Forum Discussion

5 years ago

Solved

Put Event Items Separately

Hello, I am just a person on the internet who find it strange of how the event shops work. Most items are sold inside a bundle which makes the price skyrocket. To prevent this just sell each item sep...

discussion

pastaclown
5 years ago
@yourmomsucz it's a marketing strategy, they purposely bundle stuff together so they can sell "more" for less. Here's an example:
10 people want to buy Legendary skins. Every Legendary costs 18 dollars. There's 3 items in a bundle, for a total of 54 dollars. No item can be bought separately, and they price the entire pack at 40 dollars.
IF they allowed us to buy all skins separately, they would make a minimum of 180 dollars, not including whether or not people buy more than 1 skin.
Since we're not allowed to, 5 people decide not to buy at all, and the other half buy the pack. Despite having HALF of the total sales, they make 200 dollars, as opposed to the standard 180.
IF Respawn was smart, and they're not, they would allow players to buy skins separately AND offer a discount for people purchasing all 3 skins in the bundle. 1 Legendary for 18 bucks, 2 for 36, and 3 for 40. You make the middle ground more appealing by tacking on an extra Legendary for 4 dollars as compared to the standard price of 18, people who bought all 3 get savings of 14 dollars, and the people who only want to buy one skin of the 3 save 22 dollars. You satisfy all three consumer interests, all at once.
Edit: The reason they don't do this (and the reason why a lot of live service games offer sales in bundles rather than flexible spending) is because it's not designed with the consumer in mind. It's designed for profit. Allowing players to flexibly spend requires two things, A. Quality of both game and item, and B. Trust in developers to not predatorily monetize different aspects of their game. In our case here, we have quality in item, not in game, and absolutely no trust in the developers in charge of monetization. But they continue to jack up the prices of stuff and hock things into inflexible overpriced bundles, because a substantial amount of people just keep buying them all up, and it's enough for Respawn to not really care about how inflexible it is.

BaldWraithSimp

5 years ago

@pastaclown "We're always trying to iterate, learn, and improve. In this year's Halloween event we tried to provide some value bundles to our players to purchase many legendary skins at a discounted price. We saw a lot of people engaging with that discounted bundle but also heard feedback that some players wanted to purchase a skin a-la-carte. We had planned a similar structure for an upcoming event that we have since changed based on your feedback."

Chad Grenier said this in the recent Reddit AMA that they were going to provide players with the option of buying individual skins but the leaks I saw of the Christmas event had legend skins bundled with charms, weapon skins, etc which indicates that this whole statement was a farce and they didn't actually learn anything.

pastaclown

5 years ago

@BaldWraithSimp Respawn just as greedy as the publisher they partnered with? Who'd've thought. Of course they haven't learned anything, people still keep buying stuff despite how anti-consumer everything has been made.

But of course, a significant portion of Redditors with their huge galaxy brains thinks anyone who criticizes anything, from the poor state of function to the predatory monetization, will immediately crap down your throat about how you're an anti-Apex hivemind donkey who sends death threats to the developers, and that the devs have done absolutely nothing wrong at all ever. Of course the devs listen to them and only them.