Just saw the live stream and the prices of the bazaar items, they seem significantly more expensive than previous DLC content. Just that initial set of offerings is $44, when Siptah has way more content for only $20. A single banner is $5.
I believe the prices should be tweaked. My personal recommendations are:
Sell dlc-like large bundles for the collectors who are used to buying them in this fashion.
Sell previous battle passes so that new players, especially collector types, don’t feel left out and are incentivized to spend.
Sell individual offerings for the audience who don’t want everything.
Adjust expected yearly prices for inflation and increased cost, but keep it reasonable like 1.5x previous dlc prices
Be transparent about price changes, everyone know there’s global inflation, theres no reason not to talk about it
I think price review is needed as store items are probably being compared to f2p games that jack the costs up. Paying for the core game should offset some of the costs of store goods
Just finished watching that stream… $5 bucks for a banner? are you guys out of your mind? I’m fully aware that I don’t have to buy if I don’t want it… but if there is something I want there, taking the banner price as a reference… what? I’m going to end up paying 10? 20? 30 bucks for something more than a banner? thats just mental.
If you start selling “recolors” on already existing gear/weapons like they do for those garbage shooter games I’m going to seriously flip out.
What really doesn’t make sense to me is that Funcom is shafting the collector customers who have been essentially keeping the game alive. I’m talking about those who own all the dlcs and have spent upwards of $150 on the game. Now these customers are expected to pay 4x as much essentially to subsidize free content for the rest of the playerbase.
Why aren’t there bundles with heavy discounts in addition to the individual options?
Theres been way too much discussion on the battle pass, which is essentially just a one time $10 payment to drive engagement, which leads to spending in the bazaar shop. The focus should’ve always been on the microtransaction shop instead.
The old DLCs were too cheap for what they offered. Not to mention all the shady sites which were selling them for even less. It is to be expected that when they add their own cash shop the prices will go up. By how much we will see but considering how expensive other games are, I won’t be surprised if an armor set goes for 15+. Let’s see what the final prices would look like though.
To be fair, 150$ for a few thousands of hours of entertainment is beyond cheap. For 1000 hours, we are talking about 0.15$ per hour and we all know many of us have much more than that. Not really sure that counts as “shafting”.
By having their own shop it already removes the steam cut and external key site problems. I can even see them doubling the existing DLC cost as reasonable, given the crazy global inflation. But charging 4-5x the original price is more likely to drive away customers, its just too much of a jump.
There are games that cost $20 that gives the same amount of hours for a lot of players, these types of subjective measurements aren’t meaningful.
Ultimately a product has to compete with similar options on the market and its price has to be inline with what the target audience expects to pay. As it is now with DLCs, Conan is already on the high end of pricing within its category and customer base. This simply isn’t a mobile gacha game.
Lets also not forget that the vanilla game without mods is vastly inferior, so the game success isn’t entirely due to developer efforts.
One of the benefits of digital goods is you can sell them at a pricepoint for every potential customer you have. For example, the quoted price of $150 for all current DLCs, base game, and Siptah is NOT what many have paid for Conan Exiles. Steam sales, promotions, and bundles all knock that price down.
I know one of the players I routinely play with has probably paid less than half for all those things. They wouldn’t have been able to afford the full price. Had those deals and promotions not been available, they would have spent $0 on all that stuff.
When you have something valued at $150, and someone can only pay $75, would you rather make $75 or hold out for $150 and probably make $0? This is a rhetorical question. This question already has an answer. The answer was eloquently given by Valve. Which you can read here:
The wonderful thing about digital products is that the cost to make one, is the same cost to make thousands or millions. So yes while a piece of armor might be worth $15. There is only a finite number of customers who will purchase it for that much. Eventually you want to bring the price down to maybe $10, then $7, and then $5. You do not lose money by doing this. The number of people who decide to wait for the discount is offset by the number of people who buy it who wouldn’t buy it at the higher prices.
Valve’s Steam is a testament to this with no near peer. Good Old Games, Epic Gamestore, and others even emulate their discounting strategies to some degree. Funcom would do well to do this with their own in-game store.
It was said on the stream, 1 dollar = 100 crom coins. Battle pass is 1000 crom coins.
I do give them props though, for not obfuscating the dollar to crom coin conversions by doing weird math you see in mobile gacha games. It can be said that they aren’t trying to be predatory at least.
So if 100 CC = $1 then a banner for 5 is 5/100 or 5 cents.
I’m not scanning through 2 hours because you didn’t note the timestamp for your complaint.
Overall I just think some people in this forum love to fly off for just any old reason.
Sure, let’s all khagal them so far down that the store is ineffectual.
I also think $50 to 75$ every three months for everything in the store is the lowest I would consider reasonable (if every item were virtual).
I personally would also add physical items for up to $500 to $1000 USD. I want a T-Shirt for $35 to $45, a Hoody for $50 to $75, Wide-band underwear for $25 to $35, cast aluminum 1:5 scale weapons for $150 to $250, and full size stainless steel replicas for $350 to $1,000 USD.
Plus I think $40 to $50 for the battle pass every 3 months is the cheapest reasonable price for the growth that people are expecting.
If they give away 1,000 CC they are doing themselves a disservice! It should be about 100 IMO.
And lastly I don’t think but rather I KNOW, that whatever the price there will always be someone who says “OMG! You’ve got to be kidding, these prices are a joke!” - always always ALWAYS!
MMORPG subscriptions are close to that ($192 with taxes, assuming US taxrates, EU is higher). So what income bracket are you exactly targeting with this thread?
Dont get me wrong, 5$ for one banner is alot… i dont agree with pricing in most online shops which is why i dont buy from them, unless i spend alot of time in them then id be willing to spend 20$ on an armor look maybe one time, granted if everything was around 40-50 in total, id probably buy everything
I see some better deals on there, and some worse ones… 18$ for a stand without a function, and a decal
I hope theese are place holders and not what theyre considering
In the past, 10-20$ for the dlcs we got were ultra cheap as far as gaming goes, but i bought all of them because of that if they were more i probably would have only got 1-2
If I can get an hour worth of fun out of each dollar I spend on something, it’s worth it.
Now, I get the initial knee-jerk reaction to a $5 wall decoration. It seems steep, sure. But think about it this way - if that $5 purchase keeps development going, then a future update will yield me 5+ hours of enjoyment.
$200 a year is a small price to pay for a game I play for far more than 200 hours a year.
OK, $5 then… I’m fine with that. It’s nothing you HAVE TO buy!
So at $150 you are unsatisfied with the amount of new content they’re able to develop, recognize how underpowered the servers they rent are, but are unwilling to pay the appropriate amounts to address these and other issues?
Obviously $150 for 4 years is a bad price, too low to maintain proper progress. It looks like they had to go out of country just stay solvent but you wanna hold them to that???
At the moment, until they release the actual prices, this is all speculation. They stated in the dev stream they are still figuring out pricing, so anything shown is just placeholder pricing for videos (subject to change).
Granted, if things sold work out around $15 to match a full DLC normal set of items, (this was accounting for inflation) then all is fine. In a year, they sell enough that would match 4 DLCs normally then it would = $60 spent. Obviously, no idea how many items could be sold in a year, nor the prices so take this as a grain of salt.
Please note, I am figuring an increase in price compared to the old DLC prices, since it was doubtful, they will keep with the old pricing model.
Plus, no one needs to buy everything offered either. I will wait until they release the true pricing model to have an opinion on this subject.
People used to buy a building set, armor set, weapon set and more for just 10 euro. Going above this price level will turn alot of people off. But hey, the update is free, so you won’t hear me complain too much.
