2 options to make MPQ more profitable & make players HAPPY

noobprime

aaronschmiz wrote:

The intent was simply to adjust the pricing of IAP to a level where more things are available on a more regular basis to people who would not generally spend money on a F2P game. Therefore opening the market to a higher percentage of purchases, making D3/Demuirge more money [rant] so that maybe they can BUY NEW SERVERS!!! [/rant]

Sadly we aren't privy to their metrics in terms of this. They have oodles more data than we do, and really it's hard to discern the difference in short terms gains vs the long term. And I think fundamentally their decisions at the moment are to maximize profitability at the expense of player happiness. Perhaps when they get to a more stable state they can change tack and try and do both.

Unknown

F2P demand/supply curve is a lot like piracy. There are a whole mess of people who are too cheap buy stuff at ANY price other than 0. If they slash HP cost to half all the guys who claim they'd buy it still almost certainly would not, but now they're only making half the normal revenue to the big spenders that would've bought it anyway. By the way, pretty much every decent developer knows this and they're going to call your bluff every single time. They know that people in general are cheap and there's no point to bother with a guy who thinks the most reasonable price for something is free.

Also, due to the way this game works, past purchase is almost irrelevent. It is not hard for a player to figure that unless D3 rolled out 10 P2W characters in a row, you're pretty much set with 2 of the top characters for PvP plus a reasonable featured character (PvE is slightly different but the same model still mostly works). So just because someone shelled out $500 for Daken and Sentry doesn't mean his opinion has any weight because D3 is pretty sure you're either so rich that you'll just continue to buy stuff anyway, or that you're smart enough to figure out that those 2 characters can carry you in all PvP events in the foreseeable future.

In some sense it's because this game currently does not reward depth which automatically makes most people's opinion worthless, even the significant spenders. D3 knows you only need 2 strong characters to do well too, which means they can just write you off as a lost cause if you already bought 2 powerful characters. Almost all the players of the game can be safely categorized as 'lost cause' or 'rich guy who will buy anything', and the opinion of these two group don't matter at all. If the game offered some kind of recurring expenses comparable to say the cost of a MMORPG then you could say the guys paying those recurring expenses may have some pull. The closest thing to that is the shield/boost craze toward the end of season 1, but again that falls more under some kind of craze than a legitmate recurring theme. That is, from D3's point of view they figure there are some insane guys buying $100 worth of boosts a month despite not even attempting to sell this, so they'll just take that free money and not actually care what these guys have to say either because they know it is totally abnormal.

kensterr

D3 can just have the same sale on selected Steam accounts for everyone, regardless of platform and if player has already purchased HP/ISO.

Unknown

noobprime wrote:

BUT the most important part, LOL has absolutely pathetic monetization. Their playerbase does not spend money on the game. D3P mentioned the mythical $1 ARPDAU that they hit recently. LOL has ARPDAUs of 5 ... 5 CENTS and I think I am rounding up here. The sole reason why they are successful is that they have a good core product, and people *stayed* to play the game.

Errr, they actually hit that target? I thought it is the rainbow they're chasing. Having 100k players show up it would mean $100k daily. I just doubt even fraction of that actually happens. That 5 cent figure sounds way more reasonable.

Just as a reality check, that would map to $365 spending yearly on this painbox. IMO that would require to drop down the player base to the few hundreds not caring about money at all, but having only that population it would be nothing but collection.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

F2P demand/supply curve is a lot like piracy. There are a whole mess of people who are too cheap buy stuff at ANY price other than 0. If they slash HP cost to half all the guys who claim they'd buy it still almost certainly would not, but now they're only making half the normal revenue to the big spenders that would've bought it anyway. By the way, pretty much every decent developer knows this and they're going to call your bluff every single time. They know that people in general are cheap and there's no point to bother with a guy who thinks the most reasonable price for something is free.

Also, due to the way this game works, past purchase is almost irrelevent. It is not hard for a player to figure that unless D3 rolled out 10 P2W characters in a row, you're pretty much set with 2 of the top characters for PvP plus a reasonable featured character (PvE is slightly different but the same model still mostly works). So just because someone shelled out $500 for Daken and Sentry doesn't mean his opinion has any weight because D3 is pretty sure you're either so rich that you'll just continue to buy stuff anyway, or that you're smart enough to figure out that those 2 characters can carry you in all PvP events in the foreseeable future.

In some sense it's because this game currently does not reward depth which automatically makes most people's opinion worthless, even the significant spenders. D3 knows you only need 2 strong characters to do well too, which means they can just write you off as a lost cause if you already bought 2 powerful characters. Almost all the players of the game can be safely categorized as 'lost cause' or 'rich guy who will buy anything', and the opinion of these two group don't matter at all. If the game offered some kind of recurring expenses comparable to say the cost of a MMORPG then you could say the guys paying those recurring expenses may have some pull. The closest thing to that is the shield/boost craze toward the end of season 1, but again that falls more under some kind of craze than a legitmate recurring theme. That is, from D3's point of view they figure there are some insane guys buying $100 worth of boosts a month despite not even attempting to sell this, so they'll just take that free money and not actually care what these guys have to say either because they know it is totally abnormal.

What you say is very true.

But if all dev companies have the same business model, then the same causes will lead to the same consequences. If you change the business model and adapt it because your product has a stronger potential, then it is different.

Let me give you a last example (and after that I'm done) : A Spa company which will advertise with women on the ads. And no men. No products clearly identified for men. When you tell them that they should advertise to that target they tell you : "it's not needed, we don't have enough men coming in". Of course, you never spoke to them.

That was what I tried to explain. Innovation can be in many aspects : communication, price, products... Innovation means risk. If you don't take risks, and just copy the business models of others you will never know how far your product can go.

But as my opinion does not matter, I will just stop

We'll just take for granted that D3P does everything it takes to make MPQ a great successful game, so that everyone on the forum will be happy in the end

noobprime

pasa_ wrote:

Errr, they actually hit that target? I thought it is the rainbow they're chasing. Having 100k players show up it would mean $100k daily. I just doubt even fraction of that actually happens. That 5 cent figure sounds way more reasonable.

Yeah I understand math . Here is what they said in the VB articles (which also stated that they started out at $0.21 in Oct 2013.

"Since we launched Marvel Puzzle Quest along with our partners at D3Publisher in late August, we’ve been furiously optimizing the game, chasing the mythical $1 ARPDAU (Average Revenue Per Daily Active User). As we finally rang that bell in February (if only for a day), it seemed like a good time to share how we got there."

HailMary

arktos1971 wrote:

We'll just take for granted that D3P does everything it takes to make MPQ a great successful game, so that everyone on the forum will be happy in the end

I don't see why there should be a strong correlation between the two. People will complain in any circumstance. They'll complain even more when they see some other people complaining, because there's social safety in numbers.

Unknown

noobprime wrote:

pasa_ wrote:

Errr, they actually hit that target? I thought it is the rainbow they're chasing. Having 100k players show up it would mean $100k daily. I just doubt even fraction of that actually happens. That 5 cent figure sounds way more reasonable.

Yeah I understand math . Here is what they said in the VB articles (which also stated that they started out at $0.21 in Oct 2013.

"Since we launched Marvel Puzzle Quest along with our partners at D3Publisher in late August, we’ve been furiously optimizing the game, chasing the mythical $1 ARPDAU (Average Revenue Per Daily Active User). As we finally rang that bell in February (if only for a day), it seemed like a good time to share how we got there."

Ah, that sounds like there was a single burst income -- probably a sale or something. Also possibly the "daily active player" means something different than what we would think with no relation to the player count entering events and such.

Unknown

arktos1971 wrote:

What you say is very true.

But if all dev companies have the same business model, then the same causes will lead to the same consequences. If you change the business model and adapt it because your product has a stronger potential, then it is different.

Let me give you a last example (and after that I'm done) : A Spa company which will advertise with women on the ads. And no men. No products clearly identified for men. When you tell them that they should advertise to that target they tell you : "it's not needed, we don't have enough men coming in". Of course, you never spoke to them.

That was what I tried to explain. Innovation can be in many aspects : communication, price, products... Innovation means risk. If you don't take risks, and just copy the business models of others you will never know how far your product can go.

But as my opinion does not matter, I will just stop

We'll just take for granted that D3P does everything it takes to make MPQ a great successful game, so that everyone on the forum will be happy in the end

The problem is that the game doesn't have a good recurring expense because usually guys paying these have opinion that matter to the company. If say you can be subscribed for $5 a month for double iso 8 gain, and a significant number of people do this, then these people have leverage. If it was actually possible to get all the guys who are subscribed to demand something (very hard to do, but in theory possible), D3 will listen.

As is right now the F2P guy (like me), they don't really care what you think because they know you're too cheap to buy anything anyway.

For the rich guys, they figure they'll buy anything. And for the crazy guys who buys $100 in boosts, they figure you're crazy and they won't try to rationalize why you bought $100/month except hoping you'd buy more too.

This game has a serious problem in that past, one time large spenders are no indicator of any future spending. Like I said, if you spent $500 on Daken and Sentry, in any other game it'd be a good idea to try to lure you in for spending more, but not this game. The game structure means you're pretty much set on your characters (unless they got totally nerfed or totally obseleted by new characters), so they really shouldn't care what you think either.

Right now it seems like this game is supported by guys spending money without really caring what happens to their investment, and as long as that'd the dominant form of revenue, D3 doesn't have to care about what people think either.

noobprime

pasa_ wrote:

Ah, that sounds like there was a single burst income -- probably a sale or something. Also possibly the "daily active player" means something different than what we would think with no relation to the player count entering events and such.

Definitely it wasn't sustainable (hence mythical). Frankly the numbers are a little fascinating to me. Looking at this, they are now at ~$.31 on ios alone.

http://thinkgaming.com/app-sales-data/4302/marvel-puzzle-quest-dark-reign/

Honestly the company is also in its own 2* to 3* transition where they need to get the initial problems squared away and content/game modes up so that they can really start upping the daily user base.

Unknown

The game has no meaningful recurring expenses which gives players no leverage, but not having any recurring expenses also makes you wonder if the model is sustainable.

Let us imagine we now can have 5 characters on a team. So you spend $500 to buy Daken and Sentry, and we can imagine a following conversation take place:

D3: "Hello player, you made a fine purchase with those two guys, but what you really need to round out your team is the power of THOR!"
Player: "Yeah but I just spent $500 on this game! And how do I know if you won't nerf Thor? And I expect at least a 25% discount to spend more money!"

Now we have no idea who will actually win this argument but at least you can see the player has some leverage. It'd certainly be a good idea for D3 to sell to this new guy at a significant discount given his past history of willing to spend and make some reassurances that Thor is not about to be nerfed.

Or let's imagine a new character released has this ability: "You win the game when you have a protect tile of at least 700 strength". Kind of contrived, but this makes new character + IW + Falcon a workable team (Force Bubbles and then upgrade the defense tile = instant win). But, can this team possibly happen in the current game? No, that'd be too risky and it won't even be possible in PvP unless either the new character or Falcon is featured. But in a five man team you could have featured + new guy + IW + Falcon + Magneto MN (accelerate blue for Force Bubbles) and maybe that's an awesome team. So again we create a situation where there's incentive and leverage, e.g. D3 will now want to sell you stuff so you can level up your neglected IW to the guys who spend money, but in doing so those guys will have leverage (like making sure this new character isn't going to be nerfed later).

Now I'm not saying we should have five man team (though it'd certainly be interesting) but you need something like that which gives people a reason to constantly spend, because that's the only way players will have leverage too.

Unknown

noobprime wrote:

arktos1971 wrote:

He told me you do not have to pay to succeed in LoL, but the devs included a lot of fun stuff, and so far (in 2 years), he spent $80 in it. He spent $13 in MPQ and stopped...

LOL doesn't help your argument really. The game is about >4 years old now and when it was introduced it was buggy as heck. It took them a long time to fix their server side problems (over 9000 login queues?) and to this day lag is still problematic. They gave out boosts as compensation quite freely in the early days something D3P really hasn't embraced.

As for introducing stuff, NOTHING happened for a long time aside new champions and rebalancing. There was simply NO innovation till they got their tinykitty together, and it took time. Years even. Now they have smaller maps, dominion, 1 for all, etc. At this point the community expects about 1 new shiny 'game feature' from them every ~10 months.

BUT the most important part, LOL has absolutely pathetic monetization. Their playerbase does not spend money on the game. D3P mentioned the mythical $1 ARPDAU that they hit recently. LOL has ARPDAUs of 5 ... 5 CENTS and I think I am rounding up here. The sole reason why they are successful is that they have a good core product, and people *stayed* to play the game.

MPQ doesn't have that at the moment, changing the $$ structure only helps so much, but at the moment is akin to lipstick on a pig (sorry pig, I love you bacon).

LoL is a class leader in it's genre, and after 5 years continues to improve it's user base size. They don't shove **** monetization features because they don't have to. LoL is an amazing game, can MPQ even say it's the best match 3 game? Nobody would play this game if it weren't for the license. As a game, and not as an online epeen measuring stick, this game pales in comparison to the original puzzle quest. The ARPDAU hit was a one time shot, I doubt they have that today. 5 Years of successful monetization is better than 1 month of increase spending because of new covers, packs, and back to back events. Any more features added to this game to make it generate more revenue will affect it's core base, many who are tired of downward trends. I personally will not spend another dime. I'veprobably spent $200 on this game on 200 days played, but I won't spend even $5 more. How many people are in a similar boat? I don't have any incentives. I have all the characters, all the HP i need, and can do a pvp finish with a single shield. What do I spend on? More rosters for more tanking guys? no thanks.

Unknown

The comparison to LOL is meaningless unless you want to make the argument of 'the biggest guy is always right' which will lead you to conclusion like Coke is the best non-water drink in the world too.

I'm not going to say that the biggest game always suck but there isn't some kind of inherent superiority of a game doing better financially. There's nothing wrong if MPQ is objectively a better game than LOL, nor does that even matter on the financial success of the game. If one wants to make an argument solely on financial success then you should never play a game that isn't a bandwagon game.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

arktos1971 wrote:

What you say is very true.

But if all dev companies have the same business model, then the same causes will lead to the same consequences. If you change the business model and adapt it because your product has a stronger potential, then it is different.

Let me give you a last example (and after that I'm done) : A Spa company which will advertise with women on the ads. And no men. No products clearly identified for men. When you tell them that they should advertise to that target they tell you : "it's not needed, we don't have enough men coming in". Of course, you never spoke to them.

That was what I tried to explain. Innovation can be in many aspects : communication, price, products... Innovation means risk. If you don't take risks, and just copy the business models of others you will never know how far your product can go.

But as my opinion does not matter, I will just stop

We'll just take for granted that D3P does everything it takes to make MPQ a great successful game, so that everyone on the forum will be happy in the end

The problem is that the game doesn't have a good recurring expense because usually guys paying these have opinion that matter to the company. If say you can be subscribed for $5 a month for double iso 8 gain, and a significant number of people do this, then these people have leverage. If it was actually possible to get all the guys who are subscribed to demand something (very hard to do, but in theory possible), D3 will listen.

As is right now the F2P guy (like me), they don't really care what you think because they know you're too cheap to buy anything anyway.

For the rich guys, they figure they'll buy anything. And for the crazy guys who buys $100 in boosts, they figure you're crazy and they won't try to rationalize why you bought $100/month except hoping you'd buy more too.

This game has a serious problem in that past, one time large spenders are no indicator of any future spending. Like I said, if you spent $500 on Daken and Sentry, in any other game it'd be a good idea to try to lure you in for spending more, but not this game. The game structure means you're pretty much set on your characters (unless they got totally nerfed or totally obseleted by new characters), so they really shouldn't care what you think either.

Right now it seems like this game is supported by guys spending money without really caring what happens to their investment, and as long as that'd the dominant form of revenue, D3 doesn't have to care about what people think either.

That's all correct.

I personally think that NOT caring about customers until I really have to is a major problem. But apparently that's not what customers here think

So, let's enjoy being **** till we leave the game. I would just have lost several thousands, and I am probably the only one, but I do care about the money I spent in the game.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

The comparison to LOL is meaningless unless you want to make the argument of 'the biggest guy is always right' which will lead you to conclusion like Coke is the best non-water drink in the world too.

I'm not going to say that the biggest game always suck but there isn't some kind of inherent superiority of a game doing better financially. There's nothing wrong if MPQ is objectively a better game than LOL, nor does that even matter on the financial success of the game. If one wants to make an argument solely on financial success then you should never play a game that isn't a bandwagon game.

But MPQ is both a good game and deserves financial success

noobprime

klingsor wrote:

I'veprobably spent $200 on this game on 200 days played, but I won't spend even $5 more.

Heh, you were close to their $1 ARPDAU! I sincerely hope that at this point the development team moves away from the '**** monetization features' to actual content development.

Unknown

noobprime wrote:

klingsor wrote:

I'veprobably spent $200 on this game on 200 days played, but I won't spend even $5 more.

Heh, you were close to their $1 ARPDAU! I sincerely hope that at this point the development team moves away from the '**** monetization features' to actual content development.

That's what I have been saying for several days

Unknown

arktos1971 wrote:

Phantron wrote:

The comparison to LOL is meaningless unless you want to make the argument of 'the biggest guy is always right' which will lead you to conclusion like Coke is the best non-water drink in the world too.

I'm not going to say that the biggest game always suck but there isn't some kind of inherent superiority of a game doing better financially. There's nothing wrong if MPQ is objectively a better game than LOL, nor does that even matter on the financial success of the game. If one wants to make an argument solely on financial success then you should never play a game that isn't a bandwagon game.

But MPQ is both a good game and deserves financial success

It does, but user input won't matter as long as revenue appears to be all from the "I bought a 10-pack and got no 3* ???" guys. They need to put some kind of sustainable model that does not require your user to be foolish or have more money than they know what to do with, and if such model exists it'd also give users leverage. The foolish has no leverage because they figure you're stupid for buying the 10-pack in the first place, and those of us who don't buy the 10-pack have even less leverage since we're not supplying the money.

Spoit

arktos1971 wrote:

noobprime wrote:

klingsor wrote:

I'veprobably spent $200 on this game on 200 days played, but I won't spend even $5 more.

Heh, you were close to their $1 ARPDAU! I sincerely hope that at this point the development team moves away from the '**** monetization features' to actual content development.

That's what I have been saying for several days

Oh is that what you were trying to say?

Unknown

Yes, trying to explain my poiny with details.