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Free 1 month trials, and being able to buy subs with quanta is essential for this games survivability.


Shaman

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playing $10 per month to play this game is a huge turn off for many people. Obviously I can see why NQ has it, but now that your stuff deletes itself when you're offline for too long, I think it's a good idea for people be able to play this game for 'free' as long as you grind long enough for that sweet quanta.

 

It may not seem like a cost effective idea short term, but adding a FTP option is a huge incentive for new players to join.

...which means a larger playerbase, which means more people know about it+ likely to share the game with friends, which means eventually more money will be going into NQ's pockets, especially if subbing has large benefits eg lower taxes, higher skill point gain et cetera.

 

what's more it's a money sink, which is something this game needs more of.

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16 hours ago, Shaman said:

playing $10 per month to play this game is a huge turn off for many people

If paying 35 cet per day or access to a game is too much for you, you should probably check your priorities

 

While DAC by design wil lbe tradable in game and as such be a way to earn gametime in game, it wil lbe massively harder than doing so in a game like EVE because of the fact DU is so insanely shallow as far as options to make the quanta you'd need.

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28 minutes ago, blazemonger said:

While DAC by design wil lbe tradable in game and as such be a way to earn gametime in game, it wil lbe massively harder than doing so in a game like EVE because of the fact DU is so insanely shallow as far as options to make the quanta you'd need.

Depends on how you many people are willing to (buy and) sell DAC and at how much they'll value it...

 

I can buy a year's subscription for $83.88, that is $6.99/month. With a single account, I can maybe make 350M quanta a month, with a ton of skills already in place and knowing how to do it... But that's like spending 80+ hours/month on just gathering resources to sell and make quanta... If I choose just the 'money maker', it's down to around 250M quanta a month, but the time it takes actively is about 20 hours per month, plus a computer running 100+ hours/week...

 

A month of DU time is just $7 for me, so looking at what I make per hour in RL (after taxes) vs a 'job' in DU is... Making my head spin... But not everyone looks at games the same way... I can totally see myself buy DAC with RL cash at a certain point after launch and sell it ingame for quanta. But how much quanta is a DAC worth in the new post-wipe/relaunch game? Is it worth 4 million T1 ore or ~20 special missions? I could see designers eventually paying for the game via DAC, as their designs are make once and sell forever (besides the updates after patches). Maybe industrialists as well, if they scale up large enough or sell certain rare items at a decent rate...

 

That doesn't mean that DU becomes a p2w game for me, it becomes a game where I set goals that once I achieve them and they work, I can retire them instead of grinding it till I break. I can focus on projects instead of constantly keeping up with NQ game changing/breaking patches...

 

The the other big question will be, what will a DAC cost, will there be a difference in price between 1 or 10?

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I don't really get it from a business perspective. The longer you play the game, the more it costs NQ. Why would they then reward players with free time? That's combining higher cost with no revenue. 

 

The only way DAC works is if there's enough active subs to support those that don't pay -- then it becomes a money sink and a lure to encourage people to get hooked thinking "hey I can earn my sub by grinding" when most likely they can't. 

 

If DU doesn't first have enough subs to be stable, then people trading quanta for DAC doesn't make as much sense. If they allow it...it will be absurdly expensive.

 

I mean, it seems obvious...NQ only makes less money the more people actually play and I'm skeptical that they'll be so overflowing with subs that they will be willing to exchange free play time for quanta for any reason. 

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4 hours ago, blundertwink said:

I don't really get it from a business perspective. The longer you play the game, the more it costs NQ. Why would they then reward players with free time? That's combining higher cost with no revenue. 

 

The only way DAC works is if there's enough active subs to support those that don't pay -- then it becomes a money sink and a lure to encourage people to get hooked thinking "hey I can earn my sub by grinding" when most likely they can't. 

 

If DU doesn't first have enough subs to be stable, then people trading quanta for DAC doesn't make as much sense. If they allow it...it will be absurdly expensive.

 

I mean, it seems obvious...NQ only makes less money the more people actually play and I'm skeptical that they'll be so overflowing with subs that they will be willing to exchange free play time for quanta for any reason. 

I guess it depends on whether DAC will be sold at a fixed price by bots or not. If it works like how it works on eve, it definitely wouldn't work. If its a fixed price sold by bots it will probably be worth NQ's time. Publicity is often directly proportional to revenue, so as long as NQ does it right DAC could be very successful.

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4 hours ago, blundertwink said:

I don't really get it from a business perspective. The longer you play the game, the more it costs NQ. Why would they then reward players with free time? That's combining higher cost with no revenue.

 

A free month would be a hook to try and gain players that normally would not try a game, nothing is lost and you gain a potential player.

The down side is players that would not have joined the game, perhaps learn they where right and stay away for ever

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5 hours ago, blundertwink said:

The only way DAC works is if there's enough active subs to support those that don't pay -- then it becomes a money sink and a lure to encourage people to get hooked thinking "hey I can earn my sub by grinding" when most likely they can't. 

Not really, 

 

While yes, some will have a considerable stack of DAC and not have to pay NQ another cent for months, if not years. But on the number of players NQ will need to keep the game alive that number of players is irrelvant.

 

DAC represents a month of game time and whether bought for $$ and use in game or bought in game and used, it is always paid for IRL so will always put money in NQ's pocket.

 

 

The thing NQ never has considered (it seems) is that they are not CCP and this is not EVE.. PLEX was introduced when the game was already wel established and it offered a means for players to either gain in game currency through buying a token IRL or use their in game wealth to play for free. DU has yet to prove it is viable and will be sustainable.

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15 hours ago, Kurosawa said:

 

A free month would be a hook to try and gain players that normally would not try a game, nothing is lost and you gain a potential player.

The down side is players that would not have joined the game, perhaps learn they where right and stay away for ever

 

Two sides to this.

 

1. For each active player it costs more money for NQ to host the game on (AWS) cloud servers. And since NQ are locket into this tech and cannot do self hosting, they have no way to efficiently scale the economics of this.  So there is a fundamental problem with the architecture of the game that prevents any kind of "free to play".

 

2. The game is bad, and NQ knows this. So as you said, any free exposure would probably do more damage then good. And this is probably also the main reason why they stay away from the steam platform etc., since they would get murdered in the reviews and they know it.

 

 

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