I see a lot of NA/West players doing their dailies on one character then alt F4 or spending IRL money on mats. That style of gameplay just isn’t sustainable until much later into the game.
Lost Ark is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s meant to be grinded 1-2 hours a day throughout the week with alts, funnel mats, then do a long session at the end of the week
Smilegate gives the option to spend money indefinitely but you need to realize that in other regions, only 12% of smilegates profit comes from whaling. Just because it’s an option, doesn’t mean it’s a good one, far from it. For example, an ester weapon in KR costs an estimate of 100K dollars. Only 20 players currently have it, however in a few months every player will get it naturally.
The point is, the game is not going to drastically change. Even with the insane amount of mats that we’ll get later on, it’s still going to be a slow grind & whales will always have an opportunity to spend a ridiculous amount of money on something
You should really ask yourself if this game is for you or not instead of hoping AGS will fix it because they won’t and can’t. This is fundamentally Lost Arks game design.
I think that you got it wrong. Usually, a tiny fraction of players provide most of the profit. What you just said is that 88% of SG’s profits come from casuals, which basically go against every freemium game (mobile or not) ever made
Just think about it: why would anyone make a game that requires several thousands from entry level to high end, which offers you packs and cristals and whatnot on every corner of the game, if your main income comes from skins?
…wouldn’t be better to make the game ultra acessible and get more players which would buy even more skins
I won’t spend a dime on gearing. I’ll move gold / crystals around and do some Mari’s shop but that’s it. I believe Zeals coined the term ‘Rage Honing’ and that’s what a lot of whales are doing.
They also went further to point out the Raid ilvls required for the KR version and a lot of players already exceed majority of them. Also pointed out streamers do that for views. It’s a trick.
What doesn’t make sense ? They give you all the tools to be f2p (at least in KR) while offering you the option to whale out if you want to? It’s a win win no?
I don’t get why people are so surprised they make most of their money off skins. Has anyone here not played league of legends, or other games with skins? Maplestory makes its money the same way, except their systems are way worse and way more horrible for f2p.
As far as I know, it’s against the law to falsify quarterly reports and could result in multiple lawsuits & jail time so I doubt any multi million dollar company would attempt it.
Now thats something reasonable
It means that skins act more as a bridge between f2p and whales, and would make sense that they are massively popular and acessible.
However it still implies that the people buying those seek currency, and thats usually related to whaling, which comes back to the first point - whaling carries the game. Unless casuals also tend to buy skins and sell them for gold, which is unlikely (?)
i mean that its simply wrong / misleading / misinterpreted. Read above
Thats the thing, i really think they are compelled to spend. These games (lost ark has the same predatory systems as your average mobile game) tend to incite people to spend by messing with our nature, not exactly a regional or cultural thing. A very good example of this is genshin impact, which opened wallets of millions of americans like it was never seen before, still making 80M through mobile alone every month. People love to feel strong, avoid the FOMO or just get the new cool thing that its there.
They way you get to the spedings may vary (as @Xorn mentioned from selling skins, which is also common in BDO) be it from skins or buying some currency directly, but the idea that whaling tends to carry most of the profit is a given on pretty much every game.
OP, don’t bother trying to bring sense to the entitled NA/EU crowd. They want everything handed to them in silver-platter and lose their shit when everything in-game can’t be obtained easily.
You can say whatever you want, but if you had any brains you could look it up yourself. It’s public information and has been discussed by the dev before. You’re literally talking about things that you’re factually wrong on and making a topic about something that’s incorrect.
Well, they manufactured a race by giving us T3 from the start then releasing Argos way too early. I don’t ‘think’ they will attempt that predatory behavior again. They got kicked for it.
Time will have to tell on how the game goes. I personally want the classes and more backbone content. Island are like a lottery. You find a trash grind or you find a fun story with cut scenes.
My main is 1360 and taking my sweet time because I don’t care about playing the market mini-game. I want to see more of this world… with more voice acting preferably.
