Alternate Costume Options - What Happened?

no1amerioca

Have to alternate costumes stopped? Haven’t seem any new ones in awhile. Those were good options to help spices up the game a little. Here’s a list of some I would love to see.

1) Classic Red and Yellow Spider-Woman
2) Classic Yellow and Blue original X-Men Team (Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Angel, Beast and Ice Man) 
3) Classic Red and White Angel 

4) Classic Red and Blue Wasp (Janet Van Dyne)
5) Original Gold (MK 1) Iron Man suit
6) Original Yondu (with sash)
7) Black Namor suit
8) Original Yellow and Red Daredevil

**Mod note: Edited title to keep in line with forum rules. Please refrain from using all caps. Thanks! -fight

krakenoon

Not sure what happened with costumes, maybe people are more concerned with purchases to influence their rosters’ performance than cosmetics since rewards nerfs.

Considering we now have the other members of the original X-men available in multiple tiers, I’d much rather see another Beast before we see the original costumes.

Wonko33

Players:too expensive, we won’t buy
dev$: not enough sales let’s drop them 

Dormammu

Kind of like that support PvE thing that lasted a week. It'll be back soon!

DeNappa

The way they implemented it never made sense to me. Just open a 'skins store' that sells various costumes for somewhere in the $2-$5 range or so, without any of the bundles or one-time only deals they packed them with.

jredd

same thing as supports. good idea poorly implemented. hopefully they revisit at some point.

Phumade

They wanted to create scarcity in their skins like fortnite.  What they forgot is that is you can always buy a skin in fortnite.  Even if I wanted too, I couldn’t buy a single skin at this very moment.

rare skins are fine, but you still have to provide a way for people to buy some kind of skin

DyingLegend

Until costumes give unique benefits, change the ability colors of a character or just do anything at all, then I could care less that they arent focusing on them 

daltonimperial

But if they made content/character changes based on costumes, they'd get more complaints about Pay2Win (I assume the same people who wouldn't buy if the "unique benefits" were actually a negative in most scenarios, so the costume would actually have to improve the character), so that's not really the target audience for costumes.

My guess is that it just wasn't financially viable.

Lots of games let you pay real money for cosmetics, but it's harder here with so many characters such that you'll rarely see a non-meta character.  How often do SCL 9-10 players use Scarlet Witch?  Or Miles Morales?  It's one thing to pay for a cosmetic that I can see on my WoW or Fortnite character every time I play, as opposed to going "oh yeah" when I scroll through my roster.  And even if it was a character you used regularly, there was lots of variety in the offers, in terms of currency (HP, money) and whether it was bundled (if I didn't need HP, it felt like the Strange cover cost $75).

Even if they don't make new ones, it would be nice to have the older ones come back in some form, preferably a costume equivalent to the shard store (as DeNappa suggested) or even a rotating one each week, like they do with the $19.99 for 3 covers of a random 4-star (I think).

I'm crossing my fingers that we'll see a few of them (at least the old ones) around Halloween.

Wonko33

but realistically I think most of us would prefer they put energy into supports over skins. 

HoundofShadow

All these "skins" are copyrighted by Disney. The question is whether the dev needs to pay additional royalty if they use another skin of the same character. If so, that could be the case. It might not be financially feasible overall.

In the case of Fortnite, the developers, publishers and copyright holders belong to the same entity: Epic Games. 

Dormammu

HoundofShadow said:

All these "skins" are copyrighted by Disney. The question is whether the dev needs to pay additional royalty if they use another skin of the same character. If so, that could be the case. It might not be financially feasible overall.

You may be right, but if that is indeed the case I wonder why they implemented alt costumes at all. They'd have to know beforehand the terms and how viable they were to work with. If it isn't feasible to make it a meaningful part of the game, don't bother. I expect it's more of a development issue and a lack of resources. Either there are constraints on their artist(s) time/effort or they don't have the man hours to implement on the coding side.

Or maybe less-than-desirable financial returns on past costumes caused them to abandon the feature.

HoundofShadow

Maybe they did this to test the market to see how popular Marvel skins are in this game. They probably bought a dozen of costumes, did some financial projection, but the end result wasn't what they expected. So, this became a low priority for them. Their priority might shift up in the future, just like Supports. 

DAZ0273

HoundofShadow said:

Maybe they did this to test the market to see how popular Marvel skins are in this game. They probably bought a dozen of costumes, did some financial projection, but the end result wasn't what they expected. So, this became a low priority for them. Their priority might shift up in the future, just like Supports. 

I find it hard to believe that costumes are licensed on their own in this way BUT I am not saying you are wrong as I don't know. However I agree with your conclusion that they have inventory that was translated into Costumes, just not specific costumes.

It would, however, I suspect be far more likely that characters are purchased in "packages" and that would include the right to portrayal of the character within those packages. What makes me think this way is Lockjaw - I find it hard to believe that the Devs would pay additional licensing fees to have Lockjaw in game just so that Crystal and Karnak could be featured.

4* Juggernaut would fit the theory too - there was no specific reason for Demi to purchase an individual licence to portray a version of Juggs from an event years and years old - I suspect they had the right built in and decided that was an interesting version to release. I suspect that Juggernaut (Fear Itself) could quite easily have been a costume instead.

All of the above is of course speculation and Marvel and Demi are not likely going to clue us in to sensitive commercial contracts anytime this Millenium, lol!

My guess would be that the majority of the cost involved would be paying artists to create the alternative costumes. As this sort of cost would be an up front one, it may well be that the costumes were not selling well enough to cover the artwork costs and so they decided to not create any extra inventory of this sort and just employ artists on projects that are going to be used.

Borstock

Wonko33 said:

but realistically I think most of us would prefer they put energy into supports over skins. 

Hard pass on that. Supports are either useless or game-breaking. I'd much rather something cosmetic.

HoundofShadow

That's totally possible. I read somewhere that you can purchase their license in batches. Do graphic artists cost that much per project/skin? I believe they have their in-house graphic artists under monthly payroll, unless they are hired on ad-hoc basis/per project basis, which is also possible. Well, we'll never know.

grenadier

Seems far more likely that the ridiculous prices they charge for things meant that only the biggest of whales dropped money on them.  Any time I see any item, or even set of items, that cost more than a whole new game sold at a more traditional price point, I shake my head and wonder what the MPQ devs are smoking.

Don't try to go for the big sale at $75 (or even $20).  Price things at the impulse-buy level, and see what that brings in.

Mayo

Buying customes in this game is like buying christmas lights without having a complete christmas tree. Players usually buy what gives them more game advancement and devs should focus on working in all things  broken in the game to bring more players or keep them.

PiMacleod

grenadier said:

Seems far more likely that the ridiculous prices they charge for things meant that only the biggest of whales dropped money on them.  Any time I see any item, or even set of items, that cost more than a whole new game sold at a more traditional price point, I shake my head and wonder what the MPQ devs are smoking.

Don't try to go for the big sale at $75 (or even $20).  Price things at the impulse-buy level, and see what that brings in.

This.  Right here.  There's enough people that play enough OTHER games that realize what these prices equal in other game mediums.  $60 for a big AAA game.  $10~$20 for a lot of good indie titles, not to mention discounted AAA games.  DLC for existing big titles, or season passes for your chosen addiction.

When the price of a bundle includes what's basically the disposable flavor of the moment, but at the price of an entire other game, there's plenty of people who see that and easily click the X.  When I say "disposable flavor", I'm talking about the characters and resources this game is all about -- it's "meta".  You may be buying 3 covers of Nightcrawler (example), but that's not gonna help you much in our current game environment.  Whereas the same $20 could buy an entire expansion, or an amazing indie game experience.

So, if they are just targeting whales, then they're doing fine, it seems.  After all, the game/business is still going!  Can't refute that.

However, I do wonder if they can't change their business model due to potential backlash... if the 'whales' started to see reduced prices for things that they spent SO much money on in the past, would there be outrage?  I'd think there'd be a bit of sour grapes there.  Example:  $75 costume now sold for $10 (which is still pricey, IMO, but that's just me) -- I think they'd be a bit upset on the 'loss' of $65.  Some could argue that they had much longer to enjoy that costume... I'm not here to advocate either side, but I can see how it'd make people feel one way or another.

HoundofShadow

The main difference between AAA games and F2P mobile games is the process of making the games. Generally speaking, AAA games require a few years of work before they are sold in the market. The cost of making that game is more or less fixed. Not much running cost are allocated for them after that. Since the market rate for AAA games is familiar to players, they are able to estimate how much is needed to break even or make a profit etc.

For mobile F2P games, the dev probably spend a year or two on them, and it's always a work in progress.  Running cost such as staff salary or server cost occur every month. Besides that, they have to pay Google and Apple 30% of their sales every month. I doubt any mobile game company that pays licenses/royalties for copyrighted characters can survive for long selling items at $2-$5, given that about 3-5% of the players spend on F2P games.

ZootSax

HoundofShadow said:

I doubt any mobile game company that pays licenses/royalties for copyrighted characters can survive for long selling items at $2-$5, given that about 3-5% of the players spend on F2P games.

This is probably a very fair point, but as we haven't had new costumes in quite some time and they've already paid for the artwork, licensing and incorporation into the game for existing costumes, it really seems odd that they would literally throw away the opportunity for potentially ~$2-5 from ~3-5% (I have no idea what the true numbers are, but yours sounded reasonable) of their player base from what is essentially a sunk cost in terms of development and implementation.  Sure, the costumes lose some exclusivity if they open all existing costumes to sale again, but the other elements in the bundles accounted for much of the original cost and players have had the opportunity to have these rare costumes for a full calendar year in most cases.  Maybe they've already crunched the numbers or their license was too limited to allow for them to do this, but from the outside looking in, locking them away indefinitely doesn't really seem to make any sense.