The "Super-fan"

"My advice to people monetising free games is to better consider the super-fan and their desires." -Chris Wilson.

Yup...sounds about right for every design decision that has ever been put in this game for sure. Buck up free-to-players...with enough money maybe your tears will be wiped away by the hand of THE RNGesus himself...

The Q&A was a very interesting read.

Jeez, I knew this game was a whaling operation but I never expected Mister Christopher to come right out and say it.

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AkuTenshiiZero wrote:

Jeez, I knew this game was a whaling operation but I never expected Mister Christopher to come right out and say it.

Yeah tbh I was quite surprised to actually read it. Now there is some surrounding context to this. He didn't say to ONLY consider them...but it does seem by that quite of bit of consideration is given to the heavy contributors.

I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, but the problem with many old contributors to this game is that they aren't very progressive. They don't really want the game to change much. Many players still reminisce about the "good old days".

Sometimes I wonder if this a good thing or a bad thing. I guess time will tell...It's worked okayish so far...

Appealing to the high spending fans does make sense though. If a player wants to spend hundreds or even thousands on a game, no reason to stop them so long as they feel satisfied with what they're purchasing.

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Vipermagi wrote:

It's worth noting that Chris is exclusively talking about microtransactions, not the actual game.

Maybe I read it wrong...but the question was for general monitization of a free to play game. It didn't indicate he was specifically talking about Microtransactions...at least I don't see it in his quote directly.

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Where do you think other developers get it wrong when trying to monetize a free game?

Rather than going with the obvious answer of how they often offer pay-to-win functionality and how that's bad for competitive games, I'd rather talk about maximum purchase size. Many games cap out at around the $120-150 mark for the most you can purchase in one transaction. We have had a lot of success selling supporter packs at higher values, especially ones that contain real life merchandise and signed stuff. While it may seem like a hassle to have to sign thousands of things, it's totally worthwhile because the community loves it and people who support the game receive something special. My advice to people monetising free games is to better consider the super-fan and their desires.

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Rowanbladex wrote:

Appealing to the high spending fans does make sense though. If a player wants to spend hundreds or even thousands on a game, no reason to stop them so long as they feel satisfied with what they're purchasing.

As a "supporter" who has dropped more money on this game than any other paid game, I can say I haven't felt satisfied. The problem is that the game is constantly changing, so what I felt was worth supporting before is no longer the case. I don't like the pay-2-trade tabs. I don't like how they're selling the rip-off mystery boxes when you can't do anything with repeat mtx's. I don't like xp balance around the 1%. I don't like the declining game stability/bugs/poor/worse optimization with each subsequent league. I don't like I still can't sort my MTX tabs. I don't like that GGG is still relying on 3rd party solutions for their horrible trade.

I also have to question that with all these problems, and the excuses I hear that GGG can only work on so many things at once, they ARE spending dev time and resources (that I gave them money for) to develop the game for other countries (the upcoming chinese release is a big one). Again, I wouldn't really have a problem with this last one IF long running issues were taken care of (3 years, still no sortable MTX stash, no guild tools, no trade system, etc.) and league patches weren't so damn bad with optimization, server stability, bugs, etc. I don't have a problem with GGG trying to grow the game. I do have a problem when it feels like it's growing the game at the expense of not taking care of old issues, and introducing new ones.

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Rowanbladex wrote:

Appealing to the high spending fans does make sense though. If a player wants to spend hundreds or even thousands on a game, no reason to stop them so long as they feel satisfied with what they're purchasing.

it is essentially f2p 101 to do that. any good f2p game should cater to the whales.

the fault of most f2p games is when they get into p2w territory which tries to syphon money from said whales rather than encouraging spending.

people dont like to be forced to into doing things like that.

You know you're taking this completely out of context right? He was talking about max transaction size.