That is MY Job Crusader Karukus: To find a way to make the Game profitable WHILE respecting you. Stéphanie, Your Senior Producer, is Queen of managing a budget and maximizing it. Dont Expect TONS of CGI pre-render cinematic, HUGE expensive costume and booth for E3 or anything that does not make you playtime more fun. ALL of our $ is put in the Game. And...... The No marketing Firewall between Devs and Fans.... has some saving attached to it as well!! ;-) In BETA signup, we have achieved results that most studio would have paid a LOT of marketing cash to achieve.... I am yet to spend 1$ in standard publicity and banners. Our most expensive marketing expense was the PAX ARG that cost us 5k$ and the team and I not sleeping for 2 days!!! but all worth it!! Dont worry (yet!!) on us making money or not. Just tell us what is your prefered model. We are NOT promising that it will be it as is but we will try to get as close as possible to the fans view of a respectfull business model while making sure the Game is profitable in a long terms approach. Miguel
Guild wars 2 has done buy to play with visual cosmetics, and no free to play whatsoever, so on that front I'd say that it could easily be done. As for hurting gameplay, I'd argue the contrary. If anything it helps gameplay and again, if you played GW2 at all, you'd know that it's anything short of hurting gameplay, granted at least every month there's an entirely new addition to the game.
I want to know this because game industry (or entertainment industry) has evolved a lot but sometimes good games die. I saw this happen over the two decades many times. I don't want this to happen but if we look at it from different point of view. Wh40k fans love customization after the founding release studio can start to make cosmetic stuff that will help out the financial situation a lot. I am not even bothering with race packs. I will think them as 1 year down the line. I just wanna know if race content packs+cosmetic packs can sustain the game if it does. This will grow with solid fan base and low rate of turn over which many new Online games can't even come close to. (Expect a new game crash because everyone churning out crappy F2P hoping to score the new LoL and DoTa version in FPS form. Jesus christ..nobody learned anything from console crash i guess) Game has a built in trial mode which makes it awesome for Free to play guys and who just want to see whats going on. I am gonna play some generic FPS'es till 2015 but i hope EC makes it. I have couple of games that i wanna play this is the third out of three, i dont have too many hopes left. I don't think i can handle seeing one of my dreams crashed. (DoW2 Retribution, Thaks THQ did you QA the game before you even release it ?!) Edit: " Dont Expect TONS of CGI pre-render cinematic, HUGE expensive costume and booth for E3 or anything that does not make you playtime more fun. ALL of our $ is put in the Game." Blizzard have been doing this "Cinematic intro's" and "Extreme convention and cosplay contests" for a decade now (or close to it ?) . We can see where it lead to them, a bleeding out game, 2 destroyed franchises, one of them had a promising e-sports circuit, one of them had millions of hardcore fans. We don't need that stuff,i can assure you.
I like the B2p model. Will gladly pay for updates of content, cosmetic additions (for character and room in ship) and also extra races. Micro transactions to make a character better than another in game, as many have already stated, is not what I believe in. I spend extra cash in swtor, TSW and lotro on cosmetics and updates only
I understand the point of profit and so forth. But doing micro transactions for game changing items will take away from the core of the game. I Know a lot of people would rather go to some in game store then put the time in to earn that shinny new power ax. But really whats the hook? Whats going to keep me playing and not get board if I cant get anything for my time?
This might sound strange, but what do you think about 'limited production' aesthetics? Maybe only 1000 or less of certain gear permutations that would really make it so that your character is distinct (could be chapter specific). I'm sure you guys have in mind different Ork faces, and different space marine helmets to help people create distinct characters. I like the idea of having the in game shop as being this place where you can get unique pieces that not many other players will have. Unfortunately, limited production has an obvious downside, but I think this would be a neat concept. I would just like to echo what so many have said: Do not provide players with a way to buy themselves into the top. This is 40k, may the best warriors win.
This right here. I'd much much rather pay a monthly fee to support current operations, than to have a bunch of stuff that is virtually forced to buy to keep everything going. Expansions shouldn't be supported by the sub, unless they are free as well, the cost of development should be included in the expansion cost. So, yeah, I'd much rather have a sub, with any micro-transactions going towards making more cosmetic items/free content, the daily operations being paid by the sub, and expansions being paid for on a buy-it-once format. This keeps the subscription reasonable, the cash shop doesn't interfere with the core experience (such as developers deciding to spend $ to get a new space wolves chainsword developed instead of fixing a known bug because the chainsword is going in the cash shop and is expected to generate revenue, but fixing the bug won't do anything but fix the bug), and expansions can be fully developed as well. The whole F2P/B2P with micro-transactions is, IMO, a mistake. I like the idea of F2P ork-boyz (though really this could and maybe should be expanded to every faction eventually), but I'd still rather have a subscription than have the developers trying to figure out what spiffy new thing they are going to make to earn money to keep the lights on next month.
Mate i think the core deal is that you get armors and functional everything with the package you buy. You get some cosmetic because they made it into foundation release. After that you only get pure cosmetic stuff. Thats it. You are even ground with everyone who plays the game and don't get me wrong but not many MMOFPS left out there that you can get fair fight and you will %70 get a solid team work and people who know their stuff. If you read my previous post about how F2P changed Planetside 2 you can see why i am hyped for this game.
What do you think of a rolling F2P model, where each crusade has 1 F2P faction that changes each new crusade, or each new crusade, you can pick 1 faction to play as for the duration?
