For those complaining about the Premium Shop

[MC7]

1st. It's Gameloft
2nd. This is a F2P game and not a full premium release. You're paying to beta test their game before the full F2P release.
3rd. It's Disney

[Mr. Bufferlow]

I just finished the latest Starpath. I should have not paid moonstones to unlock the extra three tasks...but still ended up gaining 90 moonstones at the end of the event. I would have had more if I had not unlocked the extra three tasks. Lessons learned.

Other then the palace, that kind of looked cool, I never saw anything in the shop that even remotely interested me- at least not for paying real money. I can live without the palace since we already have a nice castle in the valley.

Hard to gauge how many players there are over the entire DDV landscape, but based on Steam Charts, they will need a lot of moonstone purchases to sustain the game. 14000+ have played but only about 8,000+ are still playing.

I am guessing Gameloft has projections on compensation that point to the scheme being profitable, but I would be sweating based on my limited knowledge. I guess they will likely have sales of moonstones and discount periods for items so the current prices are not locked in stone.

Fortunately for me, I have no interest in collecting all that stuff, so they are going to have to make it pretty cheap before I would be a buyer. If I could pick up all the items offered in a year for $40 or less, I might consider getting on board.

As it stands, I don't even care about the stuff I buy at Scrooge's store. I mainly buy it all just to keep my balance from getting insanely large. Over $6M currently. Got to quit planting pumpkins.

[RedLouis_NL]

Originally posted by Mr. Bufferlow:

I just finished the latest Starpath. I should have not paid moonstones to unlock the extra three tasks...but still ended up gaining 90 moonstones at the end of the event. I would have had more if I had not unlocked the extra three tasks. Lessons learned.

No, you wouldn't have more. You need to unlock the premium path to get to the last page. You need to buy all items with tokens before you get to the final page. The premium doesn't unlock only the three extra tasks, it also unlocks the premium rewards. You can't get all the rewards without Premium. It is even better to get the extra tokens from the more expensive starpath or get 100 tokens with discount(if that's an option). You can make a bit profit if you did all the tasks and unlocked all the items and return the tokens to moonstones again.

[Annahri]

Originally posted by Mr. Bufferlow:

Hard to gauge how many players there are over the entire DDV landscape, but based on Steam Charts, they will need a lot of moonstone purchases to sustain the game. 14000+ have played but only about 8,000+ are still playing.

I started playing the game again for the starpath and new quests. But I'm done with that now. My valley is decorated, I have chests filled with items for the future and Scrooge's shop only shows stuff I already have. This doesn't leave me with a lot of incentive to play.
It makes me wonder how other people who've been playing for a while feel.

And OP, you're very right. It's just that in this economy more and more people will notice what you're trying to point out. And I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing that people are complaining. I know it's unlikely, but it does make me hope companies like these start to read the room a bit more.

[Mr. Alan Wake...]

The problem is when a F2P game requires hundreds of dollars to give you the full content.
To me people paying 80$ for the premium edition should have paid enough to get access to full content. That is all.
Here you have to pay extra 25$ per week, this is preposterous and insulting.
This is a very small game, it has not a lot of levels, biomes or anything that have the rights to ask hundreds of dollars more.
Here i paid 80$ for a very small game and i don't even have all of it. Lmao.

[Chip]

You do not need to pay for anything? The premium shop items are completely optional and do not count towards the collection total. It may currently show it as such but that is a bug they said they are to fix.

[Mr. Bufferlow]

Originally posted by Mr. Alan Wake...:

The problem is when a F2P game requires hundreds of dollars to give you the full content.
To me people paying 80$ for the premium edition should have paid enough to get access to full content. That is all.
Here you have to pay extra 25$ per week, this is preposterous and insulting.
This is a very small game, it has not a lot of levels, biomes or anything that have the rights to ask hundreds of dollars more.
Here i paid 80$ for a very small game and i don't even have all of it. Lmao.

The bottom line is the developers need to pay the bills (and hopefully generate a reasonable profit). They had the option of just charging $60 for the game, and making DLC packs of the stuff they are selling in the shop. They picked the F2P option.

In some ways, it is better for those of us with a little self control and have no problem walking away from a premium item that has nothing to do with game play. The first option could end up forcing me to pay for the DLC since it would like be package as a new character, related quest, and premium items.

I guess if you can't exist without all the collectables, option 1 would seem better....maybe. I think then people would be complaining that the DLC is too expensive.

[MadDawg2552]

Originally posted by Mr. Bufferlow:

The bottom line is the developers need to pay the bills (and hopefully generate a reasonable profit). They had the option of just charging $60 for the game, and making DLC packs of the stuff they are selling in the shop. They picked the F2P option.

How did MMOs make a profit only charging $15 per month when Gameloft needs to charge $100 per month to pay the bills?

If ESO can live on $15, so can Gameloft.

[Mr. Bufferlow]

Originally posted by MadDawg2552:

Originally posted by Mr. Bufferlow:

The bottom line is the developers need to pay the bills (and hopefully generate a reasonable profit). They had the option of just charging $60 for the game, and making DLC packs of the stuff they are selling in the shop. They picked the F2P option.

How did MMOs make a profit only charging $15 per month when Gameloft needs to charge $100 per month to pay the bills?

If ESO can live on $15, so can Gameloft.

Population of players and churn of players? Most MMOs do not suffer from a lack of players (at least until they get old and some new MMO steals them away. There is also a lot of churn where player 1 gets Friend B to join up so they can play together. So forth and so on...

On it's best day, DDV had a little over 16,000 players on Steam so far. Maybe that will change if they get MP installed...but this is really not a great game for mass counts of players. I would be surprised if the DDV MP is much more then 1 to 3 players can join up in a lobby and travel to each other's valleys. Not really the kind of activity that gets thousands of players onboard for regular sessions.

[MadDawg2552]

Originally posted by Mr. Bufferlow:

...but this is really not a great game for mass counts of players.

It doesn't have a mass amount of content, either. Charging 10x what an MMO costs and only delivering 1% of the content is a good way to keep the player counts down.

[Kitty]

F2P game for 60 euro o.O Wow..

[Ryuukaze]

Originally posted by Kitty:

F2P game for 60 euro o.O Wow..

No, you bought 60 euros worth of in-game currency, and doing so gave you the ability to play it early.

If you had waited for the full release, you could have just played for free, without buying any currency.

[Koro]

I'm assuming in this instant F2P means "Fee 2 Pay", cos we 'have' in fact paid to play this. I realise it won't be that way later, but this game is not free to play yet. This makes the extra money being charged 'much' worse

[SirKingJof]

Originally posted by TorqueoZ?:

I'm assuming in this instant F2P means "Fee 2 Pay", cos we 'have' in fact paid to play this. I realise it won't be that way later, but this game is not free to play yet. This makes the extra money being charged 'much' worse

You've misunderstood what you've paid for if you believe this. You were given 8000 moonstones with the basic version, i very much doubt they will be given when the game becomes free in that volume.
Buying the moonstones in game costs $20 for 5500 moonstones, the base cost of the game is $30, basically the same amount as buying 8000 moonstones in game.
What you have bought is premium currency and early access to the game to spend it, exactly what was advertised.

The game was always advertised as having a premium cosmetic store and that it would be using that as it's funding model. If you don't want to pay anything all you need is patience for the f2p release and the self control to resist cosmetic items that in no way are needed to play the game and fully complete it's story.