stop removing things from the gem store
Its called “hard sell”, and just because it’s not prying money out of your hands right this second, doesn’t mean that it’s not highly effective.
I wonder what your basis for comparison is…”
- Jareth, King of Goblins.
Its called “hard sell”, and just because it’s not prying money out of your hands right this second, doesn’t mean that it’s not highly effective.
I’m sure it’s somewhat effective, but I feel like it’s just not AS effective as always being available. once it’s time to fully gear my thief if the daggers are still not for sale I’m going to pick a different option from the trading post, and then anet truly will have lost.
P.S. love your videos
Limited availability and limited time sales have always been effective in driving people off the fence to actually spend cash. I’m talking retail not just the gem store. Slap limited edition or President’s Day sale always tick up sales.
That’s what JC Penney’s learned when they stopped having sales an marked up items and simply offered the product permanently at the old sale price. Nobody was interested at a fair price, customers wanted the false satisfaction of saving money even if the new permanent price was the same as the old sale price. So they went back to raising the prices and have periodic sales, it was better for business.
RIP City of Heroes
This is why you should just keep a couple of thousand Gems sitting in your wallet. When something epic shows up, you can buy it. Otherwise, you just need to wait and hope they re-release it.
It would be better if they stopped adding stuff to the gemstore and instead added stuff through actual gameplay.
It would be better if they stopped adding stuff to the gemstore and instead added stuff through actual gameplay.
But then the game runs out of money to keep the servers up and the devs employed.
And someone will chime in about the whole “it does already by allowing you to convert gold to gems”. Have stuff in game as well but you can’t run an MMO without some means of continuous income.
RIP City of Heroes
If I were the director of Anet sales department, I would keep it the way as it is.
Here is the business side of things:
Investors and anyone running a business prefer steady sales trend rather than unpredictable, haphazard ones.
If Anet were to keep these skins on the gem store permanently, what would the trend look like? They would have very high initial sales, and then it drops off from that. Sales are good, but it messes with your forecasts and year over year figures, which would look bad to non-players, specifically investors.
By removing these seasonal skins, Anet can effectively drive up sales over two periods. The first period of course, is when the skins make their debut. Anet can drive plenty of sales for that particular month.
The second period is when the skins come back.
Now is this far-fetched? Nope. Here is an example.
Now let’s say the sales department is looking at their forecasts for the 1st half of 2014. They predict that sales will be drastically down in March 2014 compared to March 2013 because they do not have any items in the pipeline to release in that month. So what they can do to adjust the forecast is to re-release these skins during that month to at the very least comp to 2013.
In the real world you can consider this manipulation of sales. I’m no accountant (I planned on being one before I failed cost accounting miserably), but these are some of the tricks companies use to tailor their income statements. In the extreme side of things, there is something called Hollywood accounting which turns highly profitable movies in actuality to massive losses on paper.