Hello folks! I thought I’d give a bit of “behind the curtain” description, which might help assuage some of the feelings put forth in statements like:
For reference - I’ve been a game designer (largely console games) for 22 years. I worked for 505 a few years back, and as part of that work I worked on GoW. I haven’t touched GoW codebase in 2 years now, but the things I’m going to say aren’t GoW-specific, so that shouldn’t matter.
“Selling” things digitally is complex. The laws are still very much in development, so every company selling digital goods has their own internal rules and expectations. Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Google, and Nintendo, to mention just a few of the big players, all have their own technical requirements regarding content, language, and most importantly pricing.
When selling something for Apple, you define a “package” for each item you sell. Then you select a price for that package, which is auto-localized into many different currencies. You can then set “sale” times and % values for each package, which localizes in tandem with the original settings. It’s also possible to change the base price of an item - though that’s a bit more work. But the upshot is that on apple stores, sales are a % discount from the base item price.
When selling something for Microsoft or Sony, you define “packages” for each price point - and then you can put whatever you want inside that package. So when GoW defines a $50 package, they can rotate lots of different kingdom bundles into that same package. But they CAN NOT create a package at a new price without going through a lot of hassle, including expensive re-submission processes. (“Submission” basically means getting approval of the entire code base again, as if it were a new product. NOBODY wants to do this.)
So on Xbox and PS4, a “sale” means putting more stuff into the same price point. That’s how all sales on those systems work.
That’s two examples - Steam and Switch are each slightly different. But the overall point is that when designing a sale / price / content cadence for a cross-platform game like GoW, it just makes sense to come up with a system and language that works across all your different systems.
Also, GoW is published in multiple languages. The English connotations of “sale” and “bonus” don’t necessarily exist in all languages the same way. The existing system isn’t 100% perfect, but I’d say it’s a 90% fit. And getting 90% across dozens of languages and multiple system versions is awfully good.
The one thing that could be done (because it doesn’t touch the game) is to adjust the subject lines of their forum posts. But beyond that I would say there aren’t any reasonable changes to be had.