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What Are Lucractive Yet Fair Cash Shop Items?
FlyByKnight
Member EpicPosts: 3,967
Greetings folks. Between all the activity in the forums about Archeage being P2W and the recent controversy with H1Z1 airdrops it's been very clear developers struggle continually with how to profit from their cash shops without directly interfering with game play and ecosystem/economy balance.
I think once developers purposely alter working mechanics to drive revenue it destroys game integrity. A perfect example of this is the great enjoyment disparity between Archeage Alpha vs Archeage Release. It's the same game but the release version has been corrupted to push cash shop activity.
When we degrade our discussions into rich/poor or can afford/can't afford we dilute the actual issue. The fact is, most of us are adults who are fully capable of covering the costs to play these games. The problem is the bad feeling when you participate in these cash shop games. When I play Archeage, I don't feel good about being a Patron while being prodded to buy Workers Comp potions. I don't feel good about having to AFK while I'm at work to replenish labor at a reasonable rate. I don't like how they changed the labor costs for simple things to upsell. I don't feel good about not being able to kill someone in PVP because they swiped their credit card way more times than me. I don't feel good about Archeum drop rates being mucked with so I HAVE to go into the cash shop as an alternative. I just want to play the f#cking game and be rewarded for accomplishing a challenges. Stop altering game play to upsell.
What all this said, what are alternatives for cash shop items? What types of cash shop items should be sold that wouldn't disrupt game play or bother you? Are cosmetic items enough? Are cash shops even feasible when being asked to trust that developers won't do something classless to push cash shop?
I personally feel that developers/publishers can't be trusted to have this type of integrity anymore. They're desperate and behave accordingly. I'd rather pay a subscriptions and have everything laid out in front of me. "No Trials, No Tricks, No Traps" but for real. Thoughts?
Comments
The solution is quite simple... make a good game and people will pay whatever you charge to play it.
The whole cash shop thing is an end run around the fact that the game isn't good enough to justify a sub and in some cases not even a box price. People are willing to try anything if it's free or seemingly free... ask them to pony up money and a sub upfront, you better damn deliver.
Plus, in this clickity clickity world we live in, it's so easy to have some in-game feature tied to a cash payment... imagine if every time you died and clicked release, you were actually getting charged behind the scenes a fee? It would be so damn easy to implement and how quickly they'd make a small mint. Every time you entered a dungeon, entrance fee... cha ching!
It's coming because people are desperate enough for it...
The only fair business model of F2P I played is the one Street Gears had, they had cosmetics in the shop and not much more. But like you said, you never know in F2P games when they will suddenly add power items.
In regards to H1Z1. It's obvious that SoE is a company in trouble and they're pulling out all stops in a last ditch effort to keep the company above water. They're releasing low quality unfinished games and trying to cash in as fast as they can.
If the game is focused around an "endgame" like WOW, then things like experience boosters would be completely fine because levels 1-99 are pointless grind that doesn't matter, all the real stuff starts at 100 in that game.
An experience booster would NOT be ok in a game that focuses on the experience or the journey, instead of the endgame. Runescape is one of these games where an experience booster would be very, very pay2win, because it speeds up the journey of leveling, when leveling is a large amount of the content.
In reality 'fair' cash shop items depend on the game itself, even cosmetics with no stats at all would be pay2win if the game were something like fashion online, where the goal would be to look the nicest.
Waiting for:
The Repopulation
Albion Online
I completely agree with you OP and I think you've said it well. I agree with others in that I prefer P2P but if a game has to go F2P I think the SWTOR model works well. At first I hated their model because it's so limiting and I thought that F2P should be as free as possible, until I saw what games like TERA and now ArcheAge have done with that model. The company needs to make money and how do P2P games make money? They restrict access to content unless you pay. A F2P model that uses similar mechanics is *far* preferable to a game that gives you everything because then they have to find less than desirable methods to actually make some cash.
Nothing is free and we're going to have to pay something. Aside from the issues you laid out with the AA style model there are others. When players can feasibly play the entire game and all it's contents for free, or via buying cash shop items with gold, then somebody else has to pick up the tab to keep the company in business. That creates an unfair burden on the part of players who do pay. SWTOR's model does a good job of spreading out the money amongst most of it's playerbase, so most players don't have to spend much at all.
In P2P games there are a few downsides that players use to say why they prefer F2P and SWTOR's model addresses those well. When you're either looking at a new game, or considering going back to an old one, the inability to really try it out before paying is a deterrence. I personally have lost count how many times I've paid a sub to check out an old game, only to find I wasn't into it and who even knows how many I haven't tried due to being unsure about it. In SWTOR you can play for free - albeit via a fairly limited experience. You have enough access to see if you like it and can always come back to your characters after letting the sub lapse to see if you like how it's changed and want to return. Once you've made that decision, a standard sub fee gives you access to everything. Some players also don't like losing access to in game friends and communities if they let a sub lapse and with SWTOR's model you don't have to worry about that - and many of the things you unlocked with your sub will remain with you.
Beyond that is the cash shop. Many of the cash shop items are unlocks that subscribers already have - extra action bars, access to more instances and BGs per week, etc. Subscribers have no need for those items. There are also a few cosmetics - extra hair styles or colors, lightsaber colors, weapon and armor models. There are RNG boxes too which I'm not crazy about. But none of these items in the cash shop are related to endgame at all, nor crafting, nor any other game systems. You have no need to purchase anything on the cash shop. And for a subscriber you get a stipend of 500 cash shop credits per month with your sub and an additional 100 if you use a Security Key App. So you can save that free 600 credits for the off chance that you do see something you want - and you don't have to spend more than your sub to get it. So there's no real need for double dipping like we see in TERA and ArcheAge.
Generally the SWTOR model benefits *both* the company *and* the player. The other good thing in SWTOR is that money is fairly easy to come by and isn't required in large quantities for things like in TERA and ArcheAge. So if there is a cash shop item on the trade broker, chances are you either already have the cash, or can save up to buy it without going out of your way. Granted I don't love the fact that this is essentially legalized RMT so if anyone has ideas on how you can get the same results without making another player richer, I'd love to hear it. But overall this system works really well - it's essentially a P2P game with the ability to redeem a free trial on your existing characters at any time.
The only way I can see F2P working in an MMO is if they keep it to cosmetic and then offer players a diverse array of objects that they can skin. I'm talking skins for armor, weapons, enchantments, costumes, mounts, pets, buildings, furniture, the whole nine yards.
I also think every F2P game needs to really move back in the direction of P2P. F2P mode should really be somewhat of a trial mode, or only something the most casual players would find acceptable. I think ArcheAge did this proper by limiting labor and preventing land ownership, one of the key features of the game.
I like F2P, in that it will keep new players coming in to try the game, and casuals will populate the world and provide content for the paying players, but you simply can't afford to make F2P viable for someone who plays the game every day without spending an extreme amount of time online.
They should put an item in the cash shop for $14.99 which unlocks all game features for 30 days. Yeah. Let that sink in for a minute.
Yep basically a sub
Character appearance reroll. Mounts, Pets.
- play time, subscrption time
- inventory, bag, bank space
- appearance only items, mounts, pets, etc
- character slots, guildsize slots
- convenience services internally or externally, such as access to ingame features from apps/web, sms services for raid calls, calendars, automatic dkp/raidpoint systems, chat logs, timers etc.
- additional races or classes
- content packages, zones, raids, pvp tournaments
- special private servers, maybe with specialized rule, gm events
- respec "potions"
Not acceptable are....
Anything with power, levelling services, increasing level speed, ingame currency, ingame items also attainable by playing, crafting components, mounts with extra speed, stats, free retry on fails or death, mob spawning.. Well there is more, but it should be obvious by now.. You play the game on even terms, players should be able to compare achievements earned by playing, not by paying.
"I am my connectome" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HA7GwKXfJB0
I agree with what most of you guys are saying. I'm not against cash shops. I think they can be done respectfully.
The problem is I DON'T trust developers to be respectful anymore. They do nasty things behind the scenes and are very arrogant about it when caught or just absentee. I don't trust developers to have the integrity to NOT sway in game ecosystem to prod players to use the cash shop. I don't need anymore examples. I'm 100% convinced. I think straight forward subscriptions with everything upfront to the player is the fairest route for both sides.
I'm tired of hearing "we need to get paid for our work" as the excuse for conducting business unethically and disruptive to good games.
I feel like even if a game had something as simple as cosmetic pieces in a cash shop, one of these developers would scale back the drops on cool looking gear or secretly remove it so they could get the conversions. It's pretty damn depressing.
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I'm afraid that brainless people like my mother who spend god knows how much playing candy crush saga or whatever bs mobile game/browser game are becoming the target demographic du jour for game companies.
I remember 8-9 years ago or so and seeing enhancement / enchantment safeguards and being appalled. Now, I'm hoping that's the worst they can throw at me in terms of money grabbing.
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