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From Casual to Whale: 5 Key Lessons from Spending in AFK Journey | MMORPG.com
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From Casual to Whale: 5 Key Lessons from Spending in AFK Journey | MMORPG.com
If you're a fan of hero collectors like AFK Journey and you're looking to spend, here's some insights into what happens when you pay your way to the top.
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Agreed actually! My brother and I both play Honkai: Star Rail, and I'm "mostly" a freeloader. I dropped $100 when Kafka released but never again spent on pulls, I do however get the battlepasses and the login rewards for $4.99 and month. But I am only missing a single character. Because I do every single event and whatever I can do, where he has spent thousands to stay up to date with every character, but he doesn't play as much.
I play games like this and I'll spend so I'm not a "freeloader" or f2p only. But I never spend enough to be considered a whale usually. What is that threshold anyways? 200? 500? And to what extent?
I would think spending 300 over the course of maybe a year might be considered "normal"? For some games. That's close to a regular MMO sub.
Maybe 500 is above average for a year?
I would suspect whales spend double or triple that a month. But it's hard to tell really.
1. add a warning to such games to ensure that you safeguard your community. Why? what if you have a fan who has a gambling addiction?
2. disclose whether or not this is a sponsored article, so that those of us who are your loyal readership and community can choose whethier or not to engage with the sponsored material..
3. Disclose how many hours you have played prior to writing the review. I would add a disclosure that lets people know just how much you have invested into the game, and if the funds were your own, but as this review is about spending in a gacha - you've nailed that.
I think in taking some of these steps you (collectively) help ensure that your community feel valued and also respected for their readership.
Sidenote - this wasn't intended as an attack at either MMORPG or Steven who wrote the article, just as a long term fan of MMORPG, I think a bit more respect for the community in some of the content produced (once again a general statement, and not targeted at any writer in particular), would go a long way in helping maintain a readership that engages regularly and enthusiastically.
Cheers.
I appreciate your recommendations. I'll address a few points here.
1 | We do generally add labels to some games. An example of this is our MMONFT label, where we attempt to signify plainly that the game in question utilizes blockchain or Web3. As I predominantly handle most of that content, I not only attempt to label these clearly, but I also often disclose whether I hold any assets so that readers know if there is a conflict of interest.
With gacha games, it's a little different, as we don't have a specific label for this. Could we add one in the future? Perhaps. I did have "gacha" as one of the tags on this article, but it may not be prominent enough for some, and despite adding many of these links in my articles, I don't expect every reader to have read my entire catalog. I'd love to hear more community feedback on the suggestion that gacha games be more prominently labeled.
Most importantly I want our community alongside readers old and new to know that I do emphatically respect them, which is why my review pointed out that AFK Journey has an insanely predatory monetization system, and it isn't the first time I've called out loot box and gacha games for being exceptionally predatory.
2 | Despite what many think, we always disclose when an article is sponsored. I understand when something sounds extensively positive you may think someone paid for the article, but that is never the case. Sometimes our writers just love the game they are playing, and we certainly encourage people to express that, both from our writers as well as our community.
3 | When it comes to the hours I've played and the money I've spent, I'm glad to provide the former and hesitant to provide the latter. The time I've played was roughly covered in my review, though not stated in hours, as it's hard to collect my total playtime between mobile and PC. It would also be difficult for me to discern what "playtime" really means in this context, as much of my time was spent auto-battling in the AFK tower, where I wasn't even sitting at the PC. I would suspect somewhere along the lines of 40+ hours over the course of about 3 weeks.
As for the costs associated, I simply don't have a complete breakdown of what I've spent, and similarly to our MMONFT articles, I prefer not to disclose what was spent for a variety of reasons. What I can say is that the money came out of my own pocket, and was somewhere between a lifetime Lord of the Rings Online subscription and a Star Citizen Ship package.
I hope this clarifies some of those points and I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on the possibility of enabling additional labels for the growing sub-genre categories we have here. I can't guarantee we will implement them, but we're always looking for feedback.
Happy posting!
Also, just a note about our policy on sponsored content: our writers don't write them. So if you read something that has a byline and not "Guest Author," it will never be sponsored. We keep our editorial team separate from our ads team. In fact, we contract a third party to run all of the ads on the site in order to keep them as separate as possible. This includes sponsored posts.
I actually do respect the fact that it's not always fair for a reviewer to disclose if they've spent their personal funds on a game, perhaps it may be more appropriate to disclose if you've been given in game funds to facilitate a review perhaps, and that will enable you to retain your privacy about your own spending habits in a game, and facilitate some additional transparency, as likewise it'd be just as unfair for mmorpg.com to have to state we've been paid x.xx to write a 'positive' review.
To preface my earlier comments a bit - to provide some context my 'concern' comes after a long stint playing diablo immortal. To cut a long story short, I met a friend, in fact I ended up creating a clan, and this friend of mine was truly enjoying the game, and before long he started topping up to get ahead, and before long those top ups to buy things became an addiction. He ended up losing his spouse, and a huge amount of money, and before too long he was almost in financial trouble. I ended up quitting the game before it got too bad for him as a way to disincentivise him from playing, but that didn't work. Thankfully, he did stop before it become terribly bad, but it is perhaps my worst gaming memory ever.
This is by no means your or anyone's fault exactly, but for me, ever since I've been at a heightened awareness of the shift recently to overly abundant mtx, and fomo, and perhaps if I had to categorise it in general - the exploitative psychology of games!
Regarding your play time - i'd love to see your opening paragraph detail that you've spent 40 hours enjoying the game - from the perspective of a fan of the site, I'm much more inclined to read in detail if I know at the start of your review that you've spent 40 hours in game, as that, for me at least - is an opening statement that perhaps (in my opinion) at least would see me reading from start to finish, as if you've spent 40 hours on the game, I should at least spend 20 minutes to read your review start to finish,
Regarding gacha in general and making people more aware of it, or perhaps the risks of gacha - I think (from the experience above) not everyone is fully aware of what gacha is, and while I'm sure you know more of the site's demographics than I - some of the more casual mmorpg fans, and those who aren't as well versed in cash shop games, would it add more value to perhaps have a score for games with potential gacha?
i.e. AFK Journey has an 8.0 score - what would you score it for the monetization aspect? or out of the 8.0 score - how much would you subtract due to the monetization of the game? That might work well to perhaps satisfy those who are extremely averse to a 'gacha' game earning 8.0 points, and also perhaps balance your score to reflect how much of an enjoyable experience the game might be for a f2p player.
Once again - thanks for the kind response - I apologise if my earlier response was felt as critical against your review - it wasn't. Your review was well written and detailed, it's just my alarm bells automatically ring these days thanks to the aforementioned tale above!
Anything less is performative, and I'm past the musical theater kid phase of my life.
To answer a bit on the scoring front, though I didn't review AFK Journey - the question you've posed makes me feel like there is a fundamental disconnect between how review scoring operates.
We don't assign a specific score to the parts of a game and then the final score is the sum or average of all parts, so assigning a score based on monetization only doesn't really apply. Conversely, asking what would we subtract from the score due to the monetization doesn't apply either - the score Steven came to is the score, with the monetization factored in.
Review scores aren't meant to be mathematical equations that we come up with - it's meant to be a quick guide to how we feel about a game. Reviews are inherently subjective, they are criticism informed by opinion and experience and meant to convey how we feel about the whole, not simply the parts on their own. Distilling the review down to a score isn't easy, which is why our review scale operates more on how we would describe a game to someone versus an equation, as explained in our Review Policy, which was updated a few years back.
Reading the review - the whole review - will always be the most accurate way to get a sense of how our reviewers feel about a game. Personally, I hate scores. But it's how the industry works, and we can see via our analytics data that most people just scroll the bottom to see what the number is (not saying you did, it's just what our data shows), so we still include them for that shorthand.
The site did score features and parts of the game individually before, but it's just not a good barometer of how a review should be scored, especially since everyone holds certain aspects of a game in higher regard. This way (and I think our record here since I took over in 2019 and changed how we did this proves out - though you are always welcome to disagree!) our reviews are more consistent, despite having over 15 writers working on them for us on the regular.
Regarding funds disclosure: I will never force our writers to disclose when they spend their real money on monetization. That's their personal business and decision. BUT if we are giving in-game currency to spend as part of the review/preview, we will always disclose this, just as we always disclose when we've been provided a copy of the game or piece of hardware to review.
Regarding play time - we do try to include that in reviews, especially for things like campaign length and what not - but it's not something I push for because we will never please everyone. While some one will be happy Steven spent 40 hours of his time on this game, others might think that in a live service game, 40 hours isn't enough time. What we will always do is complete the main story and many of the side quests available to us in the MMO or expansion (or other style of game) to ensure that we are playing through everything we can to provide the best criticism and opinion in our review.
I will say - this is also our job, but for many of our reviewers, this isn't their full time job, and the site is also paying for this work, so the time spent has to make sense for both the reviewer and the site. If someone is spending 200 hours on an MMO review and making $100, that doesn't really work out that well for the reviewer, right? So this is another factor that might cause us to simply not disclose full play time, but rather just the time it took us to complete the main story, as an example. BUT I think adding a "In my nearly 80 hours" or so syle language in a review, like I did with our FFVII Rebirth review, is a good compromise on that front.
As I finish typing this, I realize we should probably just write this up as a PSA article, lol.
"the monetization is still incredibly predatory, and nearly every game mode is completely pay to win."
https://www.mmorpg.com/reviews/afk-journey-review-heroes-guilds-and-gacha-should-you-invest-your-time-2000131159
Still, it should be said that not all gachas are the same. Some are very predatory, and some just aren't.
To take an extreme example, in Monmusu Gladiator, all long-term progression comes from getting things from gachas. The gems to buy gacha tickets come exclusively from playing the game. You cannot buy such gems with real money. The game is buy to play, with no in-game monetization. So yes, the gachas are a huge part of the game, but they're not pay to win at all. The only way to spend more than $5 on the game (excluding tax) is to buy multiple copies or to buy the soundtrack.
But even gachas that could be pay to win are often difficult to evaluate. Uncharted Waters Origin has a lot of gachas, and new players often think that it looks very pay to win. But the most important gacha by far is the one bought with the in-game currency, not the ones bought with real money. Even for someone inclined to spend $100/month on the game, buying gacha tickets is a dumb way to spend the money.
#Scam, #Sin, #Vice, #Predatory, #DIAF.
There, sums it up pretty well I think.
Oh, well throw in #GachaByUrBalls I guess.
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