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| So do you guys think most whales can afford it? by Worm 10/04/2015, 11:54am PDT | ||||
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| I think there's a real refusal to investigate whether the people buying 1,000 dollar ships are doing so because they're rich or just raiding the kid's college fund. Plenty of people bankrupt themselves with online Casinos or heroine, so I'm sort of surprised there isn't any focus on this. Given the recent kickstarter hack (assuming we can see what they backed along with their address) you could probably correlate if the people buying the bigger tiers are being responsible or not.
I think it's actually the primary problem of a lot of these micro-transaction based games too. They rely so heavily on people who spend tons of money and it's just assumed that OF COURSE that person is spending responsibly. You only need to look at the Cat Asser article to see just how much someone can throw their lives away over these games. I know it can't be the responsibility of the company if someone bankrupts themselves on sexy outfits for their MMO character, but I think there's a good question of how predatory a given system is. For example, I play FFXIV a lot and I really like the game there is a clear Pay to Win element in the retainer system. Retainers are how the game handles storage(bank space), market board listings(auction house space), and ventures(a little timed gacha system). You get two for free which ends up being not nearly enough storage space, plenty of Market Board space, and a useful amount of ventures. Now when the expansion dropped storage space was not given to players for free. They talked about "adding more retainers" but what they did in the end was expanded the amount you could pay for from 2 to 6. You pay a monthly fee of $2 for each additional retainer and it's definitely an advantage but somewhere around 4 or 5 (including your two free ones) you're going to have a lot more than you need. So it's not really predatory. They also sell a lot of merchandise with bundled in-game codes for cosmetics, and sell cosmetics directly. No of it feels really terrible to me. Then you look at a game like Star Citizen or some of these F2P MMOs that have 100+ dollar Founders Packs and you really have to start wondering about the human toll for these kinds of systems. It seems like they focus on being invested and then probably the steady trickle of money starts. Well I'm already in the game for 100, so what's another hundred? Before you know it we're going to be seeing exposes about people who spent all this money on |
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So do you guys think most whales can afford it? by 10/04/2015, 11:54am PDT  It would be interesting to actually see the data. by 10/05/2015, 9:29pm PDT |
