Prices are toooooo high

[Liaat]

I want to support the game, but, hell! the prices are too high to only give you temporal buffs. Even the pets, the most solid buy is expensive as ♥♥♥♥. I saw fallout DLCs give you more content with similar prices, or i can buy entire games with the price of the gender change, or an AAA with the 3 pets pack. Seriously guys, if you low the pricing you will recive a better income.

[Liaat]

This is not Kongregate guys.

[best bulliet target]

yet i've spent more time in this game then most triple A. but true i've spent the cash i wanted to on this game to give my surport but i don´t wanna spend more since i find nothing of value to receive.

[Tontus314a]

While I agree, I do wonder if there are enough people out there that spend enough money to make it worth it to keep the prices where they are. If they are making enough money as is, then there is no reason to lower them for those of us with a better sense of value.

[Ryu82]

Sorry for the prices, but they are about the same as in Kongregate and didn't change for almost two years now. Some people spent a bit on this game and if I would go and make the prices much cheaper now, it would be really unfailr to them.
If a game is on multiple platforms like Kong and Steam, I can't really make them cheaper for one plattform than on another. That would be unfair for the more expensive plattform.
The average Steam player also spends 50% more than the average Kong player on this game. So if anything, it would make sense to make the Kong version cheaper than the Steam version.

So I don't really think I can change the prices much anymore. I only can add more stuff in different categories, which I already did with the daily pack. This is a better value than other purchases.

Also you can't compare prices for a free to play game to prices for additional content for paid games. While paid games make money from every player, free to play games only make money from 1-2% of the players. Compared to many other free to play games, I think the prices in this game are about average.

@Tontus314a
That is another reason. If I would make the prices cheaper (like 20-30% of what they are now), I don't think 3-4 times as many players would buy something to make it worth to reduce the prices. From my estimation, maybe twice as many people would buy something which would result in only half of the current income.
I also can see that a bit from the daily packs. They are much cheaper compared to the god power purchases and they only make up about 5% of the income of the game, while the god power 100 purchase makes more than 50% of the income.

[Liaat]

But even in the freemiun style, out there exist differents balances between the prices and the content it provides. This game are far on the expensive extreme.

When i wrote that line i thought about the process of lowering the prices, if you have the ability to provide to the old economic supporters of the game aditional stuf, you can easily lower the prices. But i dunno if kong can give you that possibility.

To make a test, you can launch a new stuff with a low price and provide a small but permanently bonus.

[Ryu82]

@Liaat,
Well I played a lot of freemium mobile games. Most of them have gatchas where you spend hundreds of dollars at average to get the new gatcha you want. I would say that is much more pricy than the stuff in my game and also more luck dependend.

I also made the test a bit with the pet token. The first cheap token makes slightly more income than the higher priced ones after that first one on Steam and quite a bit less than the higher priced ones in Kong. So it might have been worth it to add the cheap token, but maybe not. I'm not really sure.

But well you could suggest something new permanent which is not too op. I'm open to suggestions and might add it, if I think it is good, but chances are, I won't add that.

[Liaat]

But you arent on mobile, you are on PC. I compared the prices not with candy crash, but Star Trek Online, Warframe, World of... I know that these games are a lot different to your game and have a bigger public.

But, perhaps, "Godly push", increase your multiplier by a X%. Stackable. 1$/€ each. Like the 50 GP x2 bonus.
"Godly train" Reduce the cap of all physcal and skills by X clones.
"Divine Might" Reduce the time needed on training might by X%.
"Wonderfull Workforce" Increase the % on create &/or monuments.

Stuff like that.

[Monpad]

What would people even be interested in buying? The only one I'm tempted by is refrigerator (which I don't actually remember noticing until today!). Pet tokens might be nice but I wouldn't feel they're worth buying. Everything else is too temporary to tempt me.

Not that I'm saying they're bad - if they earn Ryu82 money then its worth it I guess!

[Liaat]

I make these examples cause i dont think a lot about it. Im sure that the creator would make better stuff because he knows a lot more his game.

[roboticaust]

I agree, that fridge one is definitely tempting, but I generally find myself using up all my bought food easily. Not so sure about pet tokens as I've seen them pop out of lucky draw every so often. If anything, the lucky draw increase trumps tokens due to the nature of them being acquirable there along with a few other goodies.

Honestly, I rather like the fact that the purchases aren't overpowered paid to win type stuff. Surely they cut down time but they in no way circumnavigate or give a paying player a distinct edge a free player can't get to naturally. This feels good to me. Ryu clearly drew the line that this isn't pay2win or a money grab, but rather he appreciates any purchases made. That stance says a lot.

On the topic of coming up with potential new ones, I wouldn't mind one aimed at late game players that rebirths all killed gods with their rewards intact. Maybe something like usable once a run or once every X days. Once you hit a certain point in the game, you just stop caring about refresh and plow away at ub/ubv2s. Would be kind of fun to just refresh and pop a few extra p.baals for a fresh intake of food on those long-winded runs.

I also really liked the suggestion above of adding X amount of skill usage to all skill trainings to lower them a bit. This could work with the above suggestion but aimed at early to midgame players. However, what would be a good amount of usage and at what pricepoint? That's kind of the conundrum on that one. You wouldn't want it to lower all the clone training caps by say 5k for $2, or lower them all by 1 clone for $15. Hard to really put a price on something that generally comes naturally and degrades in value as more and more trainings hit 1 clone cap.

[muljostpho]

The daily packs are pretty nice. They were added not too long after I started playing, and before their release I would look over the store options and just think "yeah, I'm never paying for any of that at those prices (except maybe the cheaper pet token)".

But the daily packs have amazing value compared to those other purchases. 60 god power and 30 lucky draws... for the same cost as 10 lucky draws or a bit less than the same cost as 25 god power. The separate purchases that you'd have to make to buy a total of 60 god power and 30 lucky draws directly adds up to 5 or 6 times the price of the set of 30 daily packs. The catch is just that to get this value your payoff is drawn out over quite a bit of time (24 hour lockout timer each time you open a daily pack) instead of having the instant gratification that the other purchases would get you.

[TheVoluntaryist]

I bought some things as a support of the developers, but honestly, every single thing I've purchased has felt not worth it afterwards. $$$ for temporary buffs, even if they're just for the whole rebirth, just make me want to not rebirth for longer or else I'll feel like I'm not maximizing my money's worth. So, the purchases basically.. actually slow down your progress unless you just want to burn money. If the prices were brought down, not only would I spend more, but I don't think those already willing to spend money would feel "insulted". That's bunk reasoning. They'd probably be relieved and actually more likely to make in game purchases more often, which would mean more money in the long run.

[CherryKiss]

While I understand the reasoning behind not wanting to upset people who have already spent money on the game, I don't think the argument is sound. It is normal in gaming for prices to decline. The benefit of purchasing early, is that you get the benefits of that purchase early. People who have spent money are getting the benefits of that spending now, and if prices go down, they've still had that benefit of usage early on, that the people buying for less, later, don't have.

Example, if I bought a pet token at $15 (I think that is the full price? not checking) then I get to use that pet right away. If a few weeks down the way, the pet token only costs $10, then I've essentially paid $5 to get to use the pet early, for those few weeks.

I'm not trying to pass judgement on whether stuff is too expensive (I think it is, but that's just an opinion) and I'm not trying to tell anyone the prices SHOULD be lowered, but I am saying the argument about upsetting former buyers isn't really a good argument for keeping the prices the same.

[ArtyD42]

Originally posted by CherryKiss:

While I understand the reasoning behind not wanting to upset people who have already spent money on the game, I don't think the argument is sound. It is normal in gaming for prices to decline. The benefit of purchasing early, is that you get the benefits of that purchase early. People who have spent money are getting the benefits of that spending now, and if prices go down, they've still had that benefit of usage early on, that the people buying for less, later, don't have.

Example, if I bought a pet token at $15 (I think that is the full price? not checking) then I get to use that pet right away. If a few weeks down the way, the pet token only costs $10, then I've essentially paid $5 to get to use the pet early, for those few weeks.

I'm not trying to pass judgement on whether stuff is too expensive (I think it is, but that's just an opinion) and I'm not trying to tell anyone the prices SHOULD be lowered, but I am saying the argument about upsetting former buyers isn't really a good argument for keeping the prices the same.

Well here's the negative direct link to your hypothetical. Say the pet token is sold at $15 (close enough anyway) the question of how much is a transaction fee comes into play. Some of this is automatically taken by the host (kong/steam) and the rest is transfered over thru whatever payment format happens to be given. The transaction fee is then added onto that. If lowering from $15 to $10 makes profit = 0 or less then there never will be reason to do this.

This entire argument is a moot point though due to the fact that you can get pet tokens thru daily draw, earn the majority of them up to turtle (please earn the turtle please earn the turtle) and a free token can be earned also thru a very simple challenge. (disclaimer: this is Arty people, try to remember that)

[Ryu82]

@CherryKiss

While my reasoning to not upset people who already spend something was not very good (although it is still a valid reason as I heard that reason from some people who bought something and I also noticed a lot of complains from people in other games where something like that happened), it is also not normal that prices decline in a game.

Usually it is like this: If the game is sucessful and people buy enough, the prices stay or get more expensive (inflation and stuff).
If the game does not well and people don't buy anything, prices will become cheaper.
Full price games usually get cheaper after a few weeks, because 80-90% of the copies are sold within the first weeks and after that, people might only buy it at a (heavy) discount. There are always some exceptions on this, though.

As for the itrtg-ingame purchases, I don't think it does that bad. Compared to some other (idle) games it does good and I think above average. The games who make more are usually games with a much bigger userbase like Clicker Heroes or Adventure Capitalist. Itrtg would never even make 10% of what they make, but I also develop it alone and the graphics are bad compared to them, which makes that kind of expected.
I read a statistik a year ago with some revenue / user info for Ad Cap and Clicker Heroes in Kong. Itrtg made about 3 x more each user than Ad Cap did (it had 20-30 times as many users, though), and about the same each user in Clicker Heroes. That probably changed a lot in the mean time, but it still says that the pricing in itrtg might be right.

Imo, the chances are higher, that it makes less, than it makes more, if I would reduce the prices.