Darvo's Discount Should Be 75%, Not 25%

[Piell]

A deep discount will entice far more players to purchase items than the moderate 25% discount will. Most of the people I play with use platinum only for slots, potatos, and forma, because the platinum prices for items are so insanely high as to make them ridiculous to purchase - Rhino costs 25 dollars in real money!

 

A massive discount, on the other hand, not only brings the price down to something realistic, but also triggers that "huge sale, gotta buy now" feeling. Steam sales have shown that huge discounts can often bring more money in than small ones, entirely due to a much larger stream of purchases. I feel this should at least be given a try, and data collected about it.

[GIMO]

75% seems too steep.

[Mutilar]

I feel like 33% is the best price reduction value.  

 

It's high enough to make people think they are getting a great deal, yet low enough to yield more profit from having the item at a sale price.

[Rhorge]

You can already buy plat at a 75% discount. If you add 75% store discount on top of that you would cause $5 to effectively turn into $80... Not the best business model.

[Lady_Khaos]

No more than 50%

[Gravefire]

About 35%-40% depending on the day and if its a weekend sale.

[Slurmageddon]

It depends on what the sale is on and the popularity of the item.

[Llyssa]

I can't really see any logical reason for this change.

[Piell]

You're all stuck in the mindset that a larger discount means less money made. It makes sense on the surface, but once you look into it you see that massive discounts can actually lead to increased profit, in the case of pure-digital purchased. A quote from  this article

 

"According to indie developer and Super Meat Boy co-creator Edmund McMillen, these promotions can increase sales to an almost staggering extent. His 2D dungeon crawler The Binding of Isaac, for example, saw sales multiply by five when it was marked down by 50 percent, and once it hit the front page as a temporary "Flash Deal" (for 75 percent off), sales multiplied by sixty."

 

Again, the platinum prices for many  items are completely absurd vs the amount of effort it would take to earn them in-game, often for no apparent reason (why does Rhino cost 5x as much as Excalibur, considering they are approximate equal difficulty to farm?). A massive 75% discount brings them down to a level where far more players would be willing to make purchases.

[Binghammer]

I think you're all right. I don't see why the sale can't go as high as 75% and as low as 25%.

 

It's only been a couple days and we'll need to give it time. I'm sure DE is watching the sales and will adjust this % as time goes on.

[Revel72]

Pfft. Just raise the sale % 30 so everybody is happy.

[hukhukhuk]

Well, Darvo is stoned as hell, it makes perfect sense for him to feel empathy for all living creatures of the universe and discount something by 75%. And if more people buy stuff, DE makes more money, more people get cool stuff, more people keep playing, everyone wins.

[playnwin]

I would say that it should fluctuate. Perhaps during mid-week, have 75% sales, late and early week have 50% sales, and weekends have 25% sales. Or some other pattern, but 25% is too low for EVERDAY sales, and 75% is too high to make a good profit. We will see.

[ETank]

Follow the Steam example - offering things at an offensively incredible discount (ie: 75% or 90% or whatever) goes well beyond "good deal" and into "impulse buy".  As someone who has spent nearly $100 real money on this game, and shamefully hordes his plat like it's a damned bank account, great % cuts (especially very temporary ones with a tantalizing pricetag - see: Steam dailies as an example) are highly incentivizing people like me to both buy in-game items and ultimately buy more platinum.  As a digital commodity, without overhead or production values, and as a PvE game, without serious primary focus on player vs player balance (ie: Where a player with X dollars and/or hours invested SHALL be X% better than those without), there is no reason not to hook as many people as possible with sales.  The more sales, the better.  The more varied the sales, the better.  The more tantalizing the sales, the better. The steam sales have already proven that once sale percentages start to reach record heights (ie: 75%+) that the total volume of sales exponentially oversteps the individual loss-in-revenue. so from a financial perspective, the "long tail" of selling is the target to aim for, especially in MMOs and F2Ps, where a large majority of players may be convinced that they "absolutely have to" spend money on Warframe if the sale is good enough to warrant money where they may otherwise grind whatever it is that was offered.

 

The only reason for both players and devs NOT to want Darvo's Discount to be as high as possible is if some misaligned sense of entitled selfishness says "I valued that item at X platinum points, and I refuse to allow people to achieve it for less." 

[Tr1ples1xer]

We know everything should be free so you can whine about it being boring and too easy afterwards. 25% is a good start just be patient and wait and see what mre darvo will offer us.

[NIL0S]

It is a bit lackluster as is. Not really encouraging impulse buys. Steam is a good example :)

I will buy a lot of games i would never have spent money for just because they are insanely cheap.

[Iromandav]

A discount of various ranges is more suitable to me. 

 

25% Off is not going to jerk money from my wallet. Discounts ranging from 10% to 75% is going to get me to open my wallet. I've already spent over $100.00 for mats, 'taters, and bundles in order to enhance my level of enjoyment. 

 

The shop is not cheap and yes, you can obtain everything in game except for certain account enhancements. But, I do not feel the shop is effective anymore, I won't buy unless something 'good' is on sale... or more plats are given on purchase (discounts on plat is more lucrative than items IMO).

 

I'm not trying to run a business. I am the consumer and know what entices me to loosen my cash. Once the newness of Warframe leaves me... When I'm bored from impossible mod drops.... What will I do to feel progression? 

 

I will Shop.

[gell]

I think people should earn higher discounts. You inspired my thread, in part.

 

https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/110644-darvo-should-be-your-for-profit-guardian-angel/

 

I'm sure DE will play with sale prices and see what's best for them. They'll have their numbers after a few more sales, but it's only been about a day, so give it time.

[Llyssa]

You're all stuck in the mindset that a larger discount means less money made. It makes sense on the surface, but once you look into it you see that massive discounts can actually lead to increased profit, in the case of pure-digital purchased. A quote from  this article

 

"According to indie developer and Super Meat Boy co-creator Edmund McMillen, these promotions can increase sales to an almost staggering extent. His 2D dungeon crawler The Binding of Isaac, for example, saw sales multiply by five when it was marked down by 50 percent, and once it hit the front page as a temporary "Flash Deal" (for 75 percent off), sales multiplied by sixty."

 

Again, the platinum prices for many  items are completely absurd vs the amount of effort it would take to earn them in-game, often for no apparent reason (why does Rhino cost 5x as much as Excalibur, considering they are approximate equal difficulty to farm?). A massive 75% discount brings them down to a level where far more players would be willing to make purchases.

Not the same thing. That's players that never would have played at all, not players that exist and aren't interested in buying platinum. That's also on end-product games, not service games--once the game is published, it's done. They don't make any more changes. It's not an on-going project, and it's not something people have been at for months.

 

While it's entirely possible that massive discounts could spike sales, the general mathematics of f2p games and experienced history demonstrate that they use a massively different economic structure, and decreased prices rarely come close to evening out revenues, because players who are playing for free already aren't that compelled to stop. It's only players who are already spending money who will buy more.

 

The best way to put it: if 33% of your players pick mag as their starter frame, and another 20% bother earning it, and another 2% actually buy it, giving a 75% discount is unlikely to entice another 6% of players(enough to break even), and it is mathematically impossible for it to attract 60 times as many sales, because you only have 22 times as many players playing. Period.

 

The best way to look at it is the difference in "customer". The "customer" from this article is a person who does not play the game, who is then enticed to play the game for the one-time offer of a low price. The "customer" from a f2p game is going to be a player that already exists. You cannot expand the "customer" base of a f2p beyond the actual player base, no matter how deep your sales are--people who don't play have no new incentive to start merely because you're offering something for less money than it was before, as the game is free either way.

 

So, while some nobody game developer on a game sales service experiences MASSIVE sales boosts when they get all the free advertising of being put on the front page and being offered at a limited time discount, the same cannot be said of in-game sales. The items being sold are not "little known" things that someone would like to try out for a mere $2. It's something everyone who plays has seen already, and many already own or know how to get for free.

 

The advertising value is almost null--today's example, void key packs. Please, find all the players in the game that have never heard of a void key pack, that don't know about/plan to get void keys for free, that see the sale as their one chance to "get in on the action" of void keys by paying money. Shy of fresh newbies with plump bank accounts, you won't find many. There's a few players who may be tempted by "oh, well, this is helpful", but it isn't going to be exponential compared to the number of players who previously thought "oh, well, this is helpful".

 

If that doesn't make sense, ask yourself: "If void key packs were 18 plat each, would I buy them?" If your answer was "yes", then ask yourself: "Would I buy void key packs otherwise?". Chances are, the answer to both is going to be the same. VERY few players will have a change of heart, and no non-players would see any reason that the void key sale would matter to them one way or the other. Many of the "yes" answers would be from players using their free platinum they've saved up.

 

As DE's income mainly relies on repeat customers, rather than one-time sales, having ultra deep discounts means that they're just baiting themselves into a system where the "accepted" price is now the discount price, and players merely wait for it to happen--this is already the case with the platinum daily lotto discounts. Making it a regular thing on the actual price of items as well is just asking for trouble.

 

So, again, as I said before, I can't really see any logical reason for this change.

 

It's a nice thought, but the inflexibility of the potential customer group severely limits the actual customer conversion rate, as does the type of product.

[Llyssa]

Easier to relate to: Imagine there's a restaurant that sells hamburgers, and offers to add fries and a shake, as a meal deal.

 

Now, imagine they have a discount on fries to people who get the meal deal.

 

You will get an increase in the number of meal deals sold. You will get a few people upgrading from hamburgers to meal deals, but you will still have a lot of customers still buying just the hamburger. If you offer an extreme discount, then most of the hamburger buyers will upgrade to meal deals.

 

However, you won't sell any meal deals to the people who only come for the salad bar. You won't attract a ton of new customers who come specifically for the meal deal. You WILL make less money off the regular customers who always buy the meal deal anyway. You might convince a few customers to permanently upgrade from regular hamburger buyers to regular meal deal buyers, but it will be very, very few, as they were already happy with the hamburger. They will buy the meal deal again when it's on sale again, but otherwise, you basically were just being nice to the guys who already buy meal deals.

 

Does that maybe compute better, wording it like that?

Edited September 21, 2013 by Llyssa

[taiiat]

No more than 50%

yes. never, ever more than 50%. Platinum purchasing already is usually done on sales. more than 50% on the spending side would be crazy. 

and probably a bit lower than that, with 50% being those rare crazy sales, hehe. 

 

 

I can't really see any logical reason for this change.

use the Steam example. 

 

Steam is THE digital distributor. the money they rake in from all the titles they carry is half or more due to the sales they have. 

 

just think about it, the Steam servers crash a LOT during big seasonal sales. that's a sh*tload of traffic.

 

marketing. it's something to keep in mind. it just needs to not get out of hand, after a point you just lose money. though, VALVe still makes money on those 90% off sales somehow o.0

but i don't think Warframe quite has the user base to work sales like that, haha.

[Estred]

A deep discount will entice far more players to purchase items than the moderate 25% discount will. Most of the people I play with use platinum only for slots, potatos, and forma, because the platinum prices for items are so insanely high as to make them ridiculous to purchase - Rhino costs 25 dollars in real money!

 

A massive discount, on the other hand, not only brings the price down to something realistic, but also triggers that "huge sale, gotta buy now" feeling. Steam sales have shown that huge discounts can often bring more money in than small ones, entirely due to a much larger stream of purchases. I feel this should at least be given a try, and data collected about it.

I would say 33% or 40% discount is more in line. 75% is a big cut for an item. There is a sweet spot in a deal where you maximize profits through gaining more sales versus the non-sale price.

[Llyssa]

yes. never, ever more than 50%. Platinum purchasing already is usually done on sales. more than 50% on the spending side would be crazy. 

and probably a bit lower than that, with 50% being those rare crazy sales, hehe. 

 

 

use the Steam example. 

 

Steam is THE digital distributor. the money they rake in from all the titles they carry is half or more due to the sales they have. 

 

just think about it, the Steam servers crash a LOT during big seasonal sales. that's a sh*tload of traffic.

 

marketing. it's something to keep in mind. it just needs to not get out of hand, after a point you just lose money. though, VALVe still makes money on those 90% off sales somehow o.0

but i don't think Warframe quite has the user base to work sales like that, haha.

*Begins randomly stabbing people who fail to see the difference between pay-to-play and free-to-play games*

 

STEAM IS NOT FREE TO PLAY. Learn it. Love it. Then bash your head against the wall if you ever again dream of comparing the two.

Edited September 21, 2013 by Llyssa

[ETank]

Easier to relate to: Imagine there's a restaurant that sells hamburgers, and offers to add fries and a shake, as a meal deal.

 

 

 

The analogy is completely void because anything tangible has a cost to procure and produce, whereas digital goods are money forged from nothingness, with no additional effort on the part of the devs.  Steam sales, as discussed by Piell, myself, and others above, and the "Long Tail," mentioned by me above (particularly Chris Anderson's version of it in regards to digital sales) are the only real comparison.  Tr1ples1xer's comment above is hilarious if only because how ignorant he appears to be regarding the potential sales.

 

There is literally no better analogy for Darvo's Discount than the Steam Sales.  People fill up a Steam Wallet, people impulsively buy sale items, people run out of money, and the cycle repeats.  The "cost" per platinum, whether someone paid $0.01 per plat or $10 per plat is unimportant - the quicker people USE their plat, the quicker they must give DE more money.

 

 

edit: Llyssa, on the contrary, Steam is completely free to play, and not only that, but includes many free to play titles, including two owned by Valve themselves, Team Fortress 2 and DOTA2.  Clearly, a free platform and free games supported by microtransactions is completely viable and a valid comparison.

Edited September 21, 2013 by ETank

[Hayden11121]

For a real life trader to make cash flow in, he cannot go on too steep of a sale.

 

But this is just code, recreatable at will. Any price value can be thrown in, and frankly, 25% of 300 plat is all I'd ever spend on a frame, max.