Today, they actually don’t need to give a good product anymore - that is the scheme. Back in the day, when companies needed to generated a fanbase and audience, you have to provide a good product. Once you have an established fanbase who buy anything because it’s that IP, you can churn out anything. And question companies weigh up are “how many of those people do we have?” And that’s how we get the price point from their estimates.
If a product generated exactly twice the amount of money as before, it is the result of:
- Twice as many people bought the product.
TO
- The price of the same content has been doubled for the same group of buyers.
Which leads to the method:
Yet they are asking for money upfront despite the lack of information. Because they are asking that question “how many of those people do we have?”.
A well run company is one who cares about their audience, the product and have confidence in both to provide a solid reason for your money. A roadmap did just that. “We want you to pay us X up front and we will get you Y in return”. At the moment we have 14% of a roadmap with as you said the rest WIP.
Imagine going on Dragon’s Den and asking for money and you say you’ve got 14% of your plan. You’d be laughed out the room. And that’s where the fan connections and sentimental value kicks in for some. That drives the purchase because of history. And it’s being taking advantage of.
To use quotes from Franz and Pitman:
Here’s the margin scheme at play. IO chose to not disclose a plan.
Here’s the target audience for said scheme. (Not Pitman but the quote he described.)
And that leads to taking advantage of long time fanbases.
I’m sure they did. Even more so, when they’ve been in hot water before for having one of the worst information disclosures during the 2016 Hitman. They know you have to be clear. H2 was clearer, H3 was clear as day. Recently, companies are willing to take the gamble on their established audiences support, love and trust for easy margins and money if it’s profitable.
GTA is a PvP mess - the game is a battlefield that makes 80% of the game near impossible. Who buys the best tools, has a better chance.
Ghost Recon ditched a lot of its core mechanics which grew its fanbase and instead shoehorned in RPG lite mechanics for a slow grind and a store front for the chance at “re-occurring spenders”.
CoD recently added Samantha Maxis - an long time Zombie character going back to World At War. Only that she a paid bundle at 33% of a AAA game and not available to earn. 13 years of playerbase connections, story and development used as a tool to drive the inflated sale.
And here we are on Hitman going down the very same route.
What’s “over-the-top”? These are the current facts:
IO chose to disclose 14% of their new product for 100% of the price (or 14% but will be about 120%)
IO chose to paywall drop 1 of 7 which were previously free for 5 times the amount of its original price.
IO chose to not regional price the product.
IO chose to price this DLC at the equivalent efforts of Patient Zero or 2 brand new maps.
You said it perfectly 2 days ago -
https://www.hitmanforum.com/t/hitman-3-seven-deadly-sins-new-dlc/8371/222?u=gtajj
That was always the plan.
