Would a shop monetezation scheme closer to what FFXIV be better for WoW?

Community General Discussion
1

And I mean this specifically for event/promotional items, let’s use this Mtn Dew bike (That I’ve come to learn is sold out even though the promotion is still ongoing they just “ran out” of randomized digital codes ig) for the example here. The promotion would be live for a certain amount of time, people participate and those who didn’t could wait roughly a year for Blizzard to offer it straight up on their store for cash later. That way there’s less FOMO and people who weren’t able to get something they really wanted only has to wait a little bit to have a guaranteed way of getting it.

(Would just like to leave this as a footnote, I didn’t want the bike and this isn’t a thread whining that I didn’t get it.)

2

Not sure. There is already plenty of people out there that want the shop gone.

3

Blizzard makes more selling Brutos

4

I’d say those expectations are fairly unrealistic, personally.
Makes more sense for us to make the shop work for us instead of the other way around.

Okay, but this isn’t about loss of sales. This suggestion only proposes ease of access after a certain amount of time passes for event items that people may have missed out on seeing as Blizzard doesn’t re-release event items which would only net them even more sales in the long run while making people who did miss out or can’t afford it at the time/doesn’t want to buy the product associated with the promotion a lot more satisfied.

Seems like a win/win for Blizzard.

5

From my experiences, more aggressive monetization through cash shops, does not correlate into the company investing more into the game. I could be wrong, I admit, as I have not done thorough research into the actual data. And half of it is subjective.

Most times the more we see added to cash shops, with cosmetic bundles, paid services, paid conveniences ect, I just dont see the game appearing to have that money reinvested in the game. You do not see an increase in the quality or frequency of updates to a game. That stays relatively the same. You dont see them hiring more staff to better support the game. If anything you see more restructuring and layoffs.

Looking at it from a business perspective, the cash shop items, and even promotions like this, are simply bottom line, low cost, revenue generators for shareholders and budgets.

Looking at WoW specifically, they have not changed their subscription price in 20 years. And if anything, WoW’s bell curve peaked in WoTL, Bottomed out in either BfA or SL, then rose to a plateau level. I am assuming that since they have not increased the price, that the model is still profitable, the costs of everything have done nothing but increased. So in order to give the healthiest financial statement to investors and company leadership, they need to generate more revenue while cutting costs. So, laying off staff, while increasing low cost monetization is what they are going to do.

This is more a statement on the gaming industry as a whole. You have a lot of passionate developers and designers. But, they are beholden to investors and executive boards. The actual people in charge, care nothing for passion projects. They do not care for story or immersion. They honestly, more than likely do not care one tiny bit about any of the actual games. They simply have to make money, and show good, short term quarterly gains.

They do not want long term projects. They do not want large money invested in a new game or IP that is going to take 4-5 years after launch to really turn a profit. They want to pump out games to meet quarterly deadlines. Even if the games are unfinished or buggy. They can patch them later. The need to hit those quarterly sales goals. Which is why you see so many botched and incomplete launch games, that need several months of patches, done by a skeleton crew to fix them.

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6

Promotional stuff isn’t on the FF14 store. Generally they only put the holiday event stuff on there incase people weren’t around for them that year.

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Player desires: no shop - everything obtainable in game, without overly tedious grinds.

Dev desires: Time and resources to develop quality features to keep the game alive.

Corp desires: money and features to generate more money and entice people to buy “cool” things for more money.

A good game has a balance of those three. Without players, no money is brought in. With crappy / rushed features, no one is willing to shell out more money. Without money, no game will exist.

It is when games shift more toward fulfilling one side (usually the corp desires) that we see P2W things added (like a cash shop, token, “pay for convenience” items, etc.) and a dramatic downward turn of player population… and ultimately the downfall of the game.

Just look at OW2, D4, and D:I for examples of unbalanced priorities negatively affecting Blizzard games. OW2 lost so many players that they had to shift from 6 man teams down to 5 and lock new, often OP characters behind either hours of gameplay or shelling out for that season’s battle pass. D4 started off with so many bugs and inefficiencies that most people didn’t continue playing more than a month, and now they are scrambling to try to get people back. D:I was a dumpster fire of epic proportions… It was a decently developed game, but so over monetized that you literally couldn’t progress without shelling out the dough.

To the OPs question, I don’t feel like I need to buy things from the FFXIV cash shop to fully enjoy the game. I spend a little each month to have a couple additional retainers since I’m a horder, but that’s pretty much it. With WoW, I feel like I have to shell out if I want to keep up or have the “convenience” that others enjoy.

8

They are though, case in point the original Eastern set and the Maid dress both which came from Amazon purchases through a promotional event.

9

I would suppose it would depend on the promo.

For example it has been said that there was some kind of legalese in the OCC bike contest that prevented further sale of the winning bike, but oddly enough the losing one there was not.

10

Those things were probably planned out way in advance. The vast majority of the promotional stuff aren’t on there, including items from those same promotions. They do promotions in Japan all the time and none of those are on the store.

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Lots of regions have region exclusive stuff, especially China.
That still doesn’t mean that the initial suggest would impact the game or community negatively, I don’t think anybody with a rational mind would go “Man, I really hate that they can just buy this thing after I did it a year ago through slightly different methods.”

12

Never said it would.

13

I also never said that FFXIV always does this, just that they have in the past.
They did the same thing with the disastrous GrubHub pizza emote.
I don’t think it’d do any harm, and might actually be a positive thing if WoW started to do something similar.

14

Like someone else said, it all depends on the legal bits and bobs, it’s not as simple as just throwing things on the store lol.

15

For future promotions they may want to negotiate this into their deals.

16

“i dont have any actual evidence”

Ok.

Except we dont see this with WoW.

We saw they hired more devs.

We see them adding more forms of content on top of what we already have.

But how are we getting more types of content every expansion?

We got an entirely new pillar, delves.

Now we are getting housing.

If WoW was just attempting to bring in more money while doing nothing extra, those two things would not exist.

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