The fact that they haven’t done plenty of things doesn’t mean it’s not the right thing to do… c’mon AWOL that’s lousy logic. Secondly, you’re not looking for a tenfold increase in uptake. You’re simply looking for higher total revenue.
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Funcom hasn’t done any sort of significant revision of SWL’s monetization since the relaunch. That means it’s of two things:
- They’re happy with it.
or - They don’t care.
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Yup.
Oh wait, I take that back. They did just change the Agent costs from Aurum to MoF. I think that counts as a monetization change.
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It’s a change, but I wouldn’t call it significant. Was anyone paying to expedite agent missions before? Is anyone now? I highly doubt that it matters much.
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To achieve higher total revenue, you’d need more than a tenfold increase. If you reduce the price from 100 to 10, you need to sell 10 units to equal the revenue of selling at 100. It’s hard to see how making it all cheaper and then making less money from it would generate higher total revenue.
I vaguely recall that there was something in a financial report after SWL launched about SWL exceeding their expectations. It’s a very vague memory though, so I may be misremembering.
Looking at the aurum exchange, there’s a lot of aurum moving through it each day. There’s even more that’s listed and waiting for prices to rise again. That rather implies that people are paying the current prices. Without actual data, it’s hard to say, but it does seem like the silent majority is actually buying aurum. Why would Funcom cut their prices if they’re generating the sales already? Don’t get me wrong, it’d be nice if they did, and the price in MoF for aurum went down, because I’d quite like to buy some cheap aurum for inventory and bank slots. But the exchange is always active. Even when the price capped out, there were massive amounts of aurum being sold (you could tell from the dropping number of sell orders). I’d love to get my hands on the actual metrics data, but even without it, the evidence doesn’t support any justification for reducing prices atm.
It rather looks like it’s working as intended by Funcom. It’s just that the way players would like it to work is slightly different (and cheaper).
You’re assuming a static market size, which is incorrect. My logic is how Walmart makes money; by selling items at a lower margin but the gain in market share more than makes up for the lower price.
If a reduction in pricing creates a bigger market (that is, it draws in new players that pay and/or converts more non-payers into fractional payers), then your uptake, as a percent of total game population, doesn’t have to be a ten-fold increase.
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No, I’m not. I’m talking about numbers of sales in units, not as a percentage of the population or anything else. Walmart does exactly what I am talking about. They make less money per individual transaction, but have an increased number of transactions.
The likelihood that people would choose to try SWL just because the prices are lower is slim. If they haven’t heard of the game and decided to try it out, they are unlikely to be drawn by hearing that the monetization is cheap. Have you ever tried a game just because you were told that it wouldn’t cost you thousands to pay to get your gear to endgame? I’ve played a lot of games, some of which have been pay to win, but I’ve never heard people recommending any on the basis that it’s cheap.
Even if you did draw new players into the game, you would still need to make 10 times as many individual transactions to generate the same revenue. You might end up with a higher percentage of the game population paying, but unless you draw more whales in, you’d still be losing money.
Yes I am paying for expedite now that it mof. Never before.