The Flash Offer/Store cost problem

Feature Requests and Game feedback
1

So today’s flash offer is 1800 gems and 1 Medal of Nysha for $50. I bought Disco Elysium for $35 back in December and got a good 50+ hours out of that. Earth Defense Force 5? $40 and I’ve played 267 hours of it. So we know that $50 is higher than the price of two A+ titles – EDF5 with 94% overall rating and Disco Elysium with 95%.

Now what would 1800 gems get us in Gems of War?

  • We could purchase Dragon’s Hoard (75k gold for 300 gems) 6 times for 450k. It takes me a little under two hours to make that much gold doing Explores though, so that doesn’t seem like a good use of $50…
  • I could purchase up through Tier 7 of a Weekly event (30+70+150+250+350+500+500=1850). All of those sigils would get me a couple hours of gameplay for that week’s event. But that also means I’d be spending $50 for one event… ouch!
  • I could open 36 VIP chests and get approximately 32 Epic troops, 5 Legendary troops, 0 Mythic troops, 26 Arcane Traitstones, 1 Celestial Traitstone, and $72k gold. That seems pretty awful for $50.

But wait, I’m also getting a Medal of Nysha. That enables me to give all my troops +4 Magic. Well, I already have 3 of those, so another one would only be used to upgrade a troop. I could use it to upgrade a Mythic troop 100% to Bronze, saving me 3 Medals of Anu. And I should probably use it on my absolute best troop, Zuul’Goth.

Alright, what kind of stats will Zuul’Goth get when I use a Medal of Nysha on him. Well, he’s an Assassin, so upgrading him to Bronze will get him… 1 Magic. Okay, perfect. Let’s check out his ability: “Kill an Enemy. Burn and Freeze all remaining Enemies. Create 12 Skulls.” Okay, perfect, so Magic does absolutely nothing for him. Amazing.

Do you see why people might be hesitant to spend $50 on this Flash Offer? Do you know how much it would have to cost for me to actually consider it? I mean, the absolute best flash offers give 50 gems per $1, and this flash offer gives 36 gems per $1, so I would AT LEAST expect 2500 gems with this deal.

Not only that, but VIP levels don’t impact flash offers at all: Bonus Gems exclude bundles, special offers, & daily gems. Well, that sucks.

$50 is a lot of money for some people. It’s a lot of money for me. It’s the cost of a single A+ game title that gives sometimes hundreds of hours of play time.

If I’m being really honest, for $50, I would expect 2500 Gems at a minimum and like 3 Medals of Nysha – but you know what? I don’t think you should be selling Medals at all, those are things people are supposed to grind for, and you’re dangling a “short cut” in front of us.

Consider the Orb of Power. I never once bought the Flash Offer that’s $50 for 1800 Gems and 1 Orb of Power. I was really tempted, but I made my Zuul’Goth the old fashioned way: a lot of time! I only even got 1 Orb of Power from an event. But consider that for someone to craft Zuul’goth from just that Flash Offer, you’re effectively selling them one of the best troops in the game for $400 – they get 14,400 gems out of that, but guess what? In the one class event I got my Orb of Power in, I used over 6000 gems alone there – 14k gems isn’t a lot at all.

I know it’s probably not the developers at all who are controlling these prices, but this is ridiculous… maybe you’d get more sales if you would actually make things reasonable. Look at it from your poorest clients point of view maybe.

19 Likes
2

If you buy games, you want to have fun.
Medal Farming is no fun, so if you buy Medal of Nysha you save lifetime.
You may easily get more than 50$ in this time by doing something more productive.
So with this purchase all of us would win :thinking:

3

Are you implying that I should calculate the time it takes to farm 9 Token of Nysha (to make 1 Medal) and then do something else “more productive” with that time all because I spent $50 to buy the Medal I would have been farming?

I mean, that just doesn’t make any sense. You want me to pay $50 to NOT play the game? Or I should pay $50 because doing explore is boring, so by paying $50 I can go do PvP or something? There are tons of other things you get along the way in doing Explore – gnomes, trophies, other tokens, gold.

4

All “purchases” in GoW are “contributions” to keep the lights on. The digital item you receive in return is a gift.
Trying to equate value in any game with live services is a fool’s errand.
If the game makes you happy and you can afford it. Donate. If it doesn’t make you happy or you can’t afford it. Don’t donate.

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5

Not sure if this is the case here, but in-game purchase prices for bigger games are usually set by the publisher and the developers have little to no control over it.

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6

You’re 100% right.
The devs may propose a price structure but it’s up to the publisher and the client to approve it.

7

I wish all game dev’s and pubs. would open their eyes to the fact that not everyone is made of money and every once in a while throw us a bone by giving everyone something now and then when the game their working on hits a milestone GoW does this in the form of their codes during streams but when it comes to the good stuff they overprice things I understand they need to keep the light on and their employees don’t work for free but when you put something at $50 that microtransaction isn’t so micro anymore I agree with OP for if 50 gems are valued at 1 USD then they should stick to that value for all flash offers so either reduce the price to fit the gem value or replace whatever missing gems with something that would fill the value gap

8

I play quite a few different mobile games with quite a few different iap prices systems and Gems of War is by no means the worse in terms of how much they charge for stuff. I think the issue is that as a late game player there really isn’t much they can offer us. That’s a design decision they’ve made.

They want to go after the early and mid game players and they’re happy for us late gamer to just drift along picking up all the new content as soon as it comes out and except for the hyper competitive or completionists there is nothing really to spend money on as there is nothing to acquire. It’s a blessing in that we don’t get pressured to spend money on the game, but it does make the game a little dull with nothing to aim for as we stockpile useless resources we’ll never use.

IMO the completely s**t the bed with the medal system. They are just too hard to get for too little result so once you have 3 there is no point grinding or paying for more. Such a shame.

9

To continue, I used to work for a poker company who had a casual freemium game and they had 2 people full time just looking at the iaps and resources to work out how to get the most out of their players. But also how to make the resources exciting so they would want and need them.

Any idea how many full time game designer they have here? I don’t get the impression they 2 for the whole game, which is why late game content is just stat inflation and the power creep has been let so far out of control that most of the old content is worthless.

10

“Paying not to play the game” is exactly how most purchases and flash offers feel right now.

I’m a supporter of Gems of War, VIP5 In fact, but I stopped buying anything months ago for this reason. Every time I consider a flash offer, I look at the price and consider what game(s) I could buy on the Switch eShop (an infamously more expensive storefront) for that amount. And then compare that to the pathetic amount I’m getting for my money in GoW. And it just becomes impossible to justify. I want to spend money on this game, I’m checking every single flash offer trying to find one that will let me do that, and I’m still failing.

From what I understand, we should be expecting some changes to the shop soon. I really desperately hope they reflect a radical change in the value offered to justify the prices, or an enormous price drop to reflect what we’re really getting. If it’s just tweaking around the edges, it won’t change anything for me.

5 Likes
11

My feelings on this are complex and for once I think I’l just be brief.

I’ve complained GoW has inflated prices forever. At this point in time, especially after the last year of “customer service” and “quality assurance”, I don’t feel comfortable paying for the game. There was a time when I’d have felt an obligation to jump at any flash offer around $1.99 or maybe $2.99. But 2019 has been marred with release after release of cockups accompanied by promises “we’re making changes so it doesn’t happen again” that never seem to stick. I’ve seen dev representatives openly mock passionate players for writing their opinions about how to improve the game, then issue non-apologies when it backfired.

It puts a sour taste in my mouth. One could ask, ‘Well why do you keep playing?’ I guess it’s a sign the addiction engine in the game works. But I do not have an obligation to pay, especially since making that payment will make my opinion no less important to the people who make it.

It’s their job to make me so happy with the game I part with money to get some goods. I think, for a lot of us, that ship has sailed.

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12

This. So much this. :pray:

VIP11 here: the VIP climb stopped for good because of the above.
:vulcan_salute:

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13

Seeing as I know 2 people who purchased this & a 3rd who was considering it, apparently they accomplished their goal, which was to get someone to purchase it. Devs have said on numerous occasions their goal isn’t to get people to buy all the packs but rather to get people to buy 1 every so often. People are motivated by different things.

While i’m not willing to drop $50 in 1 shot on this, the other 2 clearly decided $14US for the medal (assuming $2US/100 gems = $36US of the $50) was worth not having to spend 50-75 hours to grind out the medal. On another note, 2 other people were adamant it was a rip off because it wasn’t even close to being in their budget to purchase.

If no one else in the entire game bought it, that’s still $100 more the game hadn’t earned before today.

To each their own. :man_shrugging:

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14

I bought it. I’m not sorry.

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15

I bought it too, mainly because I want to financially support the game which I play (I already have 7 Medals of Nysha). I have hundreds of games in my Steam library and if I will compare hours spend in them to their cost most of them will be more than 1 dollar per hour or something around that. I spent almost 5k hours in GoW on Steam and a lot of hours using my phone. At the same time, I spent around 1k US dollars in GoW (mostly as ‘donations’ not because I need resources) and it will be less than 0.2 dollar per hour spent in GoW - a much lower ratio than 95% of my games. I just think it’s fair to support the game which I play.

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16

As simple as that. :clap:

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17

The only thing worth buying in this game is the Deathknight armor. Buying anything else is a fool’s errand and brings shame to your family.

On a completely unrelated note, please do not look at my VIP level.

But, in all seriousness, all of the cash offers are hilariously bad ($15 to upgrade a legendary? Best I can is $5 and that’s really pushing it). God bless the whales that actually support the developers and let those guys keep the lights on.

(I wish this game had ads so I could support the devs without having to resort to wasting tons of money for… nothing at all. What about a feature request where we can watch a video ad once a day for 5 gems?)

4 Likes
18

Exactly, I could not agree more with both posts.

The way things have panned out the last 12+months has in my opinion left a stain on the whole supporting the game process. The quality of releasing stuff, the customer service and the implementation of the baseball bat approach (by and large) to most things, then the oft sarcastic reply, or the downright ‘we’ll stop talking if you don’t stop pointing this out’ has just basically driven a wedge between good grace, good will and some of the customer base.

Some will continue to pay, that’s up to them.

I’m Vip 8, I’ve supported the game a lot a while back, almost all of those transactions were 2 years ago. I can’t anymore because of this attitude, the poor quality of upgrading the product, basically nearly everything is broken first up, poorly tested or masqueraded as an oversight (how many of those have there been) and then there’s the ‘no care corporate pursuit of revenue’ and the game economy stuff that gets peddled. I can live with that corporate thing, by no longer supporting the game.

I want to support the game, but it’s just not on the page with me, and 2 years ago I was approaching mid game and started to stop paying. That’s not an end game perspective, that was a mid game perspective, a key sales target area and persists with me today.

£50 for a medal and some gems is just, well in keeping with the approach. Medals are daft, it’s never ending, it’s folly to even think 1 medal helps really.

The logic is 49 Nysha medals, might sound stupid, but that gets you somewhere, it would give 1 medal to all 49 Mythics including ZG and Xathenos. I’d probably pay £70 for 50 medals of Nysha… or £3 for 1.

That can’t work as it would be too much and P2W, but £3 for 1, every couple of months surely would incentivise far more of the customer base. People that won’t pay ever, might think that is value.
After all, 750+ troops…

6 Likes