Steam Sale until Nov. 1st!!

I read it, but basically just because you don't believe it doesn't mean its not true. Lots of indie developers hate when Steam puts their titles on sale, but its outside of their control. They get to work with Steam to set the base price, but they are lucky if they even hear when their game goes on sale. Some of the bigger developers can schedule sales for special events, but I've never seen an indie developer who has any say in the matter.

 

By which you are suggesting, correctly, that Port is an indie... and that this makes indies upset... join the dots as to why it makes them upset and, voilà, there's an issue with the sale by your own hand. Thank you.

 

Wow, ok if you are going to whine about the sky falling, be my guest.

 

Keep in mind that the main revenue Port generated does not come from people buying the basic access, but rather form higher Pledge, bundles,and add-on items. If someone were to buy the game for $20 and then decided to upgrade to one of the row lot bundle, the sales already work.

How much do you think Port would "lose money" from this weekend sales? I mean, if they "lose" $20,000 from getting 1000 more people into the game, I think that's already worth the money "loss" considering how much marketing budget cost these days.

 

Er, who's whining? I just took everything you said, and broke it down into why this is an issue without adding a single word. No more, no less.

 

The issue has never been "losing money"; the issue is one of perception. I thought that's been quite plain in many of the posts so far? But happy to redirect the conversation.

 

oh ok

 

Not really, most of the MMOs go for a little from a lot of users, the biggest item on the SWTOR store is $40, GW2 seems to have a few items in the $30 range. SotA is the first MMO that will straight up offer 4-figure prices in their addon store, prominently featured because they are hoping for an impulse buy.

 

What in God's name are you talking about? First: The most expensive thing in SWTOR is ~$20. What you are referring to is a pack of 24 lottery boxes for ~$40(Potentially less, depending on sales and how many Cartel Coins you buy at once). Second: This is an actual studied thing, what publishers of FTP games are counting on is that a large percent of users will spend little to no money, while a small percent will spend a lot. It's why so many free to play games have lockboxes.

 

SotA should have got everyone paying $5 - $10 a month, and not going down the route of selling ridiculously priced real estate, in a world that isn't going to last forever, in order to fund it.

I recognise that subscriptions can rub people wrong, but that's in AAA games (and even then, some people happily pay monthly for SWTOR and ESO even now). I find niche games have more willing types.

But, of course, the horse has long bolted. The fat lady has sung. I don't say any of this with the thought that SotA would, or even can at this point in time, change. It's simply what should have been done.

 

F2P games experience whales spending the bulk of the money, but no MMO that I've seen has made that it's core model. The draw of many F2P lottery style games is that anyone could win the big items, despite that the whales win the most and buy what they don't win. SotA has content, POTs, that were intentional designed and marketed to the 0.01% of players and which, along with their addons, represent a significant percent of the funding of the game. SotA is the only MMO that I know that can claim that.

 

Less than 12 hours left to get half price!

 

First, there is no "draw" to lottery box systems, except that they exploit the same human tendencies as gambling. Second, there is no meaningful difference between a lottery box system and this except that it's less exploitative as it doesn't directly target things like gambling addiction. Third, it's gross to call people "whales".

Fourth, from their Extended Statistics page:
Raised through KS: $1,919,275

Raised through SotA: $8,566,686

Total Raised: $10,485,961

Kickstarter Backers: 22,322

SotA Only Backers: 40,015

Total Backers: 62,337

10485961/62337 = average $168/person over the course of three years which is not a particularly high average to shoot for.

 

This time of the year again?
4 pages because of a sale thanks to @Canterbury ;-)
This happens once a year or so and last time one of this topics got hot one of the devs chimed in (I guess it was DarkStarr, it usually is DarkStarr) to explain something down the line that it's part of the contract with valve.
I can't remember the exact wording and I am too lazy to look it up but what I understood is that steam indeed enforces sales on the dev studios that decide to use steam.
This doesn't come as a surprise if you keep in mind that the market is oligopolistic. And only if you look at it in a positive way. In my opinion it's more or less monopolistic. GoG beeing no real substitute for steam and so on.

 

So answering your own question, easy enough.

I never said it was more or less exploitative, only that it was solely targeting high spenders

Why? It's what the industry calls them, at least publicly, I've seen far less polite terms.

Mean is far less meaningful without median in this case, I'd be willing to wager that it is much lower than that mean.

 

Everybody solely targets high spenders. Is your only point that SotA does it through high-priced items instead of lockboxes?

 

Only a couple hours left if you want to take advantage of the sale!

 

Given that for numerous years games had fixed sticker prices and then fixed monthly rates, you're either ignoring history or 14, either way this isn't going to be productive, we'll have to agree to disagree. It's been real.

 

So after shifting goalposts every post you've now moved to a totally different argument based on business models that haven't been mainstream for years and are declaring victory. Got it.