Massively Speaking Episode 90: Allods Online's cash shop interview

There are still plenty of folks playing Allods, including myself.. I'm enjoying the hell out of it.

I'm happy to hear that they're looking into changing the prices.. they totally made a goof up and they've admitted it. It doesn't sound like they knew so many people were going to be so passionate about the game.

If I stop having fun or I think the cash shop prices are too high, I'll just move on. Big deal.. so I'll waste my time playing another game.

1) Agreed.
2) Wrong! He says that's how they originally priced the game (as if it were similar to their existing games). He even says at the end that this was the mistake that they made with the original pricing
3) Its 1.35/hour to play at end game. This is how it is currently, he doesn't say it right away but he does say it will be evaluated downwards.
4) Meh.
5) He actually said that he thought the FoD penalty was too high, but he has to get any changes from the developer because he is just at the publisher.

Try listening to the whole thing next time kk?

I meant to add to my last post: Gpotato need to understand that 'value' has to run both ways. You can't just say 'we must get investement $ value from our players to ensure we break even'. That clearly must be an aim. Of course it does. But their economics are seriously flawed given what conclusion that has led them to - "only our paying players matter to our bottom line, and since there won't be many of them, we're going to treat them like dirt". Nice one, that'll keep those minority paying players in the game, right? *facepalm*

This is not the luxury fashion market, with only a few pretentious and flamboyant designers able to charge thousands for a single item of clothing to keep the obsessive and very rich fashionistas in the tabloids. Its the MMO market. Its flooded and is, as the exec was saying, full of 'the masses'. The masses won't put up with that crap, and they know when they're getting a raw deal. Your players must perceive value in the purchases themselves - the rest of the content pretty much doesn't matter if people feel ripped off. Look at our lovely safari park! Its even better than the actual serengetti in Africa! It has a pushmepullme and a gryphon in it! No-one else have those, do they? I can see you're drooling to get in, so in you come! Now, all you have to do is cut off your little finger to stay, that's ok, right? Hey! Where are you going?

Give the players value for money, and more of them will spend that money. I spend money in DDO. I was spending, in fact, more than a subscription - so I subscribed. Now Turbine have guaranteed income from me, and I have the best value for my buck. If I let my subs lapse, I will be buying more stuff from their store, because the content is worth it. But I'm not buying uber-buffs, and I'm especially not buying buffs whose purpose is are pretty much solely anti-penalising. I wouldn't. I'd just quit playing, because I don't appreciate being blackmailed.

Honestly, I wouldn't recommend Aion to anyone.
I'll admit I was excited when I first heard about it and bought the preorder straight off of steam. I received my beta key and when I logged into the game I was blown away. Aion is one of the most beautiful mmos ever, the entire game world is vibrant and epic. Nothing beats that first time in the Abyss where your character spreads their wings and soars into the unknown.
Then the day of release came and with it came queues that lasted hours, a horde of goldsellers and also botters. NCsoft eventually fixedthe queues and took action against goldsellers and botters but it took a very long time to get them to take it seriously. The support in the game was lacking on release they had one, yes ONE global community rep, and if at any time you need help you are only able to submit a help ticket and wait until a certain hour during the week where there was support.
Aion left a very sour taste in the mouth, it had the potential to be one of the greatest mmos but NCsoft has dissuaded me from resubbing with their apathetic support.

Hello, first time "F2P" long time "Subscription" :-) First i would like to say this game is pure gold. I think most of us know this. But coming from some of the heavy weight games i never thought i would get into a "F2P" game. They always seemed cheesy or just not my style. Then i played this game and it was like an answer to my prayers. It was a nice breath of fresh air. I almost wish they would just change the game to a sub based game. With that being said if there going to charge for death, I'm fine with that but it has to be affordable. I know there is quests to get your "Perfumes" later on and that may be fine, but they shouldn't base there cash shop ones with that information. I mean if you need to bring the cost down and either lower the amount you get from the quest or get rid of it all together, then be my guest. With that being said, (i doubt they will even read this) I'm a big fan of offering a "Hybrid" of either buying your perfumes and such though the CS or just offing a monthly fee for the more hard core. I think i heard the guy in the interview say something about being able to purchase a perfume that last a month. Now something like that would be absolutely awesome, I'm down for that. And I'm still willing to buy stuff like mounts and bags etc. even with a monthly fee. Well that's my opinion and I'm sure someone else has said the same thing before but i just wanted to express my feelings. I know the guy said they are trying to price the game on being able to pay the bills with just a few wealthy peeps. But they have to understand that this is one of the first times a F2P game has that chance to seize a good chunk of the Subscription market and they need to market accordingly.

The chance that the cash shop prices were a "goof-up" or "mistake" is total BS. They tried going high first to see if people would bite (and they are going to keep it high while they "evaluate things" and "work on it") to see how many people bite, then they will lower the price just enough if not enough people are buying, to where they will buy. Similar to when you go and buy a car really.

FoD is getting longer with the new RU patch, so that's only going to get worse, and mob difficulty is being increased as well which will increase the amount of deaths, and therefore, cash shop items to be bought.

Don't kid yourself, this game is being tailored to make money, because it is F2P. That's why P2P is the route to go, yeah you pay 15 dollars a month, or less, but the game itself is made to be fun and addicting, not to make you buy cash shop items..................................except for the new trend to have both p2p and f2p features in mmos. Ugh.

uninstalled.. game was fun but not gonna be scammed like that .... fuck gpotato .. F2P my ass

Just vote with your wallets, people. Once you spend even a dollar in their cash shop all your tl;dr's mean nothing.

Did the GPotato guy say "nitch"? And why is almost every statement inflected like a question?

May be F2P now means "Force to Pay"?

As long as the cash shop items are essential to enjoying the game (FoD/perfume, mount speed, etc) it's just not going to be compelling to this market. No matter how fun the game is to the majority of people that give it a try. It's nice to see new comers trying to engage the market in different ways. But this approach, it flies in the face of common sense.

There arefour models that have proven to be successful in the West: subscription, free to play but driven by box sells and expansions (Guildwars), free to play with micro transaction-content and premium services (DDO), and free to play with a very deep and extensive cash shop with truly interactive items (Free Realms). Trying to introduce the idea of essentially paying-per-hour by driving core gameplay around your cash shop will not work. Period. I will enjoy watching them fail if they think Western MMO players are that stupid.

The interview didn't impress me at all. It seemed like the guy was doing desperate damage control while not promising anything other than a price decrease at some point and he sounded shaky about even that.

Since this Allods item store debacle hit I've gotten back into playing DDO. The Allods team should really steal a page out of the DDO item shop book if they want to turn this disaster around.

I can just say one thing

Two days ago you could not even target a mob, there were hundreds of players everywhere.

Today seems like at least 2/3 are gone.

In my guild ,that has over 80 people. All I can hear yesterday was: "I am uninstalling" , "I lost all will to play this" , "Going back to DDO"


Basically this was a huge huge hit to Allods reputation. Even if they fix things, they easily lost 30% players forever.

But I suspect they do not really want to change prices or revenue model.
They are determined to do this. And if they were not , they wouldnt risk such bad reputation fallout.

Bottom line is

No mater what price. There will always be suckers willing to pay. Thats a fact.

I think G-potato are counting on those.

Why don't they just move to a subscription model with a cash shop thats really cheap.....

Remove the FOD crap and just keep the potions, outfits and mounts in the cash shop

That way they have a steady income supplemented by spikes in income from the cash shop

Are they really this self-destructive that they even THINK that a few people will remain to pay lots of money when the game has become a ghost town because the majority who can't pay have left

The stupidity of these companies just leaves me stunned in amazement and who the hell is running them....

Go to subscription, people will pay you will make money and not only that you will be able to plan your costings around a more reliable monthly return

So stupid doing a cash shop for such a polished game