Many live service games recognize that battlepasses in general are a revenue source if done right and also a way for players to engage with the game by having something to do on a daily/weekly and monthly basis.
If we look like at some of the top live service games (e.g. Genshin Impact, Wuthering Waves, etc) they have a battle pass that resets every ~30 days, mostly contains rewards that are obtainable in the game as well, such as gold, expeirence tokens(this can be added to level up followers faster,a token that can be stored in a chest and used when needed), etc. and the only change they do is add 1-2 items for the premium battlepass to make it worth $10.
Conan Exiles can do something similar and win big on this feature with almost no effort and hereās how to do it:
reintroduce the battlepass with 60 levels
battlepass should have 4 tiers of rewards with
tier1: gold, silver, fragments of power, blood crystals, sacrificial blood in a flask, soul essence, supply materials packages, crafter tokens, etc - in general items that are hard to come by in the game
tier2: smelted iron siege boulder, salvaged starmetal shells, burning siege boulders, any variation of sorcery spell orbs like draught of the dead, potion of detect resources, potion of invisiblity, etc - overall consumable items that cannot be obtained by playing the game
tier3: unique armor and weapons that cannot be obtained by playing the game outside events like weāve seen with bounty hunter event, these items have durability and will get consumed if used. Players will engage with the future battlepasses to obtain them again. These items cannot be crafted, only obtained from the battlepass.
tier4: rewards for the premium battle pass which can be anything from the bazar at a discounted price (maybe 20% off) Funcom can chose anything from the bazzar, put a discount on it and push it on the battlepass. + 60 extra levels with double the rewards, that progress at the time as the regular free battlepass with tier1,2,3 rewards)
In this way, players get extra content with plenty of rewards, the battlepass resets automatically after 30 days. You donāt even need to reshuffle the rewards, it can be the exact same battlepass track.
This is content for the game and can draw player engagement.
Funcom makes revenue every month and gets to sell more. With discounts already in the bazzar, why not take those discounts and build them into a repeatable system that costs almost no effort to run.
Iāve added 2 screenshots for more details from genshin impact that explains this system and how it works (thereās a lot of game dev science behind this system):
The best Battlepass system Iāve seen was probably Helldivers 2. But with any system, its going to require a bit of maintenance and upkeep on FCās end that they are probably not going to devote to this game anymore. I suspect weāll see Bazaar stay only because it allows the artists to do āsomethingā when theyāre otherwise not busy on other projects.
But outside anything related to the live service that connects the purchases, you can probably consider CE to be āfeature completeā at this point.
#1 thing for me in 7D2D is the jobs. Iām very task oriented so love dailies/weeklies/monthlies. Itās something that keeps me in game when Iām done.
The only flaw I saw in the last system was the cost of production. I donāt see how it couldnāt have lost money. But they could just bring it back restructured to not reflect ages but cultures, and recycle, I mean they got what? 2 years worth?
This game should never have had a battle pass or microtransactions added to it in the first place thus it certainly does not need the battle pass to be reintroduced.
Not certain about Wuthering Waves, but in Genshin Impact you only have one server your account is on.
Conan is quite different. One account can be on any number of servers.
Thus, having any sort of ārewardā that is a consumable is of extremely thin utility.
Furthermore, any ārewardā that can simply be admin spawned in is also of extremely dubious utility.
Then there is the random thing from the Bazaarā¦
What happens if they choose something that a player already purchased?
Should that player skip the BP that month?
Will there be an additional CC reward?
On the topic of Crom Coins, how many Chrome Cryto will the Premium battle pass grant? Because the Genshin Battle Pass offers both Primo Gems (the premium currency) as well as Fates (which are used for summoning, because, as seems to be forgotten, Genshin is a Gatcha game)
Another thing being left out is that Genshin is a consistently expanding game with actual map growth and new characters as well as mechanics. If Genshin were no longer growing no one would touch the BP.
To say nothing of events that arenāt always just recycled and banal grinds.
Also, while Genshin isnāt bug free, compared to Conan, itās effectively pristine.
So sure, when Conan has a major map expansion each year and significant server stability, absolutely reintroduce a Battle Pass.
Until then, letās not be too silly.
I agree with a lot of the points youāre making. I guess Conan Exiles is not the perfect game that we all want it to be and thatās the reason why I made this post.
You answered your own question
Conan Exiles advertised itself as a live service and itās the whole reason why I kept playing. After battlepass was removed I quit the game, same happened for server transfers. I keep coming back a few weeks a year to see the new updates. The battle pass worked for me and with no alternative objective based activity Iāll just leave this game and come back next year. If this is the player engagement Funcom wants so be it.
Well said. If I were a dev I would have this framed on the wall in my office.
There are lots of battlepass models out there and at this point Iāll take anything over the empty void we have right now.
Your publisher would likely have you dismissed within the week.
Half joke asideā¦
What works for an independent studio is entirely unrealistic with corporate overlords.
Funcom is a wholely owned subsidiary of Tencent.
Full stop.
Calling Conan Exiles a live service game started while they were offering themselves up to Tencent.
This one recalls when they first started talking up Games as a Service when describing the Tencent buy out.
This one laughed long and hard.
If this game is a service, then what does the quality and reliability of service say about the game?
No. Thatās a marketing alternative fact.
If the game were a service there would be compensation when it is down or broken.
Again, look at Genshin and count the Primos every time there is an interruption in service. Read the compensation letter for, oops, there was a bug.
Is this game Live Service?
Itās like the gray space social media likes to hide in.
Is it a publisher?
Or
Is it a platform?
Well, the answer to that depends upon whether they want to censor and promote at the moment, or if they want to distance from culpablity.
Conan is similar.
Itās a live service game when it wants to explain itās monetization and why new and exciting things are being pushed out constantly buggy with vague promises to fix later, or arbitrary changes no one asked for are shoveled forthā¦
But when servers are down or an update literally makes the game unplayable (XBoX memory overflow awhile back being the strongest example)ā¦ Well, itās a game on a platform and sold as is and there is no reason to even expect access to official serversā¦ So whatās all this salt about service being interrupted?
Alternativelyā¦
They pretend they are a small, bedraggled, valiant indy game studio when things are sloppy and janky. They have only so many resources and are stretched to the limitā¦
But when it comes to where their attention goes and what customers they interact with, or the amusing state of āpremiumā items or the MTX, well thatās big bad Tencent telling them what to do. That dastardly megacorp that owns them!
Heheheh.
This one must express gratitude.
It was very cathartic dumping some salt.
True. Iāve spent money in an other game since I stopped Conan, because the fun kept increasing. While I do connect to Conan now and then because I feel nostalgia, the only time I got motivated to āplayā this year, was to reproduce a tiny house I saw from a tutorial. I activated the flying mode, got motion sickness, vomited, turned the computer off. My engagement was short lived, and I spent no money.
The battle pass was sold as interfering with creating quality updates so it was trashedā¦only to get worse quality updates.
I think the letter from the director that came out early this year has the most truth I have seen. Reading between the lines of it, the letter states that the design team back in 2017 threw up the game as just a normal game and that meant it was never designed to truly continue on. This gave Joel and team the freedom to do sloppy patch work to get a functional game, albeit illogical designed. Now 7 years later, they moved to the next big shinny and leaving the future of Conan with the NC team that is designing stuff in a landmine state of interdependencies. However this is no excuse to release crap and the more they added complexity to the game, the crappier it got until where we are now.
Now about bringing the battle pass back, I donāt see it. To be honest I think the business types have already written off the game and the battle pass, right or wrong, has been linked to excessive resource usageā¦ meaning itās a losing proposition for FC. Great value for us but not so great for FC. Since that is the case, it wonāt see the light of day again.
