@SlivPTS so you say they made tests directly on people's wallets? like setting a skin 20 now, 10 the next day, 15 the third one and so on, to see where the right price point is? I doubt if it's even legal to do it like that in a game, although I've seen a store that adjusts prices based on demand, they start with a huge discount and then rise back towards the full price by a certain step, after each batch of 100 or so items get sold, even if that happens in an hour.
Yes, the skins are more work for artists and can't cause more issues and slower fixing directly. But maybe they don't have the possibility to double or triple the number of skins released per month, so they would have to come up with other type of content to justify buying battle passes or special event chests. New legends, items, map areas, modes and animations can cause more issues and slower fixing.
Now i might be a bit odd in thinking this.
But if i had figures showing me what the avg spend per person is on a product i was selling, and the figures didn't meet my expectations i'd be thinking;
A) is my product of poor quality?
B) is my product inaccurately priced?
Now respawn know their product is badass,hence the hefty prices. But surely the lack of sales tells them the pricing isn't where it should be.
1000 coins per skin would have been sensible, rather than making it just over to force people to buy a larger coin pack leaving them an odd number that they will inevitably gamble away on the loot ticks and likely come away unsatisfied.
If a large quantity of players who don't normally spend are tempted into spending on one off purchases they deem reasonably priced, i would think this would boost profits more than relying on the cruelly tagged "whales" for their profit margins. Pretty sure one off spenders massively outweigh the latter.
On a side note, having more than 4 items that can be bought with apex coins would probably boost profits a lot aswell. The lack of variety is pretty shoddy lol.
@MandatoryIDtag conclusions should be taken after this event ends, because it's a short time span. You can't fix stuff on the go in a business of millions of $. They screwed this event, the next one may try to fix the problems, it's not worth trying to adjust this one only to screw it up even more and * off the guys that already spent full amount.
In the end, there's also a chance for this event to be successful (living up to the expectations regarding profit and popularity boost of the game), even with this storm of complaints. Keep in mind that people that are OK with the state of the game rarely come up on social media to express their content, and those can be many. Due to negativity bias, it's normal to have any forum filled with more criticism than praise, making them a less accurate measuring tool.
@DoYaSeeMe I agree completely, the damage is done with this event. My comments were geared more towards future events/additions of saleable content, however i think they ring true with the standard store, all event content aside.
Free games attract a lot players that can't afford to go and buy the latest titles, respawn should have remembered that when implementing their price structure.
@MandatoryIDtag Free to play / freemium are not absolutely free, they are actually way more expensive if you want the complete content. But I think a lot of people are not aware of that. I really doubt EA / Respawn's main reason for going free to play was to make the game more accessible for people who can't afford it. I think this step was taken mainly because they needed the players to be already hooked when taking out the wallets, because this can make them spend more.
@SlivPTS focus group testing, qa and surveys are the way everything gets tested nowadays. You can't put an untested product on the market. The discount in the store is not a test, that move had to be planned before the event, they're not a grocery store 🙂. But if they are actually testing on public...that would be really, really bad...
Regarding the profit, it's not just an assumption, it's simple logic. Let's say a skin sells for 15$, 5$ for development and 10$ profit. If that skin is reduced to 10$, then the profit becomes 5$. Twice as small is something, right?
I can also say that you're assuming huge amount of players are not buying. I've seen a lot of these new skins in every match, so it's hard to say from the player level. The devs know better, they have the actual numbers and we may never find out the actual truth.
