Great to see we have an expert in F2P games market! Me myself I don't claim such merits, however I have been playing pretty much all types of games (single player,multiplayer, on both PC and consoles) for more than 20 years now while paying close attention to the gaming industry as a whole. And no, I haven't been born 21 years ago :< But, to keep it short as well:
I've been playing since I was 10, my dad and uncle were KR RPGs addicts who got me hooked as well ever since I was a kid. I started spending a lot of money and investing a lot of time during my teenage years and in 13+ years I've spent more than 15,000€, most definitely. Regardless, this is not a battle between experience on the matter, this is a discussion and thus opinions should be shared. That being said, I don't claim to be an expert, but I'm definitely an heavy and avid consumer, which is fairly important considering I tend not to buy anything unworthy of its price; I'm also being very objective when I say understanding a company's Business Plan is very important. Game Forge sucks, pretty much, you could say it's common knowledge, but the actual pricing of Premium Content in Soul Worker is not bad by all means if you take into account inflation on the actual Game Market due to Premium Content resellers
- F2P market generates revenue from "Whales" and "Casual players". If the "semi-hardcore" and "hardcore" player categories start having concerns, then Casuals are already in danger. Will whales be able to sustain the game indefinitely? Time will tell.
That's the point you don't need to sustain the game indefinitely. You need to feed those whales for as long as you can until you have new food to give them so they don't get tired of what you've been giving them, but this is also an entirely different topic since those who do spend money on the game and have absolutely zero issues with the prices are going to purchase non-stop. What I've been trying to say instead is that if you compare the 20€ outfits in SW to the 35€ ones in Black Desert, then GameForge is just utterly scamming people if you just judge by numbers and models, BUT if you take into account that a lot of people would start reselling those items, then the price is sort of justified. A lot of Gold Sellers would start investing into reselling Premium Content and would start manipulating the market prices in a way that favors their change rates.
As long as there is the option of crafting your own fashion stuff and that some basic fashion items are given out for free, then the entire talk about Cash Shop prices is just a huge helpless fuss in my opinion. Also, if you think the free items are bad, well, either you should complain with the Devs and the actual designers or with Game Forge for picking bad starting outfits (I'm unsure of what KR/JP have and if they have it at all), but even in that case, why would they ever provide better looking items for free? That's so against their own business.
Also I'd like to add that unlike PhoenixShi said:
Although in C9, outside of maybe the odd exception, all costume sets have a cost of just shy of $7 US, as opposed to the about $20-$50 US price tag here, with most being in the around $30-$50 US range
European players like myself actually have very different rates because some costumes are sitting on a 12€ prize (14$~) whilst the most expensive ones are around 20€.
- Last thing: Players who reach max level have a considerable chance to return on new content release. Players who don't? Not very likely. And this is a proven thing in online communities.
In fact, you don't consider players not reaching end game content dedicated players, you call them casual players and casual players provide absolutely ZERO income.
