There’s pages of overpriced cosmetics on the Blizzard store. More than a handful. As for Fortnite, I have zero interest in that crap, so I have no comment on how its shop works.
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I think SWTOR also has sales on things. That’s about all I’m aware of though. I don’t recall if ESO has sales or not. I don’t play many other games that actually have in game shops. Plenty with DLCs though. Some with gobs of DLCs. Those do go on sale occasionally. But not many with in game stores.
Oh I didn’t realize the Diablo IV cosmetics were in their cash shop. That’s weird since the in-game shop operates on FOMO. Very unusual to put them on sale (WoW has a holiday sale as I remember). If the user knows they will all be on sale at once ever year at Christmas that severely undercuts the FOMO premise. Maybe it is a different selection of items in game and on the website?
Not saying Fortnite is a good game, just that it is how the majority cash shops work today.
What I don’t understand is how they are “overpriced”. That involves 1) you wanting the items and 2) other people not being willing to pay the going rate. If the items are desirable then they should be priced to extract the maximum amount.
Not totally sure about SWTOR although I have bought items from them.
STO (Star Trek Online) for example has sales for sure. The Mudd’s Market items are so absurdly priced (like $200+? for a ship) the the in store description says something like “only a fool would pay full price”. One strategy is to set the prices so high that they might get a few desperate suckers, but another kind of FOMO is generated when there’s a sale and it is the only reasonable time to buy the items. Basically the only time you see people “winning” the T6 ships from crates is during the sales (it tells the whole server when someone “wins”). (Even on sale I think it costs on average something like $250-300 to “win” a ship in that manner).
I think that’s kind of the premise SWTOR runs on as well. There will be a FOMO sale to drive up sales because people have a limited time to get the item and who knows when it will be a “reasonable price” again. You want the Bazaar to work like that instead?
“Overpriced” generally refers to items being so highly priced that very few are willing to pay it. Yeah, I could sell a pizza for a million dollars. Or try to anyway. I only need to sell one. 
Unfortunately there are very, very few people in the entire world willing to pay a million bucks for a pizza. Probably fewer who could even afford to do so. And no, I didn’t get that backwards. 
So the odds that I’m actually going to make that sale is very low. However, I could sell pizzas for ten dollars. I’d probably make a ton of sales that way. I may or may not get enough to make a million dollars in profit, but I’ll be making a lot more profit than I would be sitting on a million dollar pizza waiting for some schmuck gullible enough and wealthy enough to go for it.
To me “overpriced” would be the seller not getting the maximum profit they could get. There are marketing pros who specialize in this tomfoolery, I’m sure they have run the numbers and continue to analyze sales and adjust the prices for new releases.
While I do think there is a lot of analyzing in this from monetization experts, it is still in my opinion the wrong approach to use this as a main way to price things in games.
The biggest problem with such a strategy is that the quality of a game suddenly becomes secondary or maybe even lower.
A game company’s succes and profits should be measured in how many players it can attract, and how many of those players find their shop prices reasonable so they are willing to buy and are happy to recommend the game to friends and just generally other players.
Happy customers that recommend a game/gaming company should be more important in the long run instead of how high prices they can get away with before their profit start to become lower than expected…
But in these times, game companies rarely ever think about reputation and fair prices to keep happy customers unless it starts to hurt them - Money talks, especially here and now, mostly because that is the only thing investors care about.
If a game or game company lose popularity, they will either be turned into zombie live service games just to squeeze out as much money as possible, or be shut down!
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I think the fact is the $9.99 DLCs were unpriced by industry standards. Now some items are overpriced. Funcom is trying to find the right balance.
The battlepass is quite fairly priced I think. For the player willing to dedicate time to the game it is basically free.
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The items on the Black Lotus Bazaar (BLB) are absurdly overpriced. Lets do a comparison with 2 other games in my library shall we. Al prices are in AUD.
So one (1) set of additional armor on the BLB is 1,000cc = $12.45.
V.S.
Dead Space - $3.95
- 3 additional suits
- 2 additional textures (like a warpaint) for player owned suits
And that is EA for Pete’s sake!
Or how about another?
Resident Evil 4: Separate Ways - $14.95
- 2+hour story expansion
- 4 new weapons
- 5 new outfits
- numerous cosmetic accessories
- 2 new treasures
- 2 additional characters for Mercenaries bonus mode
So could someone please explain to me exactly whos industry standards Funcom are comparing prices and setting a benchmark against, when we pay 215% more than an Electronic Arts game and get one-fifth of the amount of content for our money? It sounds like Warner Brothers charging $10 for one gimmicky fatality on MK1.
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Yes, ESO runs sales, sometimes on the purchase of crowns, sometimes on the items themselves.
They also rerun their boxes the contents of which can be obtained thru a currency earned by in game activity as well as purchased outright.
Some sales are only for ESO+ members.
Their price are generally on the absurd side.
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This is very subjective because in my opinion there is no such thing as an industry standard when it comes to pricing dlc’s for a game.
Ask 100 people what price would make them buy a dlc and you will likely a bunch of different answers.
Some will pay the price because the amount of money doesn’t really bother them much, there will also be some that may think that the price would be too high and they perhaps could buy a good game on a sale for the same amount of money.
A company off course also have to factor in how big a player base they have which leads to how many of those they expect will buy it.
Let’s for a minute imagine that a gaming company make a dlc for their game, and their total production cost for the dlc is 5000 dollars, so if they sell it for 10$ to 1000 players they probably won’t have much profit, they could potentially have lost money.
However if they sell the same dlc to 10000 players or several times more they would likely have had a pretty good profit because the production cost on digital content doesn’t increase by amounts of sale numbers, there will off course be some expenses in the form of handling the sales, fees to platforms(fx. Steam), taxes etc.
So basically it all boils down to…
How much will it cost them to create that dlc?
How many copies do they expect to sell?
Will enough people find the price good enough to buy it?
Personally I probably would have bought some of the dlc, maybe even most of them if they had been priced at 15$ instead of 10$ where I bought all of them when they were released, but there would probably also be some that simply wouldn’t have bought any of them then.
Had it been 20$, I probably wouldn’t have bought any of the dlc’s or only a couple and spent my money on other games instead - My point is, when it comes to cost of digital content, we all have different limits to what we find reasonable or are willing to pay 
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There are multiple wars going on in the world and the world economy is on the brink of colapse, you would think that at times like this they would be more conciderant
I vaguely recall almost buying a $70 usd house on there. I quit after that. 
there is in fact a discount if you already own multiple items from the set
Pfft. Cheapskate. A real whale would buy the $150+ houses. 
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Right? I feel like if I bought something like that it would come with divorce papers. Sheesh.
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Those are single player games.
One ship on Star Citizen or Star Trek Online can cost hundreds. One character skin (think suit of armor) on any of a number of multiplayer games will go for $15-30+. Each new train line for Train Sim World is $20-45 or so. etc. etc.
Some Conan items are overpriced to my mind, yes. However, using the bargain basement $9.99 DLCs as a metric doesn’t work, they were underpriced. I don’t think Funcom had consulted video game marketing experts before pricing those.
The original DLCs all sold for $20 on release. The price drop to $10 is because they’re almost all 4 years old now. The pre-Bazaar DLC pricing has been perfectly fair. Each pack offered good aesthetic content and in one case even introduced a totally new class of weapon to the game.
$13 for one armor set is ridiculous.
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DLCs were $10 on release (except Siptah was $20 and Riddle of Steel $7)
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I am with you on that.
Ark Ascended is out, I’d like to see FC make Conan Exiles 2 with such visuals 
Robocop is out too, another franchise for old people
As for the Bazaar, I don’t care, it’s not like it’s required or obligatory to use it.
Literally yesterday I returned to Conan after a week or two, just to complete one final challenge - go through entire game on barbaric mode, assembly the key and leave the Exiles Lands - without any companion thralls.
Afterwards I’m gone until the game gets something really worthwhile, something that creates a reason to spend another hundreds of hours in Conan.
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