I’ve always wondered about this. My initial guess is there’s not much place for COs to get discounted since they’re only $5 apiece. Contrast that to campaigns that go for $20 to $40 each, or for bundles (don’t remember, it’s been so long). However, they can always bundle those, or reduce them. For the former, I believe they’re still included when you buy the campaigns (and if you get the campaigns after already having the appropriate COs, they prorate your campaign purchase). For the latter, I remember when Nova and Stukov were reduced to $2.50 apiece.
My guess now is even though WoL went f2p long ago, campaigns are still used to draw in new players, while COs are there to continue keeping them engaged. Not to mention the margins on COs are better (so they don’t want to discount them anyways. At least not anymore).
Your thoughts?
I think it was not about the price of the content, but about the efforts to produce it.
A good polished campaign requires lots of mapmaking, faction design, story writing, asset modelling, voice recording etc.
A Co-op commander, on the other hand, allows to reuse most of the existing content with significantly less effort of making anything new. Maps are there to play at, many units can be reused, just wrap them all up into some “faction”, give some perks on top, record several commander voice lines — boom, ready to sell.
It was clear as day for long enough Blizz’d rather reuse and recycle some old stuff than make something new. Just the Nova Covert Ops campaign alone already pointed out, how greedy they got, by slowly squeezing money per each three missions, dragging them out for so long to release.
Then later on it turned out that selling Co-op commanders and unit/structure skins for ladder is much easier and cost-efficient. So hey, why bother?
I also think there is no reduce for Commanders because they are already too cheap from modern standpoint. They came out of a time where Microtransactions w+here not really accepted. Later on thanks to WoW they realised they sold to cheap and so they gave up SC II too.
Can we quantify just how much of it was reused? Coop maps draw from campaign, but they need to redesign everything so that it’s for 2 players, building space, distance to expansions, # of spawn points, those distances, everything else from objectives, the layouts.
Some of the COs may be easy, but the likes of Mengsk and Stetmenn are so unique that I heard their codebase is on the “bonkers side”
Like Konstantin mentioned, it might be due to the fact that they aren’t expensive to start with. Taking a reasonable % off a $5 price doesn’t result in much of a change. But I’m just taking a wild guess with that.
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I would’ve paid $10 apiece for them (I did if you count some of the Commander Bundles that were available at the time), but that’s just me
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Don’t say that. Otherwise we might someday find SC2’s monetization system gets as predatory as Overwatch’s monetization has become.
Sc2 has long been abandoned. We got far bigger issues than some price increases. We’ve been starved for content for 5 years, and the Oct. 2020 announcement of “no more new content” ain’t likely gonna change anytime soon
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Fair enough. You have a point. I wish we could get unique campaigns for each commander.
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Sure, the maps needed mechanical redesign for 2-player mode and timer, but not more than that. The assets and the visuals were already there, it’s not like any of that needed its own development. But, anyway, maps were produced quite rarely and were discontinued even before commanders’ content.
As for Stetmann in particular, I can say that the mechanics themselves don’t look that hard to implement (nothing out of ordinary, compared to what we’ve seen in the game), the most difficult part was the optimization — which was failed, tremendously.