384 gems for $20 seems high. You can’t even get 50 keys for 384 gems. You might not even receive a legendary with that many gems.
2000/384 = 5.2 cents per gem. If there is an extra 48 gems on top of that (not clear on this), then it is still 4.6 cents per gem. You have other specials like 100 gems plus a vault key for $2. Here it is 2 cents per gem (plus you get a vault key).
It seems like if you spend more money, you should get a better deal than if you spend less money. If you spend $20 of real world money you should get at least 1000 gems (2 cents per gem).
I understand that the word bonus may be more accurate, but we don’t make the final call on a lot of the wording for our promotions. So it is not something that I can actively influence, or exert any control over.
In my post I thought I had made it clear that every time I give advance notice we get heat about the wording. We know. We have heard it all before. Most companies do not give advance warning for sales, and we do so as a courtesy, but it is exhausting whenever I make a post and get the same complaints regarding the wording. In the past, some of the comments have been very inflammatory and unkind, which is why I made a point when posting this advance notice to say something about the phenomena. We are in no way obligated to tell you about a sale in advance, but we choose to do so because we feel it is a nice thing to do for our community.
This isn’t about leaving the community in the dark, which seems like an odd conclusion to make. I’m just saying that actions have consequences. As mentioned earlier, it isn’t smart financially for us to mention the sale in advance, that we do so is a courtesy. It is not a given, or a right.
I know a look a little, pun intended, salty, and that is because I am. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but I wanted to make it clear that this is not something we have control over, and we already know how you feel. It does make us hesitant to give notice in the future when all the feedback we get is very pointed and accusatory. Negative feedback I understand, I leave as much as I can online. The only time I remove negative feedback is when it is outright abusive or violates guidelines. But aggressive comments or angry replies over something we can’t change and already know about don’t make us want to give you advance notice, which I think is pretty fair.
Just want to say that did you did an admirable job with the community here… Which I think most of the time felt quite unappreciated. Keep up the good work you have done
About your comment.
I fully understand it. It’s nice to get such feedback in advance, especially if you want to buy something.
However, I want to mention something else here.
All you need is a few extra people who can take some of the load off you.
You can’t do everything by yourself. It’s not healthy nor desirable, @Saltypatra.
I have a feeling, I speculate, that the Switch isn’t being handled by the old team anymore, so all the extra weight has fallen on your shoulders as well, and not just yours, on your entire team.
Hopefully, I am wrong, because this means less time for the actual development and improvements, such as new features for the game.
You need to hire more people to expand and maintain this game, otherwise things will go even worse.
The changes made to the game are too slow and I think you’re not catching up, following at the same pace. It’s pretty much necessary to get more hands on this.
Steam reviews for this game have gotten worse, and I understand for the most part, why.
I am not so enthusiastic for this game, but I hope that you plan to do the right thing in the end.
I think also part of why this gets weird is the buckets are sort of far apart so it doesn’t feel like you’re getting a lot for free. Ultimately the problem is when I see “sale” it encourages me to do the math, and GoW shouldn’t remind players to do the math.
The sale’s over but IIRC I did some math on Discord when someone asked, “Is it a good deal?” (The answer to that question is subjective.)
The sale applied a bonus from 30% up to 50% depending on how much you spent. But you also have to note that not every price point sells gems at the same rate. (Having complex currency conversions is part of how F2P games trick players). At $4.99 you normally pay $0.10 per gem, but at $99.99 you pay $0.066 per gem. So if you buy the $4.99 bundle until you have $99.99 worth of gems, you’d have spent roughly $150 to get there! That affects the value of the “sale”.
The $4.99 bundle has a 30% bonus. That sounds big, but it’s 15 gems. At the $4.99 price point, that means you’re getting a bonus $1.50 per purchase. The $99.99 bundle had a 50% bonus. If you count enough fractions of a penny, that means you get a bonus $49.99 worth of gems, 100 more than if you outright paid $49.99.
It still balances out that the more you spend the more you save. But the magnitudes don’t sound as impressive as the percentages.
A bonus 15 gems is trivial. One can get that out of a few Treasure Hunt plays even if one is not very good at TH. The bonus for $99.99 ends up being 750 gems, but think about what we spend gems on. 750 isn’t enough to buy tiers 1-6 in an event. You have to stop at 5. The 2250 that $99.99 would get you in total (ignoring VIP bonus, which is also not very large) does let you get all the way up to tier VII.
That’s $100 to get a little bit more than one fraction of the week’s gameplay. Forget the “sale”. It’s a bad deal to begin with! $100 is enough for two entire other games that might represent multiple weeks of play time. If you want all of the tiers in every weekly event, the GoW shop thinks that should cost somewhere between $200 and $300 (depending on your guild gem income, tributes, etc.) Per week.
I like my games to assert they’re worth about $20/month. GoW believes it delivers $800 in value. This “sale” just reminds me of that, and it discourages me from making even the $4.99 purchase. Gems are worth next-to-nothing, that’s why I bite on the flash offers instead. Gems are best delivered as add-ons next to the thing I’m actually paying for.
So, objectively, you can save $50 with this sale. But subjectively, that $150 worth of gems won’t even buy you in to every event for a week. So in my opinion the sale makes me less likely to spend money.
One thing I hate about people with a position is when they try and use the fear of loss doesn’t work for everyone #Fact
My other point is : it isn’t financially smart to announce a sale in advance? Are you preaching this to 5 years old cuz Black Friday, Christmas sale, spring sales, and summer sales ect… all of these sales gets announced in advance and they benefit financially and solid proof that that statement is false.
For the Deals on sale I think @Skyye and @Slypenslyde made a valuable point.
I am trying to stay civil but I can’t be sorry for being honest. Thank you
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.
Please hang around and describe more “behind the curtains” when you can.
I wish the devs could share this and I’m 99% certain part of being a dev on these platforms is you can’t publicly discuss these things or risk losing certification.
It is true, at times we are limited with what we can or cannot say, and it changes depending on the platform!
It’s a lot to remember. We typically take every platform into consideration, and then make sure we don’t mention things that aren’t appropriate, even if it only applies to one.
I also want to note that our gem sales don’t function like Black Friday or Christmas sales, as a lot of them are independent of holidays. The marketing build up combined with years of public sentiment and expectation surrounding holidays means that announcing sales during these times in advance is a very smart move. However, those conditions don’t apply here.
I’ve heard between $10k and $20k but it could vary depending on platform and region. (Also my number could be very old.)
Depending on the platform, and depending on the regions involved, the game might even require re-evaluation for ESRB, PEGI, etc. ratings. Each of those requires letting a review board play as much of the game content as possible and exchange a “you can release” token for a several thousand dollar check.
Then the platform owner might want to run their own verifications that your game meets arbitrary quality requirements that only matter if your name doesn’t rhyme with Timecraft or Shortfight.
This is all in addition to your devs being tied up with non-work for several hours related to the submission process, QA having nothing in the pipeline to do, etc. That adds a few thousand dollars in expenses as well.
You don’t hear a lot about this because the certification processes and developer fees are considered trade secret-level information and part of obtaining a license is promising you will never reveal them. That also means devs aren’t supposed to discuss them with each other (in the sense of ‘other companies’) which opens the possibility that some people pay dramatically more than others. You don’t want to tell your friend at company B you’re paying 20% less than them because they might go whine to the licensor, who might figure out you snitched and either revoke your license or raise your fee.
Practically everything about the games industry makes one wonder why small companies bother.
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doesn’t work for everyone 