the new additions. That is why I would rather just not see the reminder that they exist. It reminds me that some super-rich guy has pitted all us working class against each other, and even worse, that giving him money is somehow the morally right thing to do because it helps out the devs.
in the case that EHG cant figure out any good solution, i would say throw offliners a bone. make all cosmetics for offline players free.
i dont know the numbers but i’m guessing that a majority of players are playing the game on their “online” realms.
offline realms tend to be rather worthless for most people. you cant play with others and your gear might be OP as you have access to legacy gear.
let them have fun.
also, i would say this. some players will actually WANT to support games devs that show a lot of good will. poe used to be that game for me. sometimes i just bought packs at random with the idea that theyre gonna improve the game more for me. heck sometimes i have games on steam where i dont even touch them but i purchase them because the goodwill/game quality is just that good. i m voting with my wallet to tell the industry I WANT MORE OF THIS.
mtx money aside there are people who impulse buy. there are also people who more or less THROW money at devs just because they like them so much.
i m not gonna lie. i dont like the newer supporter packs too much in LE. but i liked how LE was and how the game was growing so much (except uber abby) that i actually just yolo’d and bought the pack to support the devs.
This is a live-service game, this is neither a classic single-player nor a classic MP server.
It has a shelf-price and no subscription.
How the heck do you think they’re supposed to pay for the server costs if they have no monetization?
Nobody is ‘standing up’ for MTX. MTX are a non-functional 100% vanity investment into the game.
This is the most ethical monetization methodology existing to date. It doesn’t affect gameplay in any way. Some people enjoy it and hence love to buy it, happily so (and someone buying something without regrets causes you as the seller to inherently be ethical since it’s a win-win).
The issue is when systems exist to exploit individuals. Those are FOMO-based systems (time-based sales), those are functional payments in a competitive environment (gear, skills, stash tabs and so on), those are obfuscated things to be bought (lootboxes, ‘surprise mechanics’) and so on.
There’s a shit-ton of unethical and disgusting stuff out there related to monetization… bashing onto MTX though? Vanity items? If properly priced according to their value? (Which they aren’t)… Well… that’s only ‘odd’ to say the least.
But didn’t you use to play WoW (it seems you did from the OP)? How is paying a mandatory monthly subscription any better than optionally paying for a few MTX every now and then if you want?
I’d say that the vast majority of WoW players have paid Blizzard (and it’s hard to find a better example of corporation gone “evil” than them) way way way more money with WoW than any player ever did with PoE or LE.
MTX are usually sold via the in-game shop, so steam doesn’t get anything. In the case of PoE and LE, those go all directly to them. Steam only gets a cut when you sell them as DLCs.
The developer also doesn’t get a cut of MTX sales. They get a salary (usually a good one, since those positions are highly coveted by studios).
But you always do that anyway. If you buy the game, you’re paying to support the company.
The difference to LE is that you have a lower shelf price than usual for a live service that needs to be financially supported over the years, otherwise the servers close.
And the difference to PoE is that the game is actually free and is totally supported by MTX sales.
So whether you pay upfront for the game, buy MTX, pay a monthly subscription (or, in the case of WoW, pay for the game AND a monthly subscription), you’re always supporting the company.
The only way to not do that is to play a pirated copy.
EDIT:
Also, there’s an important distinction. When players say they buy MTX to support the company, they’re not actually supporting the company. They’re supporting the game they like and contributing to it continuing to improve and stay alive.
It all has to do with the value you perceive the game to have.
Some people don’t think games are worth 70+ bucks and buy them on steam sales.
Some people think a game is worth 200 bucks over a period of a few years and thus buy MTX.
Some people think a game is worth thousands of bucks and pay a monthly subscription for years.
But in the end, players are paying for the game. They only support the company because the company has made a game they enjoy. And in the case of MTX, they are paying for the future continuity of the game because they feel that is a worthy investment to them, since they want to keep playing that game for years to come.
More eviler? So you think that small companies are still evil?
Yes, and as long as you’re not talking about a listed company or a company that pays it’s shareholders dividends (which conpanies should, otherwise that’s close to theft) then the money that a “small conpany” receives for MTX is used to pay their employees, rent, utilities, etc.
Employees get paid a salary, so no, that artist wouldn’t get paid anything from the sale of MTX (they aren’t in sales after all & sales is likely far closer to the evil you apparently dislike), but the cash from MTX sales are used to continue paying the staff their salaries.
What do you think a company is? Is it somehow a sentient entity with it’s own will & ability to act independently of its employees? I’m not sure if you’ve ever worked for a large company, and this may shock you, but they’re full of employees making decisions & choices. That “evil” you hate is people making decisions & choices. There is no “actual company” making decisions, only people.
That very much depends on the company. Some of them, more likely the larger ones, will effectively take a skim off the top & use it to pay dividends or reward the higher ups as you say, but some of them will absolutely be using it to keep the lights on, hire people & pay for more projects (aka, games) that kerp "lowly devs) getting paid.
If you’re thinking about EA or MS/Blizzard then yes, you’re probably right. But to assume that every company is like that is just plain wrong.
And while we’re on the subject of dividends, why do you appear to think that they are evil?
Because “working class people” are known to have large amounts of disposable income that they can spend on recurring payments for luxuries…
Unless they’re a contractor and have that in their contract.
But usually they’re paid a flat rate per design rather then a percentile. It’s some which use that though… get paid nothing, get percentile of sale. Good system actually! Make good quality stuff fitting for the game and you get rewarded.
Sadly nigh unseen.
And well, with sizeable companies like EHG it’s commonly also in-house, so yes, salary.
Um actually yes unity does allow for cursor scalling. Not sure where u got the info that it doesnt. Its limited in some ways. But it can be done.
Copy past from Google
Yes, Unity allows for scaling the mouse cursor, but it requires using a custom cursor implementation. Unity’s built-in cursor scaling is limited, especially when using Cursor.SetCursor() with CursorMode.ForceSoftware. To achieve true scaling, developers often hide the system cursor and draw their own cursor as a UI element or sprite, allowing for dynamic resizing and manipulation.
So yes even with it being limited as u see here. It 100% can be done.
Theres a banner that pops up from time to time above the global chat window advertising them. As well as advertising new once. Also as far as i know turning chat off doesnt stop this. Thats the ad OP is speaking of.