Because there is no such thing as a free lunch

Gameplay Chat (PC/Mobile)
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I’m honestly asking, and please do not flame me, how people think this game should be funded. I read a lot of feedback and I’m just curious what people think. In game ads? Subscription service? Hybrid like Hulu or Disney - low or no cost for ads, monthly fee for ad free version? Pay one time and own it forever? Or continue with the existing model of free if you want it or pay for some stuff that you choose? Given that paying players will have some short term advantages over FTP.

Again, just curious as to what people would like to see, given that money has to paid in some form for the game to continue to exist.

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I find this topic funny as I’ve been playing HoloCure which is completely free.

Carry on.

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What attracted people for this game? Besides the RPG style? Mostly because it’s F2P. This kind of game exists to please a lot of people who wants some casual game or something that they can invest time without spending. There will always be some stuff behind paywall to make things fast or more accessible. I don’t mind not being able to get some stuff if there are ways to compensate on a long term. Each of these options you mentioned would change the dynamics of the game and the risk of not being the same game a lot of people desired.

For me, if it’s a pay once and everything will be yours, I can think about it. Otherwise, any payment for the basic, I’m out.

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The monetization here was fine for years. Plenty of things to spend on if you can or want to, nothing too necessary for enjoying the game or (this is key) too necessary for being a solid contributor to your guild. I think it is still on the good side of that line. But it’s been creeping closer to the border.

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I enjoy it as is. It’s not the type of game I would pay once for and own. It fits a nice niche for me.

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Ads: Absolutely not. I would rather send the developers $1 and set $9 on fire, than spend $10 of my time being subjected to manipulation so the developer can earn $1.

Pay-for-advantage: idk, I get to play on the most challenging difficulty for free, so I’m not complaining.

Pay-to-skip-tedium: no thank you, I don’t appreciate a game being made less fun on purpose.

Buy-once: good when combined with a generous demo version or a solid refund policy.

DLC: good when it adds new zones, adds new game modes, or keeps the gameplay fresh. Feels fair when it keeps my costs roughly proportional to how much of the game I’ve chosen to play. But I’ll be unhappy if DLC becomes necessary to fully enjoy the base game or stay competitive against other players.

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To be honest, I don’t understand the monetization strategy in Gems of War. It dabbles in pay-for-advantage (shiny tokens) and pay-to-skip-tedium (event headstart), but most offers just move players slightly closer to the same endgame collection as normal play.

Clearly some players are paying, but I don’t know what they’re buying or why.

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Supercool that you found an artist/developer that wanted to give a gift to the world.

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My approach is, that the more a game pushes me towards spending, the less likely I am to actually spend. And this game here is trying pretty hard.
If this game was running on a completely free basis, I would, at least in its early years, have strongly considered a donation of 25-50 Euros.
If the game was sold as a full (and relatively finished!) build, the 20 Euro range would be fine for me too.
Instead I am playing since 2015, getting increasingly frustrated with it, and am still at VIP zero.

This game is not financing itself through fun, but through impulse spendings and addictions. I find it disgusting.

A different thing, I like to point out in this regard:
Servers are cheap. Graphics are expensive.
If the game did not insist on bringing in multiple new cards every week, the running costs would be a tiny fraction of what they are now. Keeping this thing afloat is cheaper than it looks, if development wasn’t constantly pushing for “more content”, that effectively makes it only worse (Have you tried browsing through the whole troop list recently? Sit comfortably, this may take a while).

And of course, the team keeps making a huge profit on our whales. Far larger, than they would, if they sold it honestly.

I know, the one time, they made an actually good game and simply sold it in Puzzle Quest, they got to regret it, because it was distributed on stolen copies to at least 75%.
Fun gaming doesn’t pay. Addiction gaming does…
I often feel, our younger selves are to blame for how broken the gaming market has become.

I’m sorry, but I grew into the internet at the turn of the millenium, when online games were passion past time projects in flash and browsertext, that the dev carried to 80%.
And I liked it better, in retrospect even more, because you could feel that someone behind it actually cared.

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Remember back when games didnt come with an instruction manual and you had to figure out how to play because there was no internet, and that was like part of the fun of it?

Or like when you bought a game, finding that glitch/bug was like a quest all on its own and not like a “gotcha” moment to take a stab at developers and that bug was part of the fun of it?

In some ways it was better then

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Daeron: To be honest, I don’t remember, when games did not have manuals. The box versions I got always had one. Feels more like a modern thing to me, that all you get is an instruction.pdf on the CD.
Don’t know so much about the bug part.

What I DO remember, are the days, when I played games, because I liked them, and not because it felt like a daily chore, that I am obliged to.
Might be a matter of getting old though.

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Nah, i remember super nintendo and NES manuals with not evey single detail in them. Thats why nintendo power was so good, it had all the secrets in it…pretty sure none of the whistles were in the manual for Mario 3 for example.

The patterns in the atari games werent in the manuals either.

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Okay, a strategy guide or walkthrough is something different than a manual of course. Though Nintendo did sell those seperately for some larger games (and noone ever bought them :wink: ).
Lining out the base mechanics and giving you a bit of backstory (and, if you’re lucky, some additional character art and some funny in-char quotes) is all I could or would expect from a game manual.
You’re right, the details are a matter of figuring out and multiple controllers smashed against walls.

I don’t quite have strong feelings about the subject. I guess, the modern approach of ingame tutorials is neither better nor worse than that. The only thing I miss sometimes is to have something game related, I can read in bed. Printing out pdfs is just not the same.

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I remember game guides in book format, some of which were really cool because they also had all the artwork. I still have some of those.

But the better guides came from the internet from some text based websites. I think I printed out some of these be use dial up meant that you needed to get offline if you wanted to make calls.

As for the game, some things are priced okay so I’m fine buying them while others are absolutely ridiculous.

The heroic and headstart boosters for example… That would be $20 per week if you got them both. That’s an insane price point.

I’m glad we don’t have intrusive ads.

Monetization is getting a little heavy - the game is still playable as is, but it’s preying on the FOMO people with making shiny keys and tokens so extremely rare and then selling them (under the pretense of boosting events).

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I’m playing on Steam, which simply does not allow third party ingame incomes (for the obvious reason, that Valve would not get a share out of it).
So they’d either had to cut out the PC market, anger computer players by keeping features locked, or anger all other players by making the PC experience easier/less annoying.

I’m starting to get an idea, why the game does not attempt this approach (also ad revenue in gaming is laughable and by itself unable to carry game costs… unless you really push players hard into buying subscriptions).

Something to keep in mind about the game is, how horrendous the catchup mechanics are. At a certain point, you simply need to have certain troops and weapons to stay competitive, and the chances to get those are shrinking with every week and month.
As early birds and endgamers, it is reasonably possible to get along without paying. As a new player, far less so. We are talking about multiple years to get halfway into the regions, where the old players are, no matter if you play actively. Just getting a full cycle in the soulforge and the kingdoms… how long was it, that Darkstone last was in the mix?

If this game was more popular, I bet there would be a black market for account sales. And it would be a significantly better deal.
Think about what the game considers a “good” price for a mythic troop, a pet or a weapon.
By game terms, an endgame account must be worth millions.

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Thanks all for the thoughtful responses. As for the current model, I am happy about the fact that paying for stuff is optional and there are choices like the two different campaign passes.

I am thankful every day that I started playing over 2 years ago - it was confusing then for a new player and I can only imagine how it is now. But in a weird way, I kind of like that. I like that the game has enough going on that there is always something new to figure out and you can play as easy or as hard as you want.

I think the main thing for new players that don’t want to spend money is that to grow in the game you pretty much have to commit to grinding through vault weekends for awhile. I was not willing to make that commitment early on and I found the whole thing confusing. But once I did, the whole game opened up. And join a guild, of course.

This game has an amazing community and that is a wonderful intangible that you can’t put a price on.

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I’m generally fine with the current model; after all I’m still playing after so many years. Most of what I think about it has already been said, except for one thing. I wish there were more options for paid cosmetics.

It’s been brought up a few times in the past, and Salty or others have said it’s not a viable monetization option for GoW. I forget if it was based on experience, or comparison to similar games in the industry. Either way, I typically spend more on games with cosmetics, that have no impact on gameplay. I think that’s because most of the F2P games I play aren’t P2W, so I’m not really incentivized to buy anything else. I’ll just grind for it in the game or live without it.

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[hopefully brief rant of someone, who is slowly growing old, incoming]

Hobbies and side projects turn into professions and full time jobs. You notice, that your little weekend gig could actually feed you and turn it into your life focus. Five years later, you are handling spreadsheets about flow optimisation and consumer incentives.
Nothing new about this (basicly all specialisation back to the stone age works kind of like that), and nothing I would dare to blame on those, who try to make their best out of it.

But there’s something disturbing about seeing it play out.

At some point (I would roughly say around 2010, but that perception may vary), the internet started turning into a workplace. Now the production line churns out factory made goods. Optimised, polished, streamlined. Websites look the same. Onlinevideos look the same. Onlinegames look the same.

The result does have a higher quality then what was there before, just like a franchise restaurant delivers a better product than if you task a couple of middleschoolers to bring along something selfmade and hopefully edible.
Younglings, who join the internet world in its modern shape, would beg not to have experience the days of clumsy geocities pages and handdrawn flash games, because it just doesn’t match the standards, we got by now.
And yet… something feels missing, that used to be there. Something personal.

Sometimes, I try to trace down the bank info of some old browser games, I used to play (and that have long stopped existing), so that I can send a little belated Thank You.
I can’t imagine ever doing that for a free game, I started in the last five to ten years.

You certainly noticed, that the mood towards the game in this forum and most other channels is quite negative. You may point out, that the same is true for most other free games too and might be right about it. I may in return mention, that game forums have not always looked like that, and if you go far enough back in this one, the mindset will look more bright too.
I’m disillusioned and disappointed by gaming developments, that drag themselves through their workday, with the goal to make something that looks good in marketing meetings, video presentations and thumbnails, that the algorithms like, and that makes a couple of numbers grow bigger at the end of the day.

My inner child dies a little with every day.

Whatever. If you somehow found something in these ramblings, that makes sense, do not forget to like, share and [enter explicite insult that involves one or multiple body openings]

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Oh, I understand what you mean exactly. I retired early from the s/w biz 20 years ago to raise a kid. Now same kid is on the path to be a computer engineer. We talk a lot about the changes. I am encouraged to see that he and his friends are looking for less slick, more indie versions of things. Creativity isn’t dead but you do have to look past the shiny geegaws to find it. And honestly, even in the slick category now the latest Zelda game is pretty amazing. Minecraft, too.

Don’t get me started on how “knowkedge workers” are the new factory line workers…

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I can only speak for myself, but I’ll buy:

a) to avoid frustration - I’ll buy the campaign pass to get the tarot card because who knows when I’d be able to find it in the vault
b) to speed up game progression - same purchase, campaign pass for the books of deeds (that maybe I could eventually get through guild tasks / AB / offers / crafting)

I used to also buy “for fun” - I’d buy a pet through a flash offer just to get another copy of a cosmetic pet I liked. Back then, I would go “eh, I haven’t spent any money recently, I’ll spend a couple of $ for something I can’t get any other way and get a bump for my VIP level”. Or I’d buy the elite pass for the extra resources, because it didn’t feel like a lot when there was less of a push to spend everywhere. At this point, the only “for fun” purchases I’d be interested in are cosmetics, but I already bought the few that were available.

VIP level 12 here :see_no_evil:

The current model is OK, from my point of view. But, what bothers me is that only features that can have new monetization added seem to get proper resources, which leaves other features / bugs unattended. So we end up with broken kingdom offers for years.

Whether or not that perception is accurate, it often feels like they’ll only work on things that directly translate to new $$$ for them and don’t care about making the game better. I would like it if they could strike a better balance between the need for $$$ vs building a good game (the semantics of that are lacking, but hopefully it’s clear what I mean).

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