13 replies to this topic

[BodakOfSseth]

Looking around the forums, I see a lot of outcry for PvE content. Lots of wild ideas, some workable ones, but not a lot of talk about supporting it.

And lets face it, you get what you pay for.
Money talks, so let's talk money.

Here's what I want you to do:
1. Read this post.
2. Vote what you would honestly do.
3. Share with someone and ask them to vote.
-It would be a good idea to get as many people to vote on this as possible.

Kickstarter for PvE Content:
Wouldn't it be cool to fight over Tukkayid? The Kickstarter could start to make something small - a continent, maybe one world - PvE content: missions (quests), raids, PvP zones...

I imagine rewards could be the standard rewards we see today: Cockpit items, new unique mechs, camo patterns, decals, MC, Cbills. Beta test slots. Premium time.
There is plenty of opportunity to get people incentivized to drop some one-time cash on a PvE Kickstarter.
I'm not going to talk production time or any of the rest of that; I leave that to the experts, and there is plenty of advice out there on how to run a successful Kickstarter.

Subscription fee to access PvE Content:
Once the PvE Content is in place, it seems fair to pay some amount to keep it going and move forward with new content. I think $15/month is a fair price, and is a good price point for lots of other MMOs.
To not devalue or seem like PGI is abusing their subscribers, they could bundle it with Premium time bonuses or smaller MC rewards. Perhaps a discount on new mech pack purchases.
Again, lots of options.

You still don't have to pay for basic access:
I'm not saying the Free to Play deathmatch section should go away. Keep it available. Some people won't want to or won't be able to afford to play the PvE content right away, or ever. Leaving the F2P section live gives them an entry into the game as well, and a place for the two groups to mingle.

Edited by ScottAleric, 19 October 2016 - 11:06 AM.

[Tibbnak]

If pgi wants to make money then they can stop being essentially the joke of the microtrans industry.
Their monetization is considered rigid and *** backwards, it alienates mid and low spending people who aren't willing to go full whale, their mech pricing isn't even based on the mech itself and is just one solid brick amount tier, and their cosmetics are priced the highest of almost every other free to play game on the market.

They have exclusive control over a niche franchise that has fervent followers, and yet still can't make enough resources to develop at anything but a snail's pace. It's a straight travesty.

Just an example of a tried and true industry practice that they could have been using years ago to make money hand over fist:

Rotate 75% discounts for mechbays, colours, patterns, dekkels weekly and people will gobble those up
Just out of the blue during a week, have a randomly chosen set of colours and decals and camo or mechbays on a 75% discount. People who don't even normally have spent ANYTHING will suddenly start eagerly waiting for those events so they can buy in bulk.

[BodakOfSseth]

...fair enough, but not actually what I was talking about.

[TheArisen]

I'd prefer a one time purchase for an offline solo campaign with online co-op. The price would depend on how extensive it is.

My ideal would be to have a campaign for each faction for a total of 9 campaigns. If each campaign had at least 15 missions with a decent story I would likely be willing to pay 30 to 50 dollars per campaign. Obviously bulk deals would be offered.

[BodakOfSseth]

Interesting idea - that sounds like a lot of work tho, don't you think?

Edit: I mean, sure, individual faction content could be really awesome, but doing missions in a PvE/MMO space could allow players to grind faction reputation. In my model, you could also have battle zones grant faction rep for conquering/holding battlezones.

(mind you, I'm not really familiar with the rep system here. I saw that one of the mechs grants a Rep bonus when running it. - I'm going off what I know from WoW)

Additionally, if the initial PvE content is successful, then PGI could develop more specialized missions and story chains based on individual factions/houses/clans. But really, there would have to be enough players in that story content to justify the development of it.

Edited by ScottAleric, 21 October 2016 - 12:31 PM.

[ice trey]

Take the core mechanics of this game, and make it into a single player game.

Repair, Customization risk, Marketplace, Characters and character building, storylines... basically everything that HBS Battletech is shaping up to be outside of the turn-based 3rd person god-view game.

Tack that on to some interesting missions, some AI bots, some scripted events... I'm happy as a clam.

But don't charge me a monthly rate for the single player game I've always wanted. Even if it's a one-time fee of a thousand dollars, don't charge me a monthly rate for something that doesn't need an internet connection.

[ice trey]

TheArisen, on 20 October 2016 - 10:40 PM, said:

I'd prefer a one time purchase for an offline solo campaign with online co-op. The price would depend on how extensive it is.

The downside is that they're already getting away with murder by charging players $50 for a single robot model. How expensive is getting them to lift a finger and actually program a game going to cost?

[BodakOfSseth]

ice trey, on 23 October 2016 - 04:26 AM, said:

Take the core mechanics of this game, and make it into a single player game.

Repair, Customization risk, Marketplace, Characters and character building, storylines... basically everything that HBS Battletech is shaping up to be outside of the turn-based 3rd person god-view game.

Tack that on to some interesting missions, some AI bots, some scripted events... I'm happy as a clam.

But don't charge me a monthly rate for the single player game I've always wanted. Even if it's a one-time fee of a thousand dollars, don't charge me a monthly rate for something that doesn't need an internet connection.

So, you want them to make a completely different game than MWO... basically remake what, MW2? 3?
Unfortunately that style of game is going out of fashion for game developers. There are just too many problems with that business model these days.

ice trey, on 23 October 2016 - 04:29 AM, said:

The downside is that they're already getting away with murder by charging players $50 for a single robot model. How expensive is getting them to lift a finger and actually program a game going to cost?

Where are you getting that figure from? I can't find a single mech over $15...

[ice trey]

ScottAleric, on 23 October 2016 - 05:43 AM, said:

So, you want them to make a completely different game than MWO... basically remake what, MW2? 3?

Ideally, making a MechWarrior game that feels like a MechWarrior game would be good, yes.
Remember the 2009 preview? That'd be good.
Not this travesty we're stuck with.

Edited by ice trey, 23 October 2016 - 06:16 AM.

[B L O O D W I T C H]

ice trey, on 23 October 2016 - 06:15 AM, said:

Remember the 2009 preview? That'd be good.
Not this travesty we're stuck with.

That is precisely why i voted with NO for pve kickstarter.
People have backed MW5 and got MWO.

[TheArisen]

I think individual campaigns are fairly safe. They can release one, see how it does, learn from it and make the next one or not.

The absolute most I'd be willing to spend on a 15 - 25 mission campaign would be 40 to 50$ for one, but I'd strongly prefer a bundle deal. At 25$ per campaign that would be 225$ for all 9 campaigns which contain approximately 135 missions (if 15 per campaign).
If 5000 ppl buy a 9 pack at 225$ or 25$ per campaign, Pgi would have made $1,125,000. The income from MWO's multiplayer would still be going of course & ppl would continue to buy the campaigns, either individually, mini-packs, etc.

I think that would be a lot of work to finish but if done correctly would be able to earn even more money. For example, include the Hero mechs & their pilots in the campaigns as friends/enemies. That'd easily make the heroes more desirable.

The increase in income from hero sales & campaign bundles would be pretty potent I'd bet.

I wouldn't want to pay a subscription but I do think it's possible to make campaigns worthwhile for Pgi.

Edited by TheArisen, 25 October 2016 - 04:18 AM.

[BodakOfSseth]

TheArisen, on 25 October 2016 - 04:09 AM, said:

The absolute most I'd be willing to spend on a 15 - 25 mission campaign would be 40 to 50$ for one, but I'd strongly prefer a bundle deal. At 25$ per campaign that would be 225$ for all 9 campaigns which contain approximately 135 missions (if 15 per campaign).
If 5000 ppl buy a 9 pack at 225$ or 25$ per campaign, Pgi would have made $1,125,000. The income from MWO's multiplayer would still be going of course & ppl would continue to buy the campaigns, either individually, mini-packs, etc.

Okay, let's take your numbers and break it down:

Year salary of a Software developer in Vancouver, BC is about $64,713/year which is about $31/hour
With your estimated income of $1,125,000 (actually $1,502,448 Canadian dollar with current exchange rates)
$1,502,448 divided by $31/hour. That's 48,466 man-hours
With average game developer teams of 20-100 people (lets go for middle-low of 50 folks; we can keep this lean)...
48,466 man-hours split amongst 50 people is about 969 hours.
Which is 121 8-hour days to produce 135 fully-built written, playtested and debugged missions.

...Which is extremely unlikely.

Thoughts like this is why the single-payer/single-player game is falling apart.
Due to advancements in technology and other factors, game development budgets are ballooning to over $20 million.
Using the same calculation, that grants a US developer about 1,613 days for the same team to build what you describe.
Now, to be certain, a good portion of the game is already built. They could probably get away with maybe half that budget, and if we're talking lean, maybe a third of that. But they would still need over $6.6 million guaranteed sales to hit that target, which would have to be in the bank before the development begins.

By your math, that means a guaranteed 264,000 individual mission packs sold at $25 each, or 29,333 people paying $225 for the whole pack. Most people aren't going to pay that much. the Battletech kickstarter got about $2.75 million across about 42,000 backers. That's an average pledge of $66.68 per person. (which btw, the same team would have 225 days to put the game out)

Look, don't get me wrong. This is all theoretical based on a large number of assumptions - so the numbers are probably wildly inaccurate, and we're not taking into account all kinds of investors and other loans. I'm just trying to illustrate the risk.
It's also why Kickstarter is awesome. The group kickstarting can get their initial investors (the people) which, if successful, will help set their budget and production time. The money is already given, so they only have to produce what was promised.

The big part is converting people over to access of the premium content. Once that premium content is created, it's a matter of maintaining it (a comparatively easy lift - costs are servers and maintenance staff), and the rest of the income generated from folks paying for that premium content can be turned back into building more premium content.

Edited by ScottAleric, 25 October 2016 - 07:16 AM.

[TheArisen]

ScottAleric, on 25 October 2016 - 07:14 AM, said:

Okay, let's take your numbers and break it down:

Year salary of a Software developer in Vancouver, BC is about $64,713/year which is about $31/hour
With your estimated income of $1,125,000 (actually $1,502,448 Canadian dollar with current exchange rates)
$1,502,448 divided by $31/hour. That's 48,466 man-hours
With average game developer teams of 20-100 people (lets go for middle-low of 50 folks; we can keep this lean)...
48,466 man-hours split amongst 50 people is about 969 hours.
Which is 121 8-hour days to produce 135 fully-built written, playtested and debugged missions.

...Which is extremely unlikely.

Thoughts like this is why the single-payer/single-player game is falling apart.
Due to advancements in technology and other factors, game development budgets are ballooning to over $20 million.
Using the same calculation, that grants a US developer about 1,613 days for the same team to build what you describe.
Now, to be certain, a good portion of the game is already built. They could probably get away with maybe half that budget, and if we're talking lean, maybe a third of that. But they would still need over $6.6 million guaranteed sales to hit that target, which would have to be in the bank before the development begins.

By your math, that means a guaranteed 264,000 individual mission packs sold at $25 each, or 29,333 people paying $225 for the whole pack. Most people aren't going to pay that much. the Battletech kickstarter got about $2.75 million across about 42,000 backers. That's an average pledge of $66.68 per person. (which btw, the same team would have 225 days to put the game out)

Look, don't get me wrong. This is all theoretical based on a large number of assumptions - so the numbers are probably wildly inaccurate, and we're not taking into account all kinds of investors and other loans. I'm just trying to illustrate the risk.
It's also why Kickstarter is awesome. The group kickstarting can get their initial investors (the people) which, if successful, will help set their budget and production time. The money is already given, so they only have to produce what was promised.

The big part is converting people over to access of the premium content. Once that premium content is created, it's a matter of maintaining it (a comparatively easy lift - costs are servers and maintenance staff), and the rest of the income generated from folks paying for that premium content can be turned back into building more premium content.

First off, not everyone would necessarily buy a bundle. I'm also fairly confident they'd get more than 5k buyers, they get more than that for mech packs pretty easily. 25$ is a hypothetical bundle price, it could be 30 or 35 even if need be.

Also as you mentioned, a large portion of the content can be ported over from the PvP section. Another thing to account for is increased hero sales assuming they're integrated into the campaigns along with more players enjoying the PvP & continuing to purchase content.

Micro transactions like buying colors, patterns & decals could also help offset the cost. Perhaps you could need to buy mechbays to be able to salvage mechs and cockpit items could also be a thing in the PvE.

A kickstarter would be a good idea IMO but a subscription for something I'd want to be able to play 5 years from now would be a bit much.

Perhaps a simple & cheap to implement horde/survival mode would be the best way for the short term.

[Ustarish]

how about third option with a singleplayer stand alone game without micro transactions, free from dlc cancer and supporting user made mods?

maybe then i would consider giving any more money to the enemy...