VIP membership

"YaeVizsla;c-1614700" wrote:

"UnstopableSteve;c-1614346" wrote:
Well I am able bodied and refuse to work but I will whale on this game with your hard earned tax money just because I'm entitled to everything because I was born.

I really dont get why people who invest getting something back is a big deal.
You play poker you get rake back. You have a points card at a supermarket you get some money back.
Whats the problem??

You pay, you get the thing you paid for. Be it a shard pack, or crystals, or what have you.

Here's the thing.

This free to pay model is not the result of charitable **** giving away free games. There is good reason large-scale multiplayer games have been skewing more and more toward the free to play with microtransactions model.

A customer base has a variable willingness and ability to pay for your product. If you go at a game with a fixed price point model, then as you raise that price point, your player base shrinks. Even if you have a one dollar price point, you lose a ton of players compared to free. And a large-scale multiplayer game wants the biggest player base possible, to create a healthy community. (For certain values of healthy.)

The free players are providing a service to the paying players by constructing a community around them. Even if half of all players never spend a dime, that means by using a free to play model, they've doubled the size of the community. And that's lowballing it, as many of those paying players would not have come to the game at all had there been a pay wall to get in.

In addition, the bulk of the cost for a game like this is development, not server space. In fact, the bulk of the processing requirements are outsourced to your phone, not their servers. As such, more free players is not a huge added burden. On the other hand, a non-paying player may change their mind later, and serves as an added potential marketing engine through word of mouth to their friends.

The key to sustaining this model is to not alienate free players. If there is a perception that the game isn't just pay to play, it's pay to win, many of those would be free players will decide there is no point, they can't be competitive, and leave. What's more, many of the paying players may decide it isn't about strategy or dedication, but rather it's about dueling pocketbooks.

You might sa2y, "Just don't cross that line," but the problem is just where that line is varies from person to person.

No paid-exclusive content is a very deliberate and profitable choice. CG makes money by not glorifying the big spenders, by not treating F2P like second class citizens (which is what a "VIP" program does).