EA needs to wake up to reality...
December 26, 2015 4:53PM
edited December 2015
I see the complaints mounting over the time I've been here and it makes me wonder if EA knows what they're doing here?? Their IAP prices are killing this game, period. I'd estimate that maybe 2% of their customers are the big spenders with the rest on the sidelines understanding that a mere $100 investment in this will barely do anything for you so why bother?? If it weren't for the free play option, I would have quit days after I started and most would have followed.
Who here in this forum has $500 laying around to build up maybe just Lando by himself, as they pray they'll maybe open the right Chromium packs to maybe farm enough shards to maybe open and maybe level him to a usable level?? I do very well in my career but I'm not going to spend that level of money on this when I could have 3 months worth of electric bills paid for the same cost. To add insult to injury, EA doesn't even have the content ready for these high priority big spenders so it's a double failure!! You'd figure with such high prices, they'd have endless content to keep the paying customers endlessly wanting to buy at least, but no??
I've read about people seeing ads and it's inevitable this will happen. The reason is clear, EAs high IAP prices have been detrimental to profits and I'm certain they thought that many more people would be willing to drop hundreds here and they are dead wrong. The good news is that they can make prices way lower rather than use ads. With lower IAP, the game would be far more competitive and players would have access to more synergies and teams. Hackers would have no reason to be, they'd buy-in instead so those concerns would be addressed. Even P2W players would benefit from better competition because there is no fun in playing the same 10 people for the next few years in PVP...
In my view, EA is going to struggle to influence pay and free players to stick it out long term unless they change the prices and add far more levels and Arenas to acquire shards and other upgrades.
This game should never have dead spots and 20 hour forced downtime where your only option to play is expensive replay costs that escalate, putting the breaks on you unless you're willing to spend $100 a month on crystals to replay levels they've played hundreds of times.
I'd say open up the level cap to like 150 and equally for gear and all. I'm not so worried about their being enough characters, I think what we have is fine and if they do that slowly, it doesn't bother me.
Everything should be farmable though, with IAP now becoming the fast upgrade track where you can buy shards, mats and parts if you are the impatient type, making it possible for the F2P player to have any team with the P2W players advantage being only the speed of not having to waste time farming, which is how IAP is supposed to work, simply cater to a customer's impatience.
What the current strategy did was create a system of elitism, where paying customers have access to a handful of the most powerful team possibilities, making anyone who doesn't do similarly to feel as if they can never win or be successful. I'm sure free players will come up with synergies that will be challenging but it's the message. The game could be so much better and challenging, and that will create longevity..
Who here in this forum has $500 laying around to build up maybe just Lando by himself, as they pray they'll maybe open the right Chromium packs to maybe farm enough shards to maybe open and maybe level him to a usable level?? I do very well in my career but I'm not going to spend that level of money on this when I could have 3 months worth of electric bills paid for the same cost. To add insult to injury, EA doesn't even have the content ready for these high priority big spenders so it's a double failure!! You'd figure with such high prices, they'd have endless content to keep the paying customers endlessly wanting to buy at least, but no??
I've read about people seeing ads and it's inevitable this will happen. The reason is clear, EAs high IAP prices have been detrimental to profits and I'm certain they thought that many more people would be willing to drop hundreds here and they are dead wrong. The good news is that they can make prices way lower rather than use ads. With lower IAP, the game would be far more competitive and players would have access to more synergies and teams. Hackers would have no reason to be, they'd buy-in instead so those concerns would be addressed. Even P2W players would benefit from better competition because there is no fun in playing the same 10 people for the next few years in PVP...
In my view, EA is going to struggle to influence pay and free players to stick it out long term unless they change the prices and add far more levels and Arenas to acquire shards and other upgrades.
This game should never have dead spots and 20 hour forced downtime where your only option to play is expensive replay costs that escalate, putting the breaks on you unless you're willing to spend $100 a month on crystals to replay levels they've played hundreds of times.
I'd say open up the level cap to like 150 and equally for gear and all. I'm not so worried about their being enough characters, I think what we have is fine and if they do that slowly, it doesn't bother me.
Everything should be farmable though, with IAP now becoming the fast upgrade track where you can buy shards, mats and parts if you are the impatient type, making it possible for the F2P player to have any team with the P2W players advantage being only the speed of not having to waste time farming, which is how IAP is supposed to work, simply cater to a customer's impatience.
What the current strategy did was create a system of elitism, where paying customers have access to a handful of the most powerful team possibilities, making anyone who doesn't do similarly to feel as if they can never win or be successful. I'm sure free players will come up with synergies that will be challenging but it's the message. The game could be so much better and challenging, and that will create longevity..
Post edited by ioniancat21 on
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Once you get in the top 10 for PVP it's pretty easy to keep going without paying additional money. I dropped $100 on one pack and that was it. I'll never put another dime into the game. I got the barris pack as her heal and buff was OP. But then they decided to nerf her. I'm suspecting they'll do that whenever they release new characters. Release them as OP so that people are incentivized to buy them then later on nerf them just before they release the next wave of new characters.
Kabooms Uprising is actually not as bad as I'd thought. I'm spending more time lately playing that.
EA, come closer and I'll whisper a little secret in your ear: THERE ARE OTHER STAR WARS GAMES OUT THERE FOR MOBILE!!
The Barris nerf is just the tip of the iceberg if I may call it. The bigger picture was Jedis getting nerfed just a month into the game. 1 patch and the meta is turned upside down, ENTIRELY.
I understand making all heroes viable and it's true the Jedi were owning. But if the game is made FRESH by the above way, i.e. patches coming out once per month and each flipping the meta.....I think even if I had $1k I wouldn't dare buy any packs.
After all next month my 6* kylo ren's gonna be screwed......(just saying don't have him yet LOL)
I can get 5 cases of persimmons from isreal for that price. And you know what they say about.. well you know.
Have you ever written software before? Ever debugged it? The game material that you're paying for may be basically free to CG, but the game itself takes a ton of man hours to get to a state that is remotely playable. Therefore, it's disingenuous to say that the thing you're paying for is next to free, when the thing you're really paying for is the salaries of the men and women responsible for creating the content in the first place.
I work in the information technology field and people who work in the field can command good salaries but there also is a budget and a price target that the average consumer can afford. Having upgrade packs cost $100, this is not in line with the budget of your customers, no way even close. If you're project's expenses are so high that the costs have to be this high to make money, something is definitely wrong...
Because the AI is poor, anyone can beat anyone, and the PvP system comes down to who can arrange their lives around 5:30 to 6 pm. There's also an insane amount of luck involved, because if someone decides to attack you at the wrong time then you are hosed, versus if they decide someone else.
Before any real assessment can be made on the long-term viability of the game, we need to see what they have planned for new game modes. This I am hoping is just the start.
So by "I work in IT" what does that mean? Do you code? QA? Are you a project manager? Are you a receptionist at an office that has computers in it?
I don't think the project's costs have anything to do with the fact that we got $100 character packs. I think that's simple market economics. Clearly they were bought, because I saw teams with Kylo/Sid/Dooku immediately after they were released.
After the initial cost to produce it the first time. How often do you need to go back and recode it? There is little man labor and material cost from then on. The price is extreme, in game material should barely cost more than $5 when thats a more easily accessible number for thousands more playing.
And yea I get it, most of the money in p2w games come from whales, and they want to capitalize on this, but its so overpriced its almost robbery. I still feel that they could earn more money if they offered $5 bundles more often than $100, due to the greater volumes of players with more money closer to $5 laying around to spend on games like this instead of $100. Im no expert in gaming economics but it just seems to be common sense.
Here's someone who gets it...
I have to agree. I destroyed a guy in arena, talking all 5 squad left at 75% or more health in likle 1:30. He turned around and attacked me back based on the FR and the fact we reswapped positions beat me. I attacked him back, same result I destroyed him. Shows the flaw in the system.
First off, I hire consultants for many tasks. When big companies like EA hire programmers, they do what most do, the outsource to India where programmers earn $20 a week. Even if they hired American, programmers typically earn $40K-$120K and more a year so even at that price, $100 packs are still outrageous.
Second, I know they sold those TFA packs, but not nearly as many as they needed to surely. I went to Google Play and as of today, they have over 1 million downloads. Out of all customers, how many % of people had $100 for characters they still would have to upgrade?? I would doubt that even 30K were sold, or 3% of customers bought. Is this a "home run" for EA??
You can tell people area spending , the Bariss nerf outrage, the number of Kylo RENs out there in pvp now with purple gear! Tells you that people are spending in...
But to let you think of something about free games....
If you have 10 programmers who make 50k that's 500,000.00 a yr not counting benefits, taxes, building expense , vacation hours, insurance , then admins , producer, pr, executive at the studio so add another 250,000.00 and this is low end numbers , so the game needs to make about 1.5 million to be profitable and we are not even counting development time equipment server cost, bandwidth credit card processing fee , Apple Store percentage of your app purchases In game, etc
So really you need 2million to be able to support the staff .... And In game ea ads make no money for cg, so have no impact on the bottom line that's just ea making money for another studio but it's looked at as good but not for cg per say or the men and women working there
So needs about 250k a month from users to be productive , now you can do the math but no pay is not great for them and then you need more than 5/math from all or you have to pander to whales
Not sure this is all swgoh relatived as this is really money and industry, but this game is made by people who have families to support so it's not free to make and certainly they are not paid top end money or this would cost even more to support it, and we can all give them co structure ideas about how to improve realize when people say EA this game is not made by EA it's made by capital games studio Sacramento by rather small team...
Oh stop crying, they refunded everyone what she was
Oh stop crying. You forgot the fact that the $99 Character had $50 worth of gems, 4* Barris, 3* Asohka, night sister initiate, about 130 character shards, and 500,000 credits. They refunded people for the Barris nerfed 500 gems. Which is about $5 worth. Sure that's not alot but you still have a great healer.... she's just not the best anymore.
Noone notices that Elder Ewok is the best healer at this point. BTW
I've beaten every team in the top 20 at least once and my squad was only about 15K - 17K
I have been in first place the last 5 out of 7 times. Mainly because before the tfa movie patch, 10th place gave you 3 rewards which was more than 1st place. But they fixed it. Man I miss that bug.