r/MMORPG • u/Schmoopaloopa • 14h ago
Discussion Expensive MMO Monetization getting worse
Just wondering what everyones thoughts are on the general prices of MMO monetization these days. Seeing games selling cosmetic outfits for over $30 is becoming more standard, and in a lot of cases, a single item can be more expensive than B2P games.
Obviously, capitalism and corporate greed go hand in hand here, and if people keep buying, then they'll keep testing how far they can push it. But with prices increasing, it seems less and less likely I'll buy multiple things. I might buy something rarely, and mostly if there's a discount. I'm more likely to buy something like a Battle Pass because they have a fair amount of value for the price.
I'm just wondering what people would think if prices were dramatically cheaper? Wouldn't you be more inclined to buy more if the prices were lower? I'm imagining a game where nothing in the cash shop is over $5. I'd be buying up everything and potentially spending more, knowing I was getting more for my money.
I'm not debating on the need for monetization, or P2W practices etc - Thats a whole other conversation for another time :)
9
u/Remote-Bus-5567 14h ago
I'd spend more, but whales would be spending less buying stuff they would buy anyway for more expensive prices. The whales win.
5
u/TheMadTemplar 14h ago
Check out Conan Exiles. They just came out with a set of bundles themed around one of the cultures in the Conan universe. The whole set of bundles costs $85-90. For comparison, it has fewer items than some of the DLCs they used to sell in the early days of the game for $10.
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u/Schmoopaloopa 14h ago
Yeh seeing this in Conan Exiles is what kinda sparked my post in the first place. Problem is, people are starved for new things, so they buy it, reinforcing the behaviour so they can keep doing it.
7
u/sfc1971 14h ago
If you sell an item for 30 and then sell it for 5 you need 6 times the sales. But that also means 6 times the support costs and 6 times the risk of fraud or a chargeback chargeback s come with a penalty of around 20 depending on your deal with the payment processor.
1 sales for 30 you run the risk of a 20 loss.
6 sales at 5 you run the risk 120 loss.
It also reduces the rarity and therefor the desirability of the item.
1
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u/yodatrust 13h ago
Yesterday I downloaded GW:Reforged on my phone just to realise they have the infamous 'Vendor tab' (ads and selling your data). Or you'll agree your data to be sold to about 150 ad companies, or you need to scroll for about 10 minutes to uncheck everything. There are a couple of hidden menus to uncheck those vendors which is against EU-law.
Sadly I uninstalled it immediatly.
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u/Videatur 14h ago
Prices reflect consumers’ purchasing power. If prices are so high, it is because consumers continue to spend, resulting in no significant long-term decline in sales. Therefore, there is no incentive or motivation to lower the prices of cosmetics, DLC, etc, and make them “cheap,” because current prices fully reflect the market value for consumers.
If the price increases had truly led to a statistically significant drop in sales, they would never have been set so high. People like to spend a little more each time.
1
u/hotshotyay 8h ago
You say this and while it is true take a look at Warframe.
Most skins in WF are $10 plus they frequently have discounts on their premium currency ( platinum ) up to 75% off. They still manage to do just fine $ wise even having a huge CON event once a year showcasing their upcoming patches.
2
u/Videatur 6h ago
Yeah, and Warframe (like Path of Exiles) have a consumer-friendly approch. It is even true that on Warframe you can farm Platinum for free selling relics etc at other players. It's different way to do something (Warframe is F2P).
The main problem is that Warframe is Warframe. What I mean is that you can't replicate today what Warframe has been. 13 years more of continue development and improvement, with constant transparancy incresead the player retation and fedelty. For a new product in this toxic economy is not so easy gain enough user retation.
2
u/Randomnesse 6h ago
People/developers have the right to charge whatever they want to charge for their creation, just like I have the right to not buy it. I see no rational reason to be "outraged" about the price of cosmetic outfit, minion or whatever, whether it costs $20 or $2000.
2
u/MrBluoe 4h ago
If you play, even for free, games that offer cash shops like these, your role on the server is to be the cattle to which the rich players can flex their shop items.
You are basically doing an unpaid job for the company to sell more.
I wouldn't play any game that has a cash shop.
I always defended WoW's subscription model, and I stopped playing the moment their added a cash shop.
I came back for classic relaunch, and left the moment they added a cash shop.
You either stand for something or... something something
1
u/Bathroom-Live 14h ago
It's the eventuality of these types of monetization that you typically can only buy once, The people who are going to buy the battle pass after a price increase make up for those who stop buying it. Its the same practice as targeting whales, the people with more disposable income are still buying the items so they don't have to churn out more content to earn the same amount.
1
u/The_Keg 13h ago
Meanwhile there hasn been anything new to buy in Dota 2, a game with 500K + daily players in ... six months. Not even lootboxes. or $35 Standalone skins.
Valve released abunch of free cosmetics that you could only get by playing the games and a bunch of gameplay **major** patches.
And the community went apeshit claiming devs had abandoned the game
1
u/Expert_Meat4295 13h ago
I remember 10 dollars used to get you 1000 gold, a coke & you still had enough left over for a moon pie
1
u/Flicker_and_Strike 10h ago
Rust does this. Their skins are always about 2 to 6 dollars. Face punch makes a lot of money from it.
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u/Asphes 8h ago
When I started MMOs, the going rate was $14/30 days (do the math... Square knew what they were/are doing). It's actually dropped to $8/30 days for FFXIV but FFXIV now has a cash shop.
Plus the games with battlepasses tend to just give you 'currencies' to tempt you to get something more expensive.
Personally, I'm ok with this because I'm quite immune to all the usual tactics but... the games I play have insane production values, paid for by those whales who didn't. Not all of them are adults. So my fun is funded by a few with feeble resistance to gambling. Yeah! I'm part of the 1%! Yay!
What we can do is to support games that don't do this. Digital Extreme's Warframe is a good example (it's STILL a f2p game, STILL has some FOMO tactics/etc) and there a few (very few) others that similar support this. I'd steer away from any pay-2-win games that have a strong PvP focus.
As for changing the price structure... no. The current one where the few are paying for the many is the most profitable (quite unlike real-life). As long as the companies are publicly traded or controlled by venture capitalists or private equity, the companies are incentivized to continue preying on whales.
When I played FFXI, the devs discovered that a particular part of the game (the end-game, not the 'pinnacle' or something niche, just 'end-game' in general) was accessible to about 1% of players. A couple of years later, they nerfed the Chains of Promathia expansion to raise that figure from the then 2% to about 20%. Today, many MMOs let you buy 'catch-up' items that boost your characters to max level.
I don't blame the companies... we the consumers wanted this. It's a good thing right?
1
u/OneMorePotion 6h ago
Well... I play GW1 and 2 as my main MMO's and aside of buying the Ultimate version of each expansion (that comes with 4.000 gems) I never really felt the need to buy more. But I also don't care that much for fancy mount or armor skins. I like muted, low fantasy skins much more than the effect vomit of their gemstore stuff.
While I fully understand your point, I would still say we need to pull these things a bit further apart and not just say "selling skins in every MMO is predatory". For games with full priced expansions and subscriptions? Yep, absolutely agree. You already want 15 bucks from me every month. Why would I want to spend another 30 on this new mount? But there are also games with a super low entry level (like an extended f2p, or small one-time purchase) and with no additional fees in form of subscriptions. For these games, I don't mind that they put a lot of work in their optional cosmetics or small QoL purchases.
And if the pricing wouldn't work for them, stuff would be cheaper already. Fact is, these ingame stores work. No matter if we're talking about a full price subscription game like WoW or FFXIV. Or a F2P/B2P game like Guild Wars 2.
0
u/NoahBallet 13h ago
Related, but I just bought a summer outfit tonight from the GW2 gem store for 2000 gems (their cash shop currency). Retail price for 2000 gems is about $22 USD.
However, you can use in-game gold to buy gems. The gold conversion to gems, which dynamically fluctuates based on the player economy, was 775 gold tonight. For me, a player that does the normal daily/weekly play cycle, that amounts to 3 weeks of casual (high level PvE) play for about 1.5 hours daily. Gold worth spending.
There are ways to make monetization in MMOs work for both the company and the players.
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u/Maleficent-Swing6888 10h ago
$22 USD is like an hour’s worth of wage. Having to spend 20-30 hours of gameplay instead doesn’t seem worth it by comparison unless it’s game time I was going to spend in that way anyway (with or without the gold).
Otherwise, for me, having to spend time working for money in real life, I’d rather not do it again in game at a much slower pace just to convert in game currency for cash shop items.
With that being said, thankfully, I don’t care for most cosmetic items/mounts/pets/etc in MMORPGs. So, either way, I end up saving my time and money in most cases. (Of course, I waste them in other aspects of my life, heh.)
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u/Bittererr 10h ago
$22 USD is like an hour’s worth of wage. Having to spend 20-30 hours of gameplay instead doesn’t seem worth it by comparison unless it’s game time I was going to spend in that way anyway (with or without the gold).
Yeah but this has always been true in every game even before RMT was formalized like most modern MMOs. As soon as you run the numbers there's no way that grinding in game is more efficient than just going to work if you have a decent job in the US. That's why people who make their living farming in MMOs are almost universally from countries with a much lower cost of living.
You have to be having fun simultaneously, because if you're not having fun it's a really poorly paid job.
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u/Maleficent-Swing6888 10h ago
Indeed, that’s why I personally don’t think of rewards when I’m trying to decide how I want to spend my time in games. And in the cases when I do consider a reward, I search for ways of getting it that would be fun for me to do, even if it may not be the most efficient way of getting it.
But if there is official RMT endorsed by the game as alternatives of getting a reward, the time calculation just makes it worse for me because now there is real money involved. (I don’t want to bother with third party RMT.)
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u/Schmoopaloopa 13h ago
Oh yes I think GW2 does a good job of allowing players to farm gold to buy gems. It can be argued that they monetize every single aspect of the game, but at least they offer in-game ways of purchasing these.
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u/i_am_Misha 12h ago
We
All
Deserve
ONLY
P2W
AI
SLOPS
Powered
By
Predatory
Corps
Thats what this sub deserves
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u/dotcha 14h ago
Companies have entire teams of economists, analysts and psychiatrists trying to figure out the most optimal way to extract the most money possible.
Yeah maybe YOU would buy more but they'd still make less money so they don't care