Anniversary Bundle, when and what?

Well it is better than $0 per 12 months.

I can't see many people buying thier boosts otherwise, far, far too overpriced IMO.

It is the same issue SOE and now DBG always seems to find itself in, they don't seem to get their pricing right, and that goes way back to PS1 under the old subscription model (which was double the price it should have been IMO then because it wasn't remotely Everquest 1, but had the same price).

Take implants, they've tuned that to the point that if you want T4 (and for many people even T3) you've largely got to buy them to sustain them, but I suspect their sales of implant "booster packs" are pretty poor never the less and people just aren't sustaining them.

Was the boost overly generous? Maybe, but I suspect it probably still got them more absolute $$$'s in the long-term, where as if they try to sell a few of X-edition weapon reskins for $40 a lot of people just won't bother.

Yeah those poor, poor devs.

Its hard to believe there are people developing games for 50$ / lifetime, that not only are complete at launch but even get patched without breaking balancing or gameplay time and again.

If I knew beforehand they would use the money I threw at them (which is easily quadruple that) to downgrade their Servers to "EA Potato" level and reduce my Tank to a "AP only" breadbox I would have kept my money.

I'm not a big HA player, but if they gave me a Platinum Lasher I might throw my wallet at them.

I'm old school man - I'm from a time when games didn't need patching because they went through extensive testing before release. We then got into the situation where distributed patching became a thing, but with it came the ability to also get extra content for free. I'm thinking particularly of Unreal Tournament here. Fair trade off, as long as the patches were fixing essentials / upgrading anti cheat, rather than fixing sloppiness prior to release.

Now we are just full on micro transaction world and never ending bug fixes, no matter what game. I spent a fortune on this game in the first 18 months with subscription and SC / DBC so I don't see $40 as a big spend once a year now for an anniversary pack provided it has value. I still want to support this game and keep it going in the hope it moves in the right direction, but I'm not going to think twice about keeping my money if I'm getting a raw deal in the process.

Which goes back to my earlier point about how much money it takes to keep the lights on. If DBG needs $60 and you're only going to give them $40, then it might as well be $0. Just imagine trying to pay 70% of your rent and considering it even. Or hell, walk into McDonalds with $2 and order a Big Mac meal - see how far you get.

What is the cutoff? I don't know. But it's apparently more than $40/year, or they'd be happy to sell the boosts again. This is the same thing we saw with the 3x Station Cash. I'm sure it sold more, but apparently somebody in accounting realized that they weren't making enough. And possibly were getting 2x the people to spend 1/3rd the cash.


All of which isn't to say the answer is just to strip items out of the bundle. But if we take Radar's implication that the last Anniversary bundle wasn't worth it at face value, then it falls to DBG to figure out the path: higher price for the same product? less product for the same price? more product and much higher price?

For whatever reason, SOE/DB has given so little attention to the HA Heavy Weapon category. A billions LMGs and launchers, but still the same Jackhammer/Lasher/MCG. If they're not going to ever make new heavy weapons they should at least make AE versions of the current stuff.

They've always been a bit rubbish at estimating their pricing, they massively underestimated EQ1 player playtime (at a time when bandwidth was genuinely expensive), but EQ1 was so popular (for its time) they got away with it.

Not so much with PS1, which was very much overpriced for what you got (it may have been priced at what they needed to run it, but then the reality was it just wasn't viable).

I'm unconvinced any F2P with micro transaction model is actually really sustainable.

The ones that are either have a one-off development cost (TF2) or a relaunch & reset every 18-24 months (BF/CoD) or sell pieces of content as well as shortcuts (MMORPGs).

Honestly if they have to price their boosts as they are to make money, the game was always doomed.




The station cash example is a perfect one, someone probably did have a spreadsheet and thought that if they stopped it they'd make more cash, but didn't factor in if you discourage people, you discourage people from playing, and you'll never make more $$$ with fewer customers - it is IMO an accounting fallacy, where you can't see the $$$ for looking at the $$$.

Maybe I'm wrong and they'll make more money this year than they have before, but I doubt it.

As you pointed out, there's also the possibility they've got the pricing right but have misunderstood their audience.

I put together a post about a year ago looking at how much "PS2" you can get for the cost of an annual CoD reset. Turns out, you can get pretty much all the important stuff for a single empire for ~$120. That makes it really seem like they aren't actually targeting whales like a 'normal' F2P - they're trying to target an older audience (possibly nostalgic for PS1), that focuses on a single empire.

I don't fit in that. I swap between factions daily, so that same bag of loot would be nearly $400. So I bought a lot less than the single faction player simply because I wasn't willing to buy 1-2 weapons out of the "necessary" 3 weapon set.

no, but it does count towards the exceptional directive.

Also when you consider a old style subscription model would be ~$180 a year, but then that got you 100% of the game, or at least access to it, baring direct expansions.

True, though that's the month to month model. I think the All Access is still at $9.99 isn't it?

You're right on the '100% of the game'. My expected cost of $400 isn't so much if you expect a 3+ year subscription, even at $9.99/month. But that means "pre-buying" years of a game that you've only been in for a few weeks. So yeah, that puts people who want all three factions up front outside the pricing of the game. Similar things could be said of heavy vehicle players, as there just isn't as much stuff there to buy. They might be making purchases, but are in the same boat as the $40 boosts: not enough money coming in from Titan AP sales to cover the bills.

It kind of explains why profitable F2P games go after abusive pricing models. Targeting the massive whales (I want to say it was Bobby Kotick that went on record as having spent $5,000 in a month on F2P), or nickel and diming people for small consumables (similar to the 1 hour boosts, I guess). Trying to price something like Planetside 2 means not only getting your cost right, but knowing your audience before the game goes live.

See https://forums.daybreakgames.com/ps2/index.php?threads/anniversary-bundle-contents-announced.235063/

You linked one of my threads...... To another one of my threads? Fourmception.

I know, right?

(But actually I was wondering why you didn´t use this thread as you already had this one on the issue, but I think the new thread title is more "catchy". )

Nice, I think that's seems fair enough.