Which ones are you referring to? I’ve bought almost every DLC on its release day, and only the Isle of Siptah was $20. All the others were $10, except the Riddle of Steel.
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Have I completely misremembered? I could’ve sworn that they were $20. If not, cheers to Funcom for pricing things reasonably.
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Yeah I honestly thought they were $19.99 US. Which was totally reasonable for them. And even still, I say they should have kept up the DLC model even if they raised it to $29.99 (assuming it was $9.99 as people claim 
) it would still be a vastly superior value than what they are offering now and without the mandatory constant need to shove things out at such a furious pace that nothing was complete and or broken. The quality (of the items/sets) was vastly superior in those, at least in my opinion anyway. But it doesn’t matter, they are never going back.
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And Conan Exiles has an Offline Singleplayer mode. But more to the point, whether the game is singleplayer or otherwise is IRRELEVANT. It does not mean that the items are more expensive to produce. When it comes to armor reskins, a reskin is a reskin. Period.
I am glad we can agree on that.
I am sorry but could you please indicate exactly where in my post I mentioned the old DLCs or used them as a metric? Please refrain from putting words into my mouth.
As it happens with the benefit of hindsight I agree that they were worth a little more than they were priced at. But the Bazaar sees the pendulum swing to the opposite end of the spectrum, in which some 6-7 items are but a few dollars less than the entire Isle of Siptah map. But independent of past content pricing, the prices on the Bazaar are ludicrous and exorbitant.
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Single player games should not even really have cosmetics being sold, it’s a ripoff for real. Multiplayer games command a much higher price because other people get to see your skin/armor and it is how your character is portrayed to the world. This is industry standard.
The cost of something produce does not have any direct correlation with its market value. There are different kinds of scarcity at play.
What would you prefer, no further development and the game die and the single player developers be put out of business eventually due to lack of funding? 
EXCUSE ME?!?!?!?! 
What exactly do you think happens when the cost of production is higher than market value? Hasn’t your entire argument this whole time been that it just costs so much money to produce a game that developers have no choice but to monetize and overprice everything in it or they’d have to shut down?
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The cost to produce a cosmetic is not directly related to its selling price. For a game with a high demand for the cosmetics and millions of players they may be a massive profit center (on their own). For a game like this, I dunno. It keeps the lights on and servers running I’m sure.
Or think how consoles are sold at a loss to recoup the cost on game licensing fees.
I went through my Steam purchase history. This is how much I paid and when:
- 2018-06-22: $9.99 for the Imperial East DLC
- 2018-08-02: $9.99 for the Jewel of the West DLC
- 2018-10-09: $9.99 for the Savage Frontier DLC
- 2018-12-12: $9.99 for the Seekers of the Dawn DLC
- 2019-04-15: $9.99 for the Treasures of Turan DLC
- 2019-05-09: $6.99 for the Riddle of Steel DLC
- 2019-09-06: $9.99 for the Blood and Sand DLC
- 2019-10-08: $9.99 for the Debaucheries of Derketo DLC
- 2019-12-05: $9.99 for the Riders of Hyboria DLC
- 2020-05-07: $9.99 for the Architects of Argos DLC
- 2020-09-15: $19.99 for the Isle of Siptah DLC
- 2022-05-24: $9.99 for the People of the Dragon DLC
As you can see, I got almost every DLC on the release date, with the two exceptions being the Blood and Sand which I got 3 days after the release date and People of the Dragon which, if the wiki is accurate, I got 7 months after its release.
Yeah, that’s something I would’ve been quite comfortable with. Thing is, battle passes and in-game shops work. We’re not getting rid of them. And they do tend to be more expensive than what you proposed there. The publishers now know more or less what they can get away with when it comes to pricing, and they’re not going to give it up.
Thing is, to get away with charging that much, you also need to meet certain other prerequisites. For starters, your game needs to be fun enough to have people keep buying from you. For another thing, the things people buy should leave them reasonably satisfied.
In short, you need a certain level of quality. The overall quality of Conan Exiles has been degrading steadily for a while now.
None of that really matters, though. As @darthphysicist and @innocentexile have tried to explain, the way people think about pricing and revenue and costs and profit does not apply in the live service business model. The price of a digital offering is not directly derived from the cost of producing it. The revenue from a game does not get reinvested directly into that game.
No, that’s what a lot of people get wrong. The game will get shut down when it doesn’t meet its revenue goals anymore. The cost of keeping the game alive is a factor in those revenue goals, but the relationship is not as direct as people assume.
And although “well do you want them to stop developing the game instead” does sound like it implies a direct relationship between cost and revenue, it doesn’t really say or mean that. While it’s true that a game will be shut down when it’s not worth keeping alive anymore, the aforementioned argument is really just “it rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again” and should be treated as such.
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Oh come on CodeMage. It’s basic math. Cost v.s. benefit. Profit v.s. loss. It costs x to produce a product. If the selling price of the product is less than x, you are losing money. Unless that loss is somehow covered by something related to that product or related to the sale of that product, it’s not worth producing.
That doesn’t mean the business owner will be satisfied with merely selling a product for more than it cost of course. But to say there is no direct relationship between cost and market value is disingenuous. Cost of production is always a factor in determining final price. Not the only factor, but a significant one that does directly influence pricing decisions.
You forget overheard and any loan payments.
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I’m realizing people don’t know how to not pay full price on steam. I paid $9.60 (tax included) for each or less. 
It is a factor, but that’s usually only a concern for a company that is struggling to stay in business versus grow. The biggest cost is sometimes what’s known as “opportunity cost” which in the case of video games would be “how much money could we be making if we just made another game?” In the case of CE, at some point the opportunity cost of continuing the chapters will not be justified by the revenue the game brings in. That’s when CE2 would become relevant. But it’s not to say that they would wait to make CE2 until the revenue starts to fall; that would be shortsighted. The goal is ever increasing revenue to grow the business so while revenue is growing from CE, you should start making CE2 so that you never lose the market even temporarily. You grown CE until just peak (ideally) and it falls off as CE2 picks up the market and grows further. That is easier said than done, but the principle isn’t new. That’s why I would actually put money on the fact that CE2 is already being developed, if no further along than the initial concept (sometimes called Milestone 0 or Gate 0 in program management lingo).
Budgeting in a healthy business usually is about what ratios of development to sustaining, to operating expenses (and of course payroll). The goal is never tho just to make a profit. The goal is to make more of a profit than you made last quarter, or at the very least, make more of a profit than anyone else who makes a profit doing what you do (very relevant when an industry in general hits a rough patch).
What does “direct” mean to you?
Like I said, the relationship between cost of digital goods and their pricing is not as direct as people tend to assume. I find that @darthphysicist and @innocentexile have done a pretty good job explaining the layers of indirection involved. It lines up with what I learned while I was working in the industry.
You can choose to keep an open mind about what people with the knowledge are trying to explain or reject it because it doesn’t align with your worldview 
Good God, it’s amazing how such simple and basic concepts can elude people.
It costs you five dollars to make a product. How much money do you need to take in to cover that loss?
That’s it. Capitalism at it’s most fundamental level. You add up your costs, subtract it from your income, what’s left is profit. If that number is negative, there is something wrong with your business model. Like for example, one of your products is costing you more to make than it brings in? 
Good thing capitalism never progressed past its most fundamental level
I’ve got a new concept for you, and it’s going to blow your mind!
…unless you decide to double down and dig in and never accept any possibility that you might have to admit you made a mistake, but you would never do that…
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No wonder there are so many people and groups drowning in debt if even the most basic concept of “profit” is too complicated for them to understand.
Or maybe that’s the problem. Maybe everything else has been over-complicated to such an extent that they’ve completely forgotten the very basics. Like how some people can’t fathom the concept of black coffee. Many companies have taken massive hits in profits because they forgot the basics of doing business. Not just in pricing decisions, but also things like keeping the bathrooms clean or not treating their customers like shit.
You need the $5 plus what you could have earned doing something else for the same amount of effort. If I spend $5 to make $10, that sounds good, unless for spending the same $5 I could have made $20. In a publicly traded company, that makes the difference between someone investing in your company and the competition. Also realize that most large companies finance themselves thru debt. Payroll is borrowed and then paid back with interest. Corporate finances can be quite tricky in very competitive markets. You can be profitable and still have a company in trouble. Usually being profitable is good enough but not always.
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Aaaaaand there it is.
You didn’t even click on the link, did you?
Tell that to the razor industry. Gilette’s competitors came up with the razor-and-blades business model and it worked fine for them.
Or tell it to Kodak, who used to sell cameras at low prices because they could rake in a fuсkton of profits by selling film and other consumables.
Or any game studio that makes money from free-to-play games with microtransactions.
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No, I did not click the link because I already know what a loss leader is. You, however, still don’t seem to understand why it’s important to make more money than you are spending. I don’t know how that simple idea is so far beyond you, but here we are.
At this point, I don’t even know how it can be dumbed down any further. The cost of production will have a direct influence on your pricing decisions. It’s so frikin fundamental that it’s like explaining how you need to eat if you want to have energy to live. I don’t care if a person can go a month without food. You still need to eat and you still need to make more money than you are spending if you want to stay in business.
We’ve gotten way off track though. Those cosmetics in the bazaar are still way overpriced for the value they offer regardless of how much it may have cost to produce them or how much revenue is actually needed to keep the game running.
Have you ever considered that I do understand that and that talking about loss leader was a way to get you thinking about something you might be missing?
Have you tried not dumbing it down? Have you tried entertaining the idea that oversimplifying things might occasionally lead you to wrong conclusions?
Here, let me give you another example of how things don’t always work the way you think they should: MongoDB Inc.
Maybe you’ve heard of that company, maybe you haven’t. It’s okay if you haven’t, because they’re not as famous as Google, Microsoft, or Amazon. The point here isn’t their fame, but their business.
The company was founded in 2007. Their IPO was in 2017. They’ve been operating for 16 years. For 6 of those years, their stock has been publicly traded.
They’re still not profitable.
Let me make that crystal clear: they’re making less money than they’re spending.
And yet, they still haven’t gone under. In fact, they’ve been growing steadily. Their stock has been performing pretty well. Hell, during the recent massive layoffs in the tech industry, they didn’t do any layoffs of their own. Instead, they convinced their investors that not laying people off wasn’t going to increase their risk and that they can keep being a good investment.
Can they really go on like that forever? Probably not. But it’s been 16 years and they’re still going.
You might be tempted to write it all off as a big scam. If so, let me disabuse you of that notion. Ever heard of Epic Games? They use MongoDB software. And they’re not the only big customer that relies on MongoDB. We’re not talking about vaporware here.
Moral of the story: shіt’s complicated. Yes, ultimately you still “need to eat to survive”, but your mental model of how to survive is the equivalent of the historical 1800s, while the capitalism has evolved into an equivalent of a futuristic dystopia a la Cyberpunk 2077.
Is that a good thing? Not necessarily. But it’s the reality, no matter how much you want to pretend otherwise.
I agree with that. I’ve been feeling that way from the start and haven’t changed my opinion since. Some of the prices are downright ludicrous.
Unfortunately, the whole thing seems to work well enough to satisfy Funcent.
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