fmftint said: I keep seeind this $100m number thrown around but no one ever says if that's net or gross, Google and Apple keep 30% on all ap sales, the remainder is split between publisher and developer
therightwaye said: Looks to me like the forums are less active. I have a few daily players who haven't played in a couple of weeks. And the competition seems lacking. Is this game slowly dying? Having not been on the forums for longer than five months, does this come and go?
dying? Absolutely. It takes a lot of work and a bit of luck to reach 2 years, and then everything after that is really just gravy. Every decision from the development team since the last anniversary has confirmed a paradigm shift focusing on bringing MPQ to a point of termination.
However, you don't just kill the goose that lays the golden egg. There's still money to be made, and by tightening the screws on monetization you can start to deliver a "pay or quit" ultimatum.
The worst thing for Demiurge is free players. These represent a drain on resources with no income to offset those costs. So the goal is to squeeze them out of that position - either into paying customers or quitting, so as to free up those resources. If people pay, that's more profit and more reason to leave the wheels turning for a little while longer. If people quit, then you can afford to start consolidating resources since there's less requirement for resources.
There will be some threshold on daily revenue which represents the final tipping point - probably not as low as a 1:1 ratio against daily running costs, but you get the idea. Breaching that threshold is early warning signal, they'll cease development on new characters, finish up what they have in the pipeline and see where they go.
I'd say that switching the team over to a kind of "MPQ2" is certainly a possibility; as is keeping MPQ running on skeleton crew with no new content and minimal update support for as long as possible.
But people have been saying this game is dying for years, so I guess we'll just see.
babinro said: The game is definitely less fun for long time players but I have no idea if that translates to the game 'dying'. We have a 5* tier of play that's frankly AWESOME but it's so inaccessible to the player base that it can't be appreciated. The design of the end game is also such that elevating yourself to the final tier of play typically means discarding all tiers before. Now that's always been the case but you might not appreciate it as much when the tier you moved to means adding new characters to it maybe twice a year with hardcore play.Vets are left with three options...1) Have the patience of a saint and accept very little progress yearly for 20+ hours of gameplay each week. 2) Spend literally thousands of dollars to keep up with 5* tier3) Burn out due to boredom, lack of progress or just frustration regarding the realities of this endgame.
El Satanno said: babinro said: The game is definitely less fun for long time players but I have no idea if that translates to the game 'dying'. We have a 5* tier of play that's frankly AWESOME but it's so inaccessible to the player base that it can't be appreciated. The design of the end game is also such that elevating yourself to the final tier of play typically means discarding all tiers before. Now that's always been the case but you might not appreciate it as much when the tier you moved to means adding new characters to it maybe twice a year with hardcore play.Vets are left with three options...1) Have the patience of a saint and accept very little progress yearly for 20+ hours of gameplay each week. 2) Spend literally thousands of dollars to keep up with 5* tier3) Burn out due to boredom, lack of progress or just frustration regarding the realities of this endgame. It's interesting how you said the 5* tier is awesome, and then elaborate a bit on how not-awesome it is. You're a funny guy, Babs.
RtW said: Maybe the should look at the model that Marvel Future Fight uses. That game also has a lot of characters. And they are very generous how often you get characters. No roster slots so you can keep expending. The more you play characters the more they level. The reason why you should ever pay in that game is for extra's. New costumes on characters. And I pay sometimes because I think they have a very good and more important FAIR model.