As far as I understood the explanation, it applies to discount prices. I was asking about starter bundles etc. and whether the same, or different, interpretation applies to them. That is, there is no claim that the price has been lower, only a statement that in the future, the price will be higher because in the future, the bundle’s contents will only be sold separately (as different SKUs, so technically different products than the original bundle). I think it’s a different enough case to ask for clarification.
As I said, I’m no expert on German law, but if you guys are, you can probably clarify this to me.
The old dlc price offer somewhere in between the 2 lowest dlc packs for The Sims 4, less than their stuff packs costing 10$ and a bit more than their Kits costing 5$… I can also compare content pricing against other games
If the inflation has affected the gaming industry then why are even new games still sold at same price as before?
I agree that the inflation can be felt in pretty much all areas, some more than others(food, heating electricity), but in my opinion it must be affecting the gaming industry very little because I don’t see a general increase in game pricing.
That said I do agree that they need an income to keep the lights on in conan Exiles, but I can’t help but feel they are trying to squeeze as much money out of that game as possible to make shareholders more happy and to inject more money into future developments like Dune.
Nothing wrong with doing that, but the more they squeeze the bigger the risk is that they lose in the end and end up pushing too many players away
The bigger the playerbase the more potential customers they have to buy their extra content, it is logical, but where is the fine line?
This is a hypothetical example, there is no base in reality, but I believe there is some truth in it…
Imagine 100 players that each have 50$ to spend on extra content for their favorite game each month.
The extra content is set to a price of 10$ per pack containing roughly 10 items where they before got 100 items in a dlc for 10$, so it is a big chock to them, but they all keep playing the game.
10 of the 100 players have gotten used to the pricing, they don’t like it, but they really want some new items to use in the game so they each buy 5 packs every month(total 500$).
However the remaining 90 people feel it is way to expensive, but 20 of them buy 1 pack each month(total 200$) because they feel that they need to support the game that they love and also because there are some really nice items they really want, the remaining 70 of them feel that no matter how much they actually want some of the items, they simply refuse to pay such an overinflated price and simply don’t spend any of their monthly 50$ on the game.
So all in all the game company earns 700$ from these 100 players
Let’s try with a different example using the same 100 players and the same extra content, but with a different price…
The company has decided to stop making the dlc with 100 items for 10$ and instead offer smaller sets with roughly 10 items for 2$, it is roughly twice the price per item, but many of the players feel that it is fair since they can now better choose what they want to buy.
50 of the 100 players spend their monthly 50$ on the game(total 2500$)
30 of them spend 30$ of their monthly 50$ on the game(total 900$)
20 of them spend 10$ of their monthly 50$ on the game(total 200$)
So with a price per content pack of 10$ the company earn 700$ from these 100 players while if they set the content pack price to 2$ they will earn 3600$
I know, I know, this is a very simple and crude example.
There is a lot that I haven’t taken into consideration like amount of content produced each month, pricing, amount of different people, growth or drop in player base, inflation etc.
But I still think there is some truth in this example… Somewhere in there
It is a balance for such a game company to find out where the right price is to get the best profit while keeping the player base fairly happy, also there is the fact that reputation also matters, a quick profit on a game with very unhappy customers may hurt their sales for the next big game.
Bottom line is, YES, people should vote with their wallet if they find the pricing too high, best advice ever.
I am sure they are constantly evaluating their strategy to improve their sales and keep their player base and perhaps make it grow a little.
I don’t think they are close to finding a good balance, but I hope they have learned something form the past 5 or 6 months with their new monetization strategy, I don’t believe it is working as they hoped it would, they relied too much on specialists that only know how to maximize the profit and take inspiration from what other game companies do and can get away with, what works for some may not work for others, but I feel sorry that gaming has turned out to be selling extra content for as high a price as possible, simply because you cannot go to another seller and buy content cheaper for that game like you often can with physical stuff, so they can get away with overinflated prices… Until a certain point
EDIT: After re-reading the post, I noticed that I had made some wrong calculations, these are now corrected
Oh wait.
.it just dawned on me. We actually buy crom coin and not anything in the Bazaar. I believe these types of law only follow legal tender and since there isn’t a limited time discount price on the crom coin, the law is moot…at least that is what the courts will need to figure out.
I do agree that a company has to make profits in order to survive, but the customer has to not feel scammed along the way.
There is a balance to be found and it depends on what we think the items should be at the “right price”.
I paid the stormglass and recently the sandstone set from the Bazaar because when i divided the price per piece and the taking into account the use i will have for them, it was worth the price.
Unfortunatly any other single item even in bundle feels overpriced.
I needed the market, the garden and the bath for my RP building project but the price is damn too high for what they offer.
Therefore, I didn’t buy anything and so, Funcom lose some income from me.
This! This is the data that they look at and adjust accordingly. The sandstone is a great example of this. 2 pricey items that probably didn’t sell as well as expected were combined with a reduced price and probably sold a bunch.
I keep harping on this but it is valid. The only thing they got as far as data on individual items is other companies (IE industry) and especially those under the Tencent family. So this is probably where the initial pricing is coming from. However as we all know, each game is it’s own community and willingness to purchase varies game by game (the what is industry average when it ranges from $1 to 100 for items?) and so as the data comes in the pricing gets adjusted accordingly.
Now this next part isn’t a threat or anything but a simple truth that is more visible in these micro transaction companies. As CE cements into what type of price point it is going to be based on customer feedbacks, the employees will as well. What I mean in this is that if CE is looking like it’s going to be a cheaper community (not meant to be a derogatory assessment ) the company then starts adjusting to this paradigm and the talent that knows they can make better money elsewhere will move on to these (which typically are the other games that have $20 skins etc) . The overall quality of the items may or may not suffer (depending on the leadership culture and their candidate selections) but can be frustrating and delayed because of turnover as the new kids get their feet wet in CE and then move on once they get experience. The whole thing is actually quite beautiful to watch in an organic way of money and social constructs.
The only warning I will give in this is be careful what precisely you wish for. The customer is ultimately in charge and will dictate how everything works. You can’t expect luxury items out of a convenient store budget long term so when it comes around in 3 years from now on how CE has really taken a nose dive in as far as quality goes, please refer back to this precise moment when we,as a collective, said ‘we know they need to make money but not so much of my money’. I personally say let the early adopters subsidize the game and hopefully we see discounts in the future for the rest of us (I used to be an early adopter but I’m one on a budget and have learned now to wait to get more bang for my buck)
Though I personally think someone in ‘Marketing & Sales’ may indeed have made a bit of an ‘unintended’ glitchette with the pricing math, I do think in-game purchases should follow guidelines to not expose vulnerable players who feel they Must have Everything and don’t without clear warning messages, etc. I do remind myself that truncheons are not being held at heads. If you do not want to buy anything then just don’t.
(I remind myself of this daily when I walk past that excellent corner cookie and snack shop nearby).
And this is where individual sociopolitics come into play. Who is responsible to ensure you have the self control to limit yourself? FOMO is real but it hasn’t been a significant challenge till very recently so what happened to where we hold companies responsible for their ability to get us to buy stuff? Yes I was caught up with it too as I bought the headhunter set but realized very quickly it was for the gibbet and the rest…meh. I force the helmet as a gas mask illusion (because I paid for it and it’s going to have purpose dang it) but as others have said, maybe I will find use later. But the point here is that this was MY mistake. I don’t blame FC for this because i understand the relationship we have. Yes I can talk to the dev team and remark about direction and get all friendly and yes I love good banter but in the end…I’m a customer and they want my money. It’s not wrong to be friendly and have this business relationship. I do it daily and I actually prefer it to the alternative of caveat emptor/ adversarial relationship. We both want an exchange to happen, lets figure it out together.
Sadly, not in Egypt anymore (in South Africa right now), so it’s fine. I did however feel (a little bit) scammed by the gift shop merchant on our Nile cruise. Nice enough guy, but he tried to sell me a really pretty pewter looking cleopatra statue for $75. He said he made it and it took a long time. I don’t actually believe he made it (lol, they’re always “home made”), but I managed to get him down to $50. It was higher than I had hoped, but fortunately, I never saw one like it anywhere else… so maybe he did? Or it was pretty rare. All-in-all, no major complaints… just spent more than I’d hoped lol…
This post isn’t an endorsement of the new Bazaar, but I have been buying items from it.
The pricing is not ideal, the entire predatory monetization method sucks and I wish they’d go back to the large DLCs, but there are items I want that I can afford and that personally, make me enjoy this game a lot more. I understand if enough of us don’t buy it things will change, but this game is truly an escape for me, and I’m willing to pay maybe a little more than I should to have fun when I want.
I’ve gone through some hard times the last few years, and this game has been somewhat of a saving grace in tough times. Again, I don’t agree with the practice and predatory pricing, but I’m still going to buy what I want, because we’re each capable of making our own decisions. We’re all here a short time in the big picture and it’s best to get the most out of each day we can! This is certainly not an endorsement to go out and buy any items, just that we all can decide what is best for ourselves.
Similarly, if anyone has any questions about the bazaar, if I’ve purchased that item I’m happy to answer any questions about it and how it works or doesn’t work
Personally I would feel no remorse to give out 20-30€ for a conan DLC, it is not coming out frequently maximum 2-4x a year. I would rather pay higher price for those than for a bazaar set.
Yes indeed - and we do have a freedom of sorts to still spend the DLC amount + inflationary urges and I think it is Very clear that the actual artwork and design of all the pieces is way, way better than past designs. Compliments and thanks to the Art/Design teams.
This will sound really harsh, but there’s literally no other game I have personally played that has been out for this long and suffers from this many visible bugs. For context, one of the games I’ve played is the infamous CyberPunk 2077, although nowhere near its release. I’ve only had 2 bugs manifest in my several end-to-end playthoughs of it.
Don’t get me wrong, I still love and enjoy Conan Exiles, and I acknowledge that none of the bugs that bother me are literally game-breaking. Most of them are annoyances I know how to work around, and a few are serious bugs that prevent me from doing certain things I should be able to do, but I want to be clear that I’m not saying this game is “broken”.
All I’m saying is that we shouldn’t fool ourselves about the quality of this game. When it comes to quality, there’s a significant difference between “good” and merely “tolerable”.
This is the truth that gets neglected most of the time in these discussions. When we buy stuff from BLB, we’re not merely paying for the cost of that stuff plus some profit on top. We’re providing profit for Funcom, which will then get allocated to a variety of things they do, one of them being continued Conan Exiles development.
So even though we all treat this as “I’m paying N CC for this armor and saddle”, it’s not the whole truth.
That said, that’s precisely why we can argue so much about different aspects of the monetization. If we were buying loaves of bread, we would be much more restricted in terms of business model. But it’s precisely because we’re subsidizing future development that there’s more flexibility and this monetization isn’t cast in stone.
This is one of the reasons why the pricing itself – not talking about other aspects of BLB – grates so much on those of us who have played this game for years.
Funcom looked at the situation and realized two things: 1) they needed more revenue, and 2) there was a lot more to be extracted from people than what just the DLC pricing allowed.
And so, naturally, they set up a new system that focused on that segment of the market and simply let the rest of us forgotten and ignored. Like I stated repeatedly, if we’re talking about pricing alone, I don’t blame them for that. I simply won’t buy what I don’t think is reasonably priced, whether I can afford it or not, and that’s that. It sucks, but that’s the way many things are.
The only thing I would say about the pricing is that it doesn’t have to exclusively focus on whales*. Late adopter bundles can mop the rest of us up
* As always, I use the word “whale” in its technical sense, not as a pejorative.
Because they make up the difference in DLCs. SMB3 was a $50 game in 1990 on initial release. Adjusted for inflation that’s a bit over $100. Now you see even singleplayer games being released for $60 plus DLCs, Season Passes and other things.
Some players might be willing to pay $120 for a full featured game with no DLC. There just isn’t any publishers willing to do that. Why make only $120 up front when you can make $200-600 over several years when the initial development is done?
Remember this isn’t being done because they simply can. Its being done because its profitable. If in general people got wise to this in 2005 and didn’t buy in. Then we wouldn’t have this conversation now. But players bought in and bought in hard and continue to do so.
The days of cultural DLCs are gone. A memory, a nice little bonus for the random new player that gets into Conan years after launch. But for the rest of us, this is the new future going forward. You pay the price you are willing to pay, and don’t pay the ones you don’t.
I’m pretty certain we will see prices of older objects come down. It makes no sense for them to not do so. Sell them at higher introductory prices people are willing to pay now. Then drop them for the rest. Its how games work on Steam. Brand new shiny game is $60, then 6-12 months later its $45, then it drops down to $30, and eventually is in the $10-20 range and in some cases lower with sales driving those prices lower.
If Funcom doesn’t do this, its more their loss then ours. Literally the loudest voice you can have on this subject is not purchasing and playing. As I’ve said before, playing and not buying skews their numbers in a bad way.
This of course relies on those who do wish buy stuff at the current prices aren’t of sufficient number to keep them going. Of course if it is, there no amount of feedback that is going to work anyway. But unfortunately this seems to be the case. While there is a ton of complaints about the prices, people are still buying stuff despite complaining about it.
Personally I’ve sent no such mixed signal and have not purchased any crom coin for the bazaar. Imagine if everyone else did the same?
Allright, now I got it (sry, English is not my native Language so I misunderstood your Question before). But I don’t have any reference examples for this, i.e.: This would really have to be answered by an expert for consumer protection who has already fought through something like this legally.
Yep…but as they try to figure out that magical price point where luxury isolated turns into profitable mass market appeal profit, the late adaptors need patience for the price to go down. It will happen, just when I’d the critical aspect and looking how certain things resurface, I’m thinking FC is starting to get the understanding better or had a brilliant plan to begin with. I don’t believe they are forgetting anyone but just letting “whales” have first dibs at the higher price point. After the first year, I think they will be more apt to discuss a larger store with “clearance bins” of older materials that just aren’t generating traffic as much as the want to. As long as they use true sales data vs some dumb projection modeling, the pricing will equilibrate into a cash cow for them that will be reasonable for us. A lot of ifs but it’s feasible.
Patience is a nice thing to have, but there’s also nothing wrong with conveying feedback to Funcom. Communication is a two-way street: Funcom could just as easily choose to address that feedback, but they have their reasons not to. I respect those reasons. But as long as the status quo persists, you can expect the feedback to continue. It’s just the way things are.
It depends heavily on your definition of “us”. It will certainly reach an equilibrium, but that equilibrium doesn’t need to be reasonable for the playerbase. I don’t see why that equilibrium couldn’t focus exclusively on the whales, the way it does now, and keep the game profitable enough for continued development, despite the never-ending stream of feedback from non-whales.
I’ve been gaming even before ZX81 was a thing(arcades), so with 40 years of experience in gaming playing a variety of different types of games, I know that it is not a new thing with extra content and in some cases at outrageous prices, but I have always been wise enough to just stay clear of those games.
Not necessarily staying away from games that had dlc, because believe it or not, there are still lots of games that have dlc that deliver reasonable content for a fair price, like I mentioned, The Sims franchise has despite being owned by EA always been fair priced, you get a lot of content and often expansions with new worlds and new mechanics.
I have several games like The Sims where the price for extra content is at an entirely different level than CE is trying to push on us, that is why I believe that unless you have a very special game like for example WOW, it is hard to get away with it in the long run, look at Blizzard, players have very little confident in them and I wouldn’t be surprised if the sales won’t match their expectations since their reputation has taken some serious hits.
I don’t think it always is as profitable as they think, remember the Sims again, shortly after they had released The Sims 3 they added a premium ingame cash shop where you could buy items for a currency called simpoints, this was very unpopular(Conan Exiles Bazaar deja vu?) and the sims franchise took a huge hit, so big that the sequal Sims 4 almost could not have happened if it weren’t for the fact that they scrapped the cash shop and went back to content packs bought for real money at reasonable prices, they slowly regained the trust of their player base again, but for them this predatory tactics didn’t work out well for them.
I acknowledge that some games get away with overpriced content using predatory tactics, but in the long run they may hurt themselves more than they knew, a quick profit doesn’t always work, at least not for everyone, how it will affect Funcom and especially Conan Exiles in the long run remains to be seen, but I fear they have overshot the target by a lot with this new strategy.
Maybe it is deliberately from Tencent’s point of view, I don’t know, all I know is that the gaming industry in Asia is much different than what we usually see in Europe and US.
Also worth noting is that EU is aware of the problems the gaming industry is creating with lots of these strategies to conceal how much money people are actually spending in cashshops, lootboxes etc.
They are looking into how they can regulate it, so I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point in the future these tactics may become illegal in EU.
Deep down I think the people at Funcom wanted to make the best possible game for their players and be rewarded by big sales, I just fear that the focus has shifted and where that will leave them in the future… No one knows, all I can say is that I am a part of Conan Exiles right now because I own and find joy in the game still, but I am not so sure that my loyalty will stay for future products from them, don’t know but this whole thing has left me with a sour taste in my mouth, it is just not something I really want to invest in, so yeah vote with your wallet, but still it feels sad that they only focus on how high they can push the price instead of relying on the old way of good products sell themselves if the price is right
Greed. duh. Look sure you can make a nice profit on luxury items but if you got everything ready and done, why not make something appealing to the mass market as well and gain significantly more profit. If we are all in agreement there is a price point between low quantity but out of reach price and cheap as hell and everyone buys it, why not give the early adopters their due for the pricepoint to make it tidy for the shareholders and then lower the price to bring in a nice big fat bonus for the staff? Greed can be directed to do good things as well and there is a number between luxury and cheap that makes the most bang for the buck . Marketing folks all know it exists and the larger companies get it down fast but I say do both and make everyone that is reasonable happy. The unreasonable will always be unhappy and so catering to them is…well…unreasonable.
Just an aside, purchasing anything from the Bazaar is an endorsement of it in the most meaningful way.
While this one is of the belief that some of the sounds made in the forum do carry… They will not carry with anything resembling the weight that transactions do.
If people groaned, but they still purchased, that’s a green light, in some circles it will indicate that the sweet spot, has been found. The maximum that can be charged and still generate revenue. Go higher and the groans turn into closed wallets. Go lower and perhaps a larger number of customers will buy. But if the revenue goals are hit, rolling the dice on larger numbers at lower costs usually isn’t embraced until the product is stale.
