Expensive ZEN -- Devs please reply

The conclusion has been drawn that they just don't care. They base their prices on an unregulated number of what they think the average American income is, despite the fact that the American economy is currently epic fail. Simple economics could make them millionaires, but they must have slept through that class in college lol.

Personally, I love PW, and if the Zen prices were lowered I would gladly use the cash shop. But, as it currently is, the "free to play" game is a bit too expensive. Just waiting for the WotLK expansion to hit and then I'm going back to WoW.

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HYPOTHETICAL REFERENCE MATERIAL:
(Based on 1000 players)

$1 = 1 gold
1000 players
200 spending $20 a month
Total profit = $4000 a month ($48,000 a year)

$1 = 2 gold
1000 players
800 spending $10 a month
Total Profit = $8000 a month ($96,000 a year)
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Azraelkurai, online purchases are not entirely profit. There are non-trivial levels of overhead involved in credit card transactions. Paypal tends toward >1.9%-2.9% + 30 cents per transaction, while Google Checkout revolves around 2% + 20 cents per transaction for normal users, plus the bandwidth and other fees and whatever their internal merchant account costs and taxes are.

Assuming just Google Checkout, and a minimum purchase of 20 gold :
200 users at 20 USD/month would result in an income of 3,880 USD.
800 users at 10 USD/month would result in an income of 7,680 USD.

That's still 'more' money -- albeit at the cost of having twice the number of Cash Shop items running around -- but it relies rather heavily on that stupendous jump in Cash Shop users. If you 'only' double the number of users purchasing from the Cash Shop, you end up making less money (3,840 USD in the above example).

I'm not familiar with the prices of many other comparable F2P Cash Shop games, nor have I used the Cash Shop here enough to give pronouncements from on high. A quick look at Maple Story, arguably one of the earliest successful games of this economic structure, suggests that at the very least both clothing and EXP scroll prices are well within an acceptable range for that particular market.

I'm not unsympathetic to the concept that some items might be oddly priced, although my opinion counts for mouse nuts, but claiming that the exchange rate for the currency itself is inherently wrong seems a bit like yelling that the sky is falling.

More players vs Cost

I do agree more players would be tempted to pay for this game if the prices were lowered just a bit. But majority of the players I believe are minors, who does not have a credit card and who certaintly won't ask for money for a video game from their parents. They will reject them indefinitely. So the most of the cash-payers here are LIMITED with addition to their willingness to pay. Less payers = require more money. It is also a fresh (somewhat?) start, and if they were to lower the prices on the cash shop they might go out of business.

The amount of money that will be used up increases the in-game value of cash-items too, so that they will stare and admire it and then finally will be tempted to quest for it in real life.

Another thing is that It's like gambling, and either way the company could **** up. Unless they collect statistics from a 3 year range and find a common ground there. Well has it been a long time since OPEN BETA yet? I don't see them closing down their businesses just yet.

I can't begin to imagine how much it is costing right now to run 3 servers packed with gazillions of people.

Also consider that these cashshop items last FOREVER unlike in maple story, where you get to wear something for a month, and is disappeared into oblivion~b:bye

troll wrote: »

doesn't really matter anyway -OTHER VERSION OF PW THAT DOESN'T EXIST is going OB prob in mid october.

this statement is factually incorrect and we do not allow users to promote/link to other versions of PW.

This is your first and final warning.