Divide your games primary features and draws up into sections. Sell people only the sections that they want. The core of the game can be free and can include a few basic levels, but new adventures, characters, battle arenas, and even online play can be sold separately.
If you were to buy everything, it would exactly add up to what the game would cost if you just buy the whole thing.
No scamming, just giving the people only what they want and nothing else.
Can’t wait to hear how much you all hate the idea.
You have to buy those entire game for full price and then for some reason you have to keep buying more and more content that arguably is just part of the original game you already bought.
I think people just like, lack basic arithmetic skills in the 21st century, because if by the time you’re done buying all the DLC and expansion packs the game cost like $89…
I just don’t understand how you can confuse breaking your game up into modules with buying a game full price at retail cost and then also having to buy a whole bunch of other content in order to even enjoy it
I mean, there are “f2p” games that allow to buy all the “pay” content in one go, for way less than the total it would amount to, and including future content.
But seriously, if you are just posting to up the message counts, wouldn’t this belong to the “gossip” instead?
The “you’re completely wrong”, having price as your basis, despite never stating prices in your first post…
The main point I’m trying to make is that those names are all for the same thing, and nothing says that it should only apply for products that are already pricy to begin with, does it?
It’s kind of like here buy a pizza for $11.99 and each topping is an additional $1.99. And also every time you take a bite it going to cost you 22 cents. But if you act fast we can give you pizza points which you can use to circumvent all of the cool downs on your pizza consumption and we just happen to be having a special where you can get a thousand coins for $89
??? This topic certainly fits in game design. It definitely impacts the game play experience. Why come out guns blazing? Lol
That would be a lot better than the way many of these f2p games currently are run.
For instance, I once played Kingdom’s of Camelot on FB. I joined a clan or whatever it was called. Let’s just say group. Made some friends. We all played nightly. Another group was roaming around declaring war on many groups. I got tired of their antics so started buying stuff to power up my own kingdom so i could produce troops faster, achieve max speed, damage and so forth. Then started hammering them hard whenever they hit. I ended up sinking a couple hundred dollars into the game through these stupid micro transactions. It was fun but the cost was insane. I got bored a couple months later and gave my account to another person in our group.
The system definitely worked for the developers (Kabam) but it also made it so I probably won’t play another game made by them. You kind of feel “raped” after a while. I mean $50 even $100 I could see for a great game (such as Diablo 3) that gives you years of gaming (my cousin and I played D2 for about a decade). But these other games like KoC. No. The game should have been designed so you spend say $50 or at most $100 and you get every damn thing they come out with. I mean how much money do they want to make from each customer? I know most people will say “duh! As much as possible!” and that is my point. It is just wrong. Set a dang limit an upper amount that is reasonable and even if the player gets there by spending a bit at a time unlock evrrything when they hit the “full price”.
Anyway, yeah I like the idea of a free game allowing you to buy custom content. I would never do it for fluff (just changing the look of the game, etc) but for things that imlrove or expand on game play sure I’d buy it. But it needs to be reasonable. Make it like “pay only $10 to unlock the Mega Wizard and get all future new characters free!” Things like that.
I guess I’m just kind of trying to say invert the model instead of saying you can’t have any fun unless you buy all this crap, and there’s no limit to how much crap you can buy and how much currency you can bury into this game, I would just say different people play different ways and everybody doesn’t necessarily want everything. So I think what you would end up with is actually more players then you would have had
I mean McDonalds has a menu, why are game developer still trying to sell a one-size-fits-all approach and the only alternative is the equivalent of a crooked casino
It’s like buy a factory model car, or lease used junkers… no alternative.
I see what you are getting at and it does make sense. Unfortunately, I doubt most developers make their game architecture modular enough to actually split out things like online multiplayer pvp from coop mode or even single player mode. Same for characters and other stuff. But yeah that would be awesome for games to truly be modular and you pay to add only the modules you want. Expansion packs like D3 Reaper of Souls do that but you get the whole enchilada. But in that case they basically refined and changed the whole game structure in the process.
I’m not suggesting that you get rid of DLC or expansion packs in those kind of huge games, I’m more talking smaller titles like indie games that might have a hard time selling but if you were to break it down into different packages, kind of how cars can come with power windows or your burger can come with bacon.
But now I’m actually realizing that I think the consumer isn’t savvy enough to handle that much choice
You basically have to tell them to buy and they will buy. In my limited sales experience If you give them the opportunity to think about it, they will probably say no and then buy the next guy’s crap when they’re basically commanded to buy. Consumers are just that way. Once you get into thinking about saving money, suddenly there like wait why do I have to pay for this at all?
