I can only hope that he is gathering the universal feedback and feeding it back to the right people that can make the decision to pull this nonsense from stores.
If he’s not, then he’s just as bad as the decision makers because that’s just shoving fingers in the company ears and yelling “LA LA LA LA. I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”.
As a PR person for IO, he’s kind of obligated to be the face of the company. It’s an unenviable and impossible position; hated by those in the community but being told to put on a brave face and defend their reasoning.
Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t mean PR people can’t grow a spine and leave when shit like this gets pulled in a game, but I can understand the reluctance, job security being what it is and all that.
I’ve been thinking and I’m just even more confused by IOI’s own wording that this is “a foot in the door” type entry point.
Because fine, sure, it’s a lower-cost, low-content bundle compared to the price and content of the full main game.
But then what does that make Part One now? “Foot in the door-with-extra-steps”??
Clearly Part One is the better “deal” for someone who might want to try out Hitman’s location-hopping assassin fantasy for a lower price (at least when its on sale). Because as it stands right now, if IOI are really certain they needed an even cheaper, smaller paid bundle to advertise the game as, then they should just remove Part One entirely.
Heck, give them long enough I’m sure someone in the investors will have an epiphany that selling a “Free Demo” version of the game will incease sales tenfold, and they’ll just start promoting the Starter Pack as the newest, coolest “foot in the door” product… 
How many more times are they gonna shrink the game to sell it again??
The biggest thing that doesn’t make sense with the whole “foot in the door” thing is that it doesn’t include Paris, the actual first sandbox mission. Paris is pretty much perfect for the first mission: a relatively small sized map, a large amount of mission stories which are easy to find and understand, it’s easy to navigate the map with so many options to find to go between floors, and all the disguises are easy to find and obtain.
Sapienza, while a great mission and map, is much more complex and has a ton more going on than Paris does. The map’s much larger, and there’s so much outside of the mansion area which isn’t utilized for much. The targets have more restricted routes (with Silvio even being able to run away and make you fail), and the destroy the virus objective is a lot tougher to figure out what to do. There’s several disguises which aren’t particularly useful and/or are harder to collect. Even mission stories are a step up in complexity. The reason why Sapienza is so good because it develops and builds on skills the player learned in Paris, which they don’t have by skipping to Sapienza.
That is an excellent analysis and I totally agree.
Very good explanation.
I also think Sapienza, especially at the time, got a whole lot of praise and hype from the community since it was such a drastic shift from Episode 1 Paris in a much larger map area.
From dusk fashion show in a large mansion to a bright seaside town, chapel and market in Italy, plus a mini-mansion and underground lab! Like, compared to Paris it’s still impressive and a great evolution but that still needs to have Paris as a comparison…
I agree that Paris is proper-built to be the ultimate sandbox tutorial. Nearly every disguise and area is useful or intended with the main mission. Wheras in Sapienza there’s tons of empty shops and apartments that have very little to do with the main mission events.
I can’t believe they’re actually doubling down on this. What a stupid hill to die on.
This company is so out of touch is downright comical. A couple years ago, Hakan publicly admited that the episodic format from 2016 totally blew up on their faces and the studio almost died because of that. They were expecting most people to buy each episode individually because it was a “cheaper entry point”, however, they found out that people prefer to buy a full product over an incomplete one (no shit Sherlock), this lead to the game failing comercially and they were only able to make a profit from it after rereleasing it as a full package.
Did they learn anything from the almost demise of the studio? Wasn’t already very clear that people hate this kind of shit? Is the delvelopment of your other games going so bad that you have to squeeze every single penny out of Hitman to keep it afloat?
Selling a game is not rocket science guys, so stop acting like it is, jeez. Why is it so hard for you to be consumer friendy?
https://www.reddit.com/r/HiTMAN/comments/1if2od4/iois_quest_for_virality_and_pointless_changes_to/
I decided to copy-paste my video script (and make some minor changes to recent events) on Reddit. It’s largely the same wording as in the video I posted, but now, in text format!
Oh I saw this a few days ago and thought it was a meme, chuckled and moved on
Just checked and what the fuck? Why is this real?
It seems that Sapienza has a lot of love within IOI so, if I’m being charitable, let’s say they made the map its own SKU because they want to showcase it specifically to potential customers on the basis that Sapienza is so good, it’ll drive you buy the rest of the game.
OK, all well and good, except… the current price point for what amounts to a single map that released ~10 years ago is absolutely batshit insane. At the least you could knock it down to 70% off when you’re selling the entirety of HITMAN 2015’s maps at €1 less precisely because you’re doing a 70% discount on it.
The mere existence of an undiscounted inferior SKU can only be percieved as either incompetent or predatory.
Neither of those are a good look.
It’s blatantly predatory. It’s called Penetration pricing, and just about every corporate business does it to hook a new customer base by having a “low cost of entry” so they can push sales and of course try to hook someone into being a loyal and returning customer.
In the case of this Sapienza Pack they created this “low cost” jumping off point of one of the most if not these most well received map in the trilogy. This seems all well and fine, but the issue with the existence of this pack is the fact IO has released other packs like these in the past to hook people but they were of greater value.
Insult to injury is the subsequent sales of the Part 1 Pack being cheaper than the Sapienza Pack. So for the people they’re attempting to get in through the door they inevitably created a situation where the one of greater value is being presented as the one that’s also the cheapest entry point for people. With these two existing and essentially competing with each other it’s only left people trying to buy the game confused on what edition to purchase and when a customer is confused they’re gonna be less likely to make a purchase.
This is where the community has been picking up the slack trying to make it more clear on where the right jumping off point is. If IO didn’t release individual packs like Part 1 and had just the base game or a complete edition. Then sure fine the Sapienza pack could in theory work so long as the full game upgrade packs also make sense.
The Sapienza Pack failed and IOI will fail to hook further new players if these editions continue to persist.
To IO (pray tell, maybe even someone who’s not on the community engagement roles who might be reading this):
Please, please do reconsider this decision; it’s a bad note to start off Year 5 on, and takes away any shine off whatever may be in store.
Not only that, but it reflects very poorly that a studio that used to command much respect and loyalty from its playerbase feels a need to resort to such marketing plots to obtain as much money from WoA as possible.
A key complaint about Hitman 1, 2 and 3 was that of a convoluted purchasing system; a great step forward was taken by uniting everything into the WoA umbrella, but then all of that has been undone by the addition of the Sapienza access pack.
This just gives off the impression that you don’t care about either new players who want to buy your products, or about older players who’ve stuck with you through thick and thin- even during the leanest of times during Hitman 2.
While I wasn’t worried about how either Project Fantasy or Project 007 would’ve turned out earlier, I most definitely am now. I’m concerned that questionable decisions like these will eventually percolate down to every aspect of the coming games’ monetization components too.
Ending this pointless essay with worry.
Gosh I hope we will at least get some communication from @Combatglue
So if this were like a pizza… The whole pizza would cost $80.00 (and it’s cut into 8 slices). So that’s $10 per slice.
So IOI is selling one super special slice at say… $30(?).
To get the remaining slices would you have to pay $50.00? Total price (still): $80.
Or are you still paying $70 for every remaining (not as super special) slice? Total (new) price: $100
I’d be interested in a more simplified graphical breakdown, or something that represents how the money put in for the whole product could be broken down for each (shall we say) “slice”.
Perhaps the (supposed?) surcharge is to help fund development either for the 007 game, or the content that H:WoA will or should be getting for Y5. Because in the end, even though this “strategy” doesn’t seem right, you still have to wonder…
Why!?
Or maybe sales have leveled off and this is a way to keep an upward trend. 
Don’t take this as me defending their actions. I mean, I already own most of what there is to own outside of the ET DLCs (but I’m tempted to get the Splitter DLC) and the street art pack. So I’ll never have to worry about buying Sapienza.
But if customers, in hindsight, realize this offer was a rip-off - then that’ll reflect badly. I just hope that, for them, buying the rest of the game is offset by the amount of money they’ve already put into it.
I understand that IOI needs to make some money before 007’s launch, but HITMAN WoA split sale looks like a bad idea.
Instead, how about putting out a product as DLC that benefits existing users as well?
Personally, I’d like to see “permanent play rights to elusive targets”, “All content offline play rights”,“Wildcards and Fixers to the Elusive Arcade”, “Resale of Disruptors (how about making it a masked fighter?)”etc.
I would gladly buy it.
Putting a proper offline mode behind a paid DLC would go down worse that this has.
The game should just have its offline mode reworked; with offline scoring and support for offline escalations (especially 7DS which I paid for!).
I just noticed that today, did the Sapienza pack also used to have a store page? It can be bought from the WOA main site but besides the title the user gets no information what it is. “Sapienza” is a fantasy city so you need to know the game a bit to know it is a map.
