Let’s imagine for a moment, this was a game you could purchase in a store. Let’s imagine, that all ingame money purchases were either removed or available for free, depending on which works better with the balancing. Let’s imagine, outside the new campaigns and the remaining underworld kingdoms, there was no more new content introduced to it.
How much would you pay to buy it?
As a bonus question if you feel like it: Would that be more or less than what you have spent since you have started playing?
It’s a tough question. What is a fair price? How much is the game worth, how much is it worth to me? Personally I’ve spend a couple hundred on it over the years. Enough to get VIP 6. I’ve certainly Gotten $200 worth of enjoyment out of it, but I would have to play it for several months to learn this. This type of game has to be free to play to be successful.
Gems of War. People either love it or hate it… or think it’s okay.
I actually don’t know how much I would want to pay for a paid full feature version of the game. Things like Raid/Invasion/Tower of Doom/World Events have a negative value to me
The original core loop of the game starts out very fun, but at some point, the game becomes more about having you spend gems and less about fun.
Eventually, you get reminded that the last new gameplay feature, revamped explore, features elite level upgrading. Its interesting until you notice how fruitless of an endeavor that is and start to doubt most things.
The foundations of this game are built on a F2P model so me saying what I would pay for a game straight up for the version it is today would be very low. A paid PC/Console game that expects 100000 hours of gameplay to complete the game and is nothing but grind isn’t something I would touch.
I agree with other comments that a game like this essentially has to be F2P. I’m VIP 6 and there’s absolutely no way I’d have paid this much to buy the game off the shelf. If it were a full, complete retail game I’d expect somewhere in the $20-30 range (with Steam sales dropping it to $5-10).
And this right here is why the F2P model works. In spite of all the free players, the people who do pay can easily wind up paying more than they’d pay if the game were sold as a complete product. Has GoW made more as F2P than it would have made selling the game outright for $20 or $30 a copy? I have zero idea, but I assume most successful F2P games pull this off or they wouldn’t use that business model. VIP 20 in GoW costs over $8,000. That’s like 400 copies of a $20 game. People who spend that much subsidize things like server space for a LOT of free players.