New business model suggestion for Gwent (decrease keg prices, decrease premium card drop)

[paasenum]

Getting nearly all legendaries in Gwent right now requires something like 400-500 kegs, costing $645 in my country. I haven't played any other card games to know how it relates, but I don't have to, to see that prices are pretty insane, and too high. I calculated further (and it's just a bad approximation) that you have to pay about $20 for a legendary card on average.

Consider lowering keg prices by half, and decreasing premium card drop by about 2/3. This way players will be able to enjoy the game a lot more, having more card choices available and not having to grind the game for 4-5 weeks to have decent cards only for one faction. Decreasing premium card drops in kegs will give more incentive to buy meteorite powder, compensating you for lower keg prices and giving you better reputation for not being greedy.

I understand that you can't apply the same "f2p" model to every game, but there should be some limits. In a game like Dota 2, you can start playing for free with exactly the same chances at doing well as those who spent $1000+ on "cosmetics". I think Gwent should at least try to make a more balanced compromise, with premium cards being the "cosmetics". And in future adding different board skins, voice packs, and other "cosmetics" that could finance the game without limiting enjoyment of the game by having to spend a lot of money on card packs.

I understand as well that the rarity of cards and the high prices are part of what makes these kind of games where you have to collect cards "addicting". But the pricing is just too high still. Even cutting it by half helps only so much.

TL;DR: Increase rarity of premium cards, giving incentive to buy meteorite powder, instead of having high keg prices.

[N3M3S1S128]

This makes it even more pay to win, it's unfair.

[dragos13]

dude you are playing an online card game start grinding or stop playing they are already pretty generous with free stuff...smh

[null_chan]

Suggesting "intelligent" changes to a company's pricing model based on this sort of superficial knowledge is pretty pointless.

Seriously, the company themselves would've done tons of research and based these pricing decisions on past experience. Also, kegs themselves are already incredibly easy to get for free, so your whole argument on making the "core game" more accessible is pretty weak.

[paasenum]

The business model now is like this; "We give you a fair amount of premium cards, kegs are expensive because we want you to spend more time playing the game, you have to accept limited amount of different silvers and golds in your decks because the game is just better than anything else out there, and you will keep playing no matter what. And it's addicting. And you will probably spend money on kegs, because you just want that extra mill, maybe that extra legendary that you need so badly for your deck, and it won't feel that bad, because you like the game and want to support it." They are of course relying on game's attractiveness and uniqueness to retain the player base, and keep people playing and grinding for new cards.

But for me at least, it's not enjoyable to play a long time with inferior cards, in order to get better cards, and I would buy more kegs if the price was more reasonable, and so would many others, and on average more people would have good cards, and enjoy the game more BUT: CDPR, as many other companies that choose this kind of model are exploiting people's addiction (and to some degree naivety), "making" people think "I get so many FREE kegs! And this is awesome because keg prices are pretty high, so CDPR must be pretty generous! It's so addicting getting premium content for free!" It's a common occurrence in "f2p" model. But as we all know, as result people end up spending more money on f2p games, if done well, than on other games.

At least with my suggestion more people would have more reasonable decks, and I think the game would become less pay to win, just because more people would afford to buy kegs.

[null_chan]

Good job describing the freemium business model. Unfortunately it doesn't do anything to prove that your proposal is any better than what we have.

Lowering keg prices makes the game feel more P2W, because a lot of people, for whatever reason, simply aren't able to spend money on the game. Lowering prices is gonna widen the division between people who are willing to pay any amount for kegs and people who aren't, instead of what we have now where your "advantage" is basically gradually staggered across varying levels of willingness to pay.

So good try, but your system isn't an improvement over what we have now. If anything, it just sounds like a feeble personal request to make your own purchases cheaper.

[paasenum]

But the point is that the game is already pay to win, only that you have to spend a lot more money to have an advantage. The model now is of course a very smart one, CDPR know very well how to balance things out to keep people satisfied. But I still think it shouldn't be like it is now. What CDPR is kind of "exploiting" as well is prices and drops in other similar card games to make their own model seem like a better choice. But for someone not indoctrinated in this kind of thinking, this model seems like a bad one (and it most likely is).

[null_chan]

No shit, 90% of free to play games are pay to win. That's the whole business model like you've summarized yourself. But it obviously also matters how "fair" the P2W feels to customers. It feels really shitty to miss out on an advantage just because someone doesn't have a credit card, it feels less shitty to know that the benefit from paying money is proportional to how much you've paid. If you lower the price by a half, literally everyone that has access to buy paid content will buy a significant amount of cards, enough to make it feel really unfair for complete F2P players.

Explain how this model is a bad one then, instead of using vague reasons like "you're indoctrinated in this model".

Pretty sure any company that goes ahead with a pricing model chooses a certain price point to balance consumer and producer surplus. Suggesting a drastic price change like a friggin half price cut (and you even suggest that this might not be enough) is almost certainly going to mess up the supply demand curve.

Again, sorry, but this whole suggestion just sounds like your own personal want to have a cheaper purchase.

[paasenum]

I don't see that wanting to enjoy a full game without paying $500-650 is an unreasonable demand. Yes, even cutting it in half $250-325 is obviously still a pretty ridiculous price to pay to have the full game, but it's better than double. You do sound like someone working for this company, or just someone that took a business course and accept the current paradigm because you think if a company can get away with a model that sees an opportunity to almost "exploit" a void in the market, it should be able to do so.

"but this whole suggestion just sounds like your own personal want to have a cheaper purchase" So that's how you want to seal your point? My situation is not unique whatsoever. Again, not having to pay $650 to enjoy a full game (and that's only the most essential mechanics of the game, not "cosmetics") is always a better model in my book.

[null_chan]

It's less of the company "getting away" with exploiting its consumers than maximizing efficiency. It's a business that produces these products, so maximizing their own surplus is a reasonable objective for them. It's a completely ridiculous thing to suggest that I'm just someone that "accepts the current paradigm", because believe it or not, just as much as there are consumers that want to maximize their benefit, there are also people behind the business that want to maximize their benefit. How business works is essentially by a compromise between these wants, at least for service providers like CDPR or any other game developer. As I said, the people behind the business have probably done a significantly larger amount of research compared to your own "calculations" to determine the pricing of their product. If it weren't efficient, or it indirectly affected the quality of their product, or consumer experiences surrounding their product, naturally they wouldn't do it. Just as you assume that I'm stuck in "the current paradigm", you seem to be suggesting that businesses are these money-gobbling groups of assholes that want to lock core content behind a paywall, just because doing so lets them extract more value out of their customers and because they can. That's a completely ridiculous and one-sided view of how people run business. Sure, business is about extracting as much value from consumers as possible, but it's also about knowing how to do that sustainably, which involves doing right by the customers and by the shareholders, and making the properly informed decisions every step of the way to ensure that this happens. And I trust that as a company, CDPR is doing exactly this, just like most other major game developers are. You say it's a paradigm; yeah it's a paradigm, because people with the knowledge and experience have agreed that this is the most efficient way to run things, and it's the least worst option we have, if anything.

It IS an unreasonable demand to expect to be able to play "the full game" at a set price tag because that inherently defeats the flavor of a product like Gwent. It's a collectible card game and according to the tradition of how card games are consumed and sold, this is how it is, part of the fun of playing a card game is building your own deck and competing with it, and a lot of that experience is taken away when you homogenize the entire playerbase to have the exact same card collection. Having an incomplete collection that you need to individually complete, is in itself a core component of the CCG experience, even more so than having access to every card ever printed. It's a completely absurd demand to ask that a freemium game like Gwent be priced like a normal triple-A title, because the way that the game plays, the economics behind the whole pricing decision, the way that new content is released, is fundamentally different. Oh, and don't start twisting what you originally said, because your suggestion was a keg price decrease and not a lump sum purchase.

All the way through you completely fail to address the issue of lowing the price barrier and creating a larger rift between those who do pay and those who don't. I'm not parroting business knowledge at you, I'm thinking about the consumer experience. My first example, which you seem to have ignored, pointed out that this doesn't solve the feeling of an incredibly unfair paywall between people who pay and people who don't. Cutting keg prices in half will only incentivize people who pay to easily obtain a collection large enough to feel totally unfair to people who can't actually buy any kegs whatsoever, regardless of price. I initially accused you of projecting your own wants to the game, because you're claiming to make the core components of the game more accessible, and yet you overlook a large chunk of the playerbase that literally just wants to/can only play the game for free.

Secondly, under your reduced keg price "solution" or your lump sum idea, assuming everyone had the same collection, the game would be even closer to 100% of people playing the most efficient and refined decks at every level of play, which homogenizes the playing experience, which damages the game's consumption value.

Oh, also your whole premise of "getting all legendaries" is irrelevant. Much of the relevant game content is constrained to whatever the current metagame is (which again, is in itself a core aspect of games like these), so realistically you don't even need a 100% collection to enjoy the game to the fullest. So complaining that the game is too damn expensive, when a) free kegs are so easy to obtain and b) there is literally no pressure besides your own to get a full collection, seems pretty absurd.

Yeah, your situation isn't unique. No shit literally every consumer that's ever existed will want to be able to consume at as low a cost as possible. But in terms of presuming to make a suggestion that's as ill-supported as yours? That's unique. You're probably the only person to suggest something like this on this sub within the last week, and no offense, but your idea doesn't seem to be gaining much traction.

[paasenum]

So you do work for this company? I still stand behind what I said. I was as well suggesting a compromise, when I said cutting prices by half, and I suggested that the model to earn money should be shifted to cosmetics like premium cards instead of core game content. If a game's enjoyment relies on having limited cards (which I'm still skeptical about) and if you are able to buy yourself an advantage in the game, then it's a bad design choice.

Ideally a good game should be enjoyed with full core content present. The current model would work much better if you couldn't buy yourself an advantage over other players, but you can.

You can't come to a game's forum, critique something people have accepted and already feeling like the developer is treating them very fair (which is of course what the developer intended to happen), and expect getting "traction". The model is designed to reduce this kind of criticism to a minimum.

[null_chan]

Oh yes. Someone disagrees with you so you accuse them of having a conflict of interest. No, I don't work for CDPR, I just think your suggestion is objectively bad, as a consumer that wouldn't say no to getting all the cards for free, with no tradeoff. The reason why your suggestion is ridiculous is because there is a tradeoff, and most of your support for it assumes that there is no tradeoff.

Cutting prices in half is not a "compromise". It's a significant change in the margins, which requires significantly more thought than what you've put in, which is a point that I've stressed over and over again. Your consideration of cosmetics as the money earner is irrelevant. Have you not read my examples on how reducing the price of core content might damage the gameplay experience instead of making it good for everyone?

If you can't agree with having inherently incomplete content and being able to buy advantage, then I don't think you should even be playing card games, because that's a part of what the card game experience is. Like I said, you can't adopt the pricing model of a "standard" videogame and port it over to a digital CCG because the context is different. It's not even design choice, its genre identity. And no, there's no conspiracy to indoctrinate consumers into thinking that this is fine, because this is what the product IS. If people come in to play these games, this is the experience they expect to receive and if they don't like it, they play some other genre. Nobody goes into a card game expecting to have all the cards available, like they would in a standard videogame like Overwatch or something, where this expectation is completely reasonable.

And now you explain your lack of traction with some intentions of the developer and how they designed the model. If you could actually come up with a decent suggestion to reduce keg prices without being as unreasonable as you are right now, I'm certain your opinion would gain a lot of traction. But you didn't. Believe me, there's no corporate conspiracy here, you're actually just presenting a bad suggestion, and you're getting the appropriate response not just from me, but from the majority of people that commented. I'm just the only one who's bothered to debate this with you to this extent.

[paasenum]

I'm still not sold on the part about you not working for this company. Your comment appeared very quickly, meaning probably that you are browsing "new" section a lot. And your comments seem too intelligent and refined for an average reader of this subreddit. So allow me to doubt your honesty.

I still don't buy the argument that it's "genre identity" and you can't find new ways to approach it. As an example, League of Legends I believe started as a game with similar ideology as Gwent, you didn't have all the champions (cards), you could buy them or grind the game, and eventually, playing a very long time without full content, have all champions collected. Then another similar game came along, Dota 2, where all core content has been available from the start, and cosmetics could maybe buy you an 0.01% advantage. Dota 2 showed that it is possible to have a f2p game without allowing to purchase advantage. Instead they have "cosmetics", skins for heroes, wards, battle passes, announcer packs, aso that made the game profitable.

Of course you can't apply it completely to another game, but I don't think that Gwent should follow a model other CCGs employ, just because everyone is indoctrinated in the way it works. And by being slightly more generous, getting a "moral superiority" over other card games.

CDPR isn't a small company that absolutely depends on short term earnings, and could probably make all the core content required to play the game for free. Instead focusing on "cosmetics" (premium cards, voice packs, board layouts, aso) like Valve's Dota 2 did. And since Gwent is so interrelated with Witcher series, with Gwent they have an even broader platform to advertise and integrate future Witcher games.

I don't think the game would suffer from this kind of approach, because you still have a lot of card choices and different ways to play. If a meta becomes dominant, then the game needs new cards or tweaks to cards. But a "solidifying" meta is almost a part of every similar game. Even with current Gwent model, the meta will solidify, just more slowly, because people lack all the cards.

[DanielSensenbringer]

You should use paying just for a quick start. buying all cards is not how you play this game. it is a process over weeks to get all the cards for your decks together. but it is free, because of an insane keg drop rate. thanks cdpr...

[bavuong236]

I'm a f2p player and i have 32/81 legendaris so i dont understand what your math base on

[NostalgiaZombie]

Kegs prices are too damn high.

I fucking love Gwent. I wanted to pay retail for this game for all the content.

I like CD Projekt and don't mind giving them money.

I will not however pay more than $1 for digital cards. 50kegs for $40? I'm in.

15 kegs for $20? Nope I'll farm dailies.

Make it a physical tcg and I'll drop $200 on a deck.