Open Discussion Pertaining to Monetization Model of Supremacy 1914

I'm sorry, but I have a little problem with that? I was, apparently mistakenly under the impression that inciting a topic such as "Open discussion pertaining the monetization model" would indicate some form of openness in the company to implement different things. Afterall, that is not as uncommon for companies to do as you're leading us to believe here. If no businessman ever did something that had "a significant risk attached to" it, we'd live in a much different world right now. Changes can also be gameplay tested, they can be rolled back, I'm sure a lot of businesses actually envy you guys for that actual lack of risk and ability to fine-tune the way you make money. So while I never expected you to do anything, also seein as how the company has made it abundantly clear at almost every opportunity that the monetization system is for some reason entirely carved in stone, surely you could see how it wasn't all that far-fetched to think that you were actually considering implementing some feedback. I mean, you guys even asked for it. This is a bit of a slap in the face.

What you guys did is ask for our concerns about something and then, after one and a half years and five pages of (mostly) constructive feedback on it you come back to basically tell us that if we ever thought you would actually care about those concerns we're almost idiots who clearly have no idea what the "economically sensible" thing is because that thing obviously makes our feedback worthless. And with your quote essentially just brought it all back to the old "Well it couldn't be free to play otherwise!" argument that literally everybody in this thread has acknowledged or at least clearly accepted in one way or another and tried to come up with ideas keeping it in mind. So alright, everything is the way it always was, but now I also feel taken for a fool.

Sorry, couldn't let you get away with that. That wasn't a great way to treat your customers at all.

Hello. this maybe my first post. I have played for over 10 years. and seen the basic game develop. Good to hear the company is financial;ly "stable" from a designers point of view. I am not too bothered about GM players blowing thier cash, But if this your only profit production as opposed to break even trading then you are comfortable leading to laziness and on to arrogance to your customer base. There in lies your "risk factor".

But i wish to make a designer point here (ok off topic but

1. I am colour blind as are around 25 % of men. 2% of women. The province info button menu shows in orange on grey is near invisible to me most txt is black or white was it a woman who coded that txt over background.? a simple tweak should solve this please?

2. Also the trade window state "We DEMAND" not a good word to open a trade negotiation, any right minded english speaker would say We Request, a minor point but then you are a GERMAN company huh ! open to customer feedback Nichts Verstehn !!!

Let the players get thier Ya's Ya's out and ppl trouble will blow over.

Be careful, very very careful my friends.

Crasianos

around 25 % of men

That can't be true!?

Crasianos

2. Also the trade window state "We DEMAND" not a good word to open a trade negotiation, any right minded english speaker would say We Request, a minor point but then you are a GERMAN company huh ! open to customer feedback Nichts Verstehn !!!

It's 1914, I think this is owed to that. I've also thought about that in the past but chalk it up to "historical conduct".

LostRealist

That can't be true!?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness#Epidemiology

Color blindness affects a large number of individuals, with protans and deutans being the most common types. In individuals with Northern European ancestry, as many as 8 percent of men and 0.4 percent of women experience congenital color deficiency.

In the United States, about 7 percent of the male population—or about 10.5 million men—and 0.4 percent of the female population either cannot distinguish red from green, or see red and green differently from how others do

Oops have i started something

Yep many men are colour blind. Rods excessive over cones on the retina or something. BUT there is an advantage in that night vision is superb, well it is with me perhaps evolutionary to improve men's sight when out night hunting in the dim and distant "Demanding" past. (Historical) J'me demande?

Back to Money and Devs. I am on a good 6 core raid graphics PC with fibre connextion and since the mobile access became active i am experiencing a posativley ANNOYING FRAME LAG. Is this that the cause ? i hear from my coalition patrners that the mobile screen actions are in many cases too small to the point of being useless especially in a 500 game. Can Bytro not separate the mobile / PC versions to different games and servers ???? it may also seem that targets of opporunity wandering into range of ARTY and BG's are ignored, what is this a retrograde step or deliberate restriction.

I am asking freezy for a response or is he too lazy, oops sorry too busy. probably unpaid anyhow.

Crasianos

Back to Money and Devs. I am on a good 6 core raid graphics PC with fibre connextion and since the mobile access became active i am experiencing a posativley ANNOYING FRAME LAG. Is this that the cause ? i hear from my coalition patrners that the mobile screen actions are in many cases too small to the point of being useless especially in a 500 game. Can Bytro not separate the mobile / PC versions to different games and servers ???? it may also seem that targets of opporunity wandering into range of ARTY and BG's are ignored, what is this a retrograde step or deliberate restriction.

I am asking freezy for a response or is he too lazy, oops sorry too busy. probably unpaid anyhow.

decrease number of shared maps and seen provinces

decrease number of troops moving on the map ( try to talk to others)

if this does not help switch off unit visibility and at least try to do some economy

never use spy mode with units visible!

Personally at this point i dont care how they monetize the game, as long as their willing to admit that the game is clearly pay to win as well. While it is free to play, the amount of money you spend on a round gives you a clear and direct advantage over another player. Whether it be used to "nuke" provinces (spend gold to tank the morale of a province or country) or to spam armoured cars/arty/tanks etc and simply overwhelm your enemy, or its used quite literally to "buy rounds". And while i am understanding of the fact that there are players who are skilled enough to at least make the gold spend worthless, it does not represent the entire playerbase. There are players who play the 500p maps or 31p maps who are newer and get gold rushed on day 1 (kaizer12 actually gold rushes in alot of games). If anything, the gold spam is actually demonizing players and to a degree i think it hurts more than helps. In fact, its hard to gauge how good you actually are against a player who makes up for their lack of skill with their paychecks.

Either way, im happy to admit that i myself have been killed by gold spammers hundreds of times over, and im sure it will happen hundreds more. Thats fine, as long as the company is willing to admit that the game is free to play, but pay to win. Honesty is one heck of a thing. And i prefer supporting an honest company rather than one who throws every single advantage possible to the player who is foolish enough to spend hundreds and thousands of dollars on the game and masks it under the "helps the game" excuse. And it is an excuse.

Another idea is to allow players who are eligible (be it frontline pioneers like myself or those players who have gotten a certain rank in the game) to create games that are gold free. Its almost depressing in a way knowing that there are no alternatives to the current "gold crisis" that kinda plagues this game. Now im not the first person to bring up the idea of gold free games either, its quite a popular idea. The fact that even the admins admit they dont want to change anything makes it seem like you truly dont care about your playerbase. I mean you shafted everybody by forcing us to play against elite AI by default, which was widely disliked, and still threw the playerbase the middle finger. I guess theres no reason why this issue should be different. I guess there truly are some things that will never change. And unfortunately, it seems Bytro is unwilling to change too.

LostRealist

I'm sorry, but I have a little problem with that? I was, apparently mistakenly under the impression that inciting a topic such as "Open discussion pertaining the monetization model" would indicate some form of openness in the company to implement different things. Afterall, that is not as uncommon for companies to do as you're leading us to believe here. If no businessman ever did something that had "a significant risk attached to" it, we'd live in a much different world right now. Changes can also be gameplay tested, they can be rolled back, I'm sure a lot of businesses actually envy you guys for that actual lack of risk and ability to fine-tune the way you make money. So while I never expected you to do anything, also seeing as how the company has made it abundantly clear at almost every opportunity that the monetization system is for some reason entirely carved in stone, surely you could see how it wasn't all that far-fetched to think that you were actually considering implementing some feedback. I mean, you guys even asked for it. This is a bit of a slap in the face.

What you guys did is ask for our concerns about something and then, after one and a half years and five pages of (mostly) constructive feedback on it you come back to basically tell us that if we ever thought you would actually care about those concerns we're almost idiots who clearly have no idea what the "economically sensible" thing is because that thing obviously makes our feedback worthless. And with your quote essentially just brought it all back to the old "Well it couldn't be free to play otherwise!" argument that literally everybody in this thread has acknowledged or at least clearly accepted in one way or another and tried to come up with ideas keeping it in mind. So alright, everything is the way it always was, but now I also feel taken for a fool.

Sorry, couldn't let you get away with that. That wasn't a great way to treat your customers at all.

This is so on the ball. This is partly the way i have felt for the past year. I dont appreciate being valued based on the amount of money im willing to blow on the game. It reminds me of Wargamming's games World of Tanks and World of Warships, which are games that value your patronage to their game by the amount of money you are willing to spend. And they work the same way. Paying players get infinite advantages that the otherwise common person cant afford.

Momo Kawashima

Personally at this point i dont care how they monetize the game, as long as their willing to admit that the game is clearly pay to win as well. While it is free to play, the amount of money you spend on a round gives you a clear and direct advantage over another player. Whether it be used to "nuke" provinces (spend gold to tank the morale of a province or country) or to spam armoured cars/arty/tanks etc and simply overwhelm your enemy, or its used quite literally to "buy rounds". And while i am understanding of the fact that there are players who are skilled enough to at least make the gold spend worthless, it does not represent the entire playerbase. There are players who play the 500p maps or 31p maps who are newer and get gold rushed on day 1 (kaizer12 actually gold rushes in alot of games). If anything, the gold spam is actually demonizing players and to a degree i think it hurts more than helps. In fact, its hard to gauge how good you actually are against a player who makes up for their lack of skill with their paychecks.

I agree with a lot of that and I'd like to use this opportunity to point to a specific problem again: The lack of any way to spend your GM that doesn't unfairly affect other players. Even the least intrusive options give you an immediate advantage and this is clear to everyone using them. I have actually talked to new players in chat who disliked this, stating they wanted to play "normally" and without gaining such an advantage over other players and were confused as to why there was no other way to spend GM.

I mean you could start five premium games a day but that's about it. The monetization scheme here goes straight to the point that "if you buy, we'll make you better". Obviously this attracts those who will end up spending money pathetically because they have a problem that the gaming industry as a whole has seemingly decided is absolutely fine to exploit. Don't wanna get into that, rehab centers also make money somehow, so whatever. But this also alienates players who realize early on that the monetization system is exclusively pay2win. Other games let you buy skins or junk like that that doesn't impact gameplay at all, just lets you customize your personal experience. Why not ponder something like that? Because enterpreneurship is not "financially sensible" to you?

freezy

... please don't expect us to change the current model of this game as long as it is working and as long as alternatives have a significant risk attached to them. That is just the economically sensible thing to do (and most other businesses would (or should) act in the same way.

Can you tell us more on how you define "significant risk" so we have a better idea on what types of changes you are open to?

I posted my suggestion under the "Missing Features" section before realizing this thread existed.

New "Pure Strategy Mode" gold feature

Can you share thoughts on creating a new "Pure Strategy Mode" gold feature? Seems like you could experiment with this pretty easily and turn off the Gold Feature if doesn't work out. You could also adjust the High Command cost to find a good balance between maximizing revenue and increasing new subscriptions/referrals. Perhaps offer a short promotion on 6 month subscriptions when the new feature launches? Just some ideas...

Guys if you were around a year ago or before the Thread was created you know that this Monetization Thread was made to stop the need for Banning players from the Forum for stating the obvious about the 'Pay 2 Win" nature of the game... IMO Bytro is willing to make any changes which will increase revenue and profit, many suggestions from players are already available and players simply do not know how to micro manage their own countries, units, etc...

In the real world business professionals simply 'Smile and say Sorry", when they really mean to leave the building and you have nothing coming... no-one from Bytro Team is allowed or would jeopardize a real paying job to accommodate some gamer by saying " Yes, S1914 is Pay 2 win" however we all know at a certain point your either increase your skill level, learn new strategies and tactic's to fight the heavy gold users, or you join the club and buy premium currency (GOLD)...

Worst thing Bytro does IMO, is to implement new rules changes which affect maps that are 3-4 months already in progress, and for those 500 maps where I already dumped 150k GM fighting against some noob gold spammer which got his 1000% bonus on his first purchase of GOLD and was able to instantly materialize planes and burn down 100 provinces with the gold he purchased for pennies on the dollar...well it is all part of the business plan , and if I am really upset I can go find a new game, Candy Crush or something LOL

Good luck and have fun, we all here for entertainment

Hastings TNT

however we all know at a certain point your either increase your skill level, learn new strategies and tactic's to fight the heavy gold users

But you can't though, and you know it. You yourself are spending 150k of the stuff on a "noob" to combat his spending. Do you see how this reminds me of the old "Fighting for peace is like doing something for virginity" saying? Yes there's a lot of players (like a seriously concerning amount) who learn to spend money much sooner than they learn actually playing and for a lot of them, no amount of spending will overcome their ineptitude. But if a guy is for whatever reason - more often than not a pathological psychological situation, let's not kid ourselves - willing to spend triple digit dollars just to get past you, no amount of tactics or strategy will save you. This is the core issue with the current system. It can be used not only to make the game easier for you but to completely break it for anyone else. It goes too far. The more someone spends, the less of a point there is for his opponents and himself to even play the game at all. Use of Goldmark is a substitute to regular playing, not an amendment in its current form. Just one example: Railguns are worthless thanks to Goldmark. In a public game, you'd have to be a straight up idiot to build one and rely on it being operational. I am honestly a little dumbfounded that that sort of business model for a game worked out the way it has. You can literally buy the actual game out of the way here and people actually do it by the dozens every week.

And if someone pulls out the Goldhammer and nukes your entire military infrastructure completely in a two month-old 100p map, and I should not have to state that this is entirely possible and absolutely happens, no amount of tactics or skill on my part will change what an incredibly frustrating thing this is. I've spent weeks to be where I'm at, it's been a journey through gameplay that wrote a completely unique story of fight and survival, friendship and betrayal - and then someone spends 30 bucks on you smartly and it's fricking over. I realize my emotions don't put food on anyone's table but maybe my High Command memberships over the course of nine years have and maybe some of those I've recommended this game to way back in the day have as well. You probably wouldn't want to hear what I'd consider my honest description of this game and the people running it to an outsider nowadays.

It's not like all suggestions in this thread would lose Bytro revenue. I really don't feel like shouting them into the ether again but plenty of stuff here could bear some economic potential, it's not like we're here just to bash the pay2win factor, there are some really interesting ideas in here. But again, I guess I'm just an actual idiot for spending any time thinking about this. After ten years of nothing but "Well we gotta make money somehow, so y'all can stfu" it was indeed pretty stupid to take this thread seriously at all I now realize. I just really could have done without yet another set of middle fingers at those who actually care about this game and try to help improve it.

Sorry LostRealist . I do feel your pain, I have also been caught in the wheel and running in place and always have been given a polite deaf ear from those in power, some really do care about this game and go to lengths to teach players the nuances , some volunteers are amazing giving yrs of their lives to the community and to the team without much appreciation... it is so sad that this is the result, I feel blessed to have had a glimpse behind the curtain and to see it for what it is within 2 yrs and that I did not spend 10 yrs on this pay2win dynamic... now I am content to play small maps, if I enter a big map I know to join with trusted friends and go whale hunting , even a huge whale spending millions can not defend against a coordinated attack from several veterans on several fronts

Good Luck try to have some fun

LostRealist

I'm sorry, but I have a little problem with that? I was, apparently mistakenly under the impression that inciting a topic such as "Open discussion pertaining the monetization model" would indicate some form of openness in the company to implement different things. Afterall, that is not as uncommon for companies to do as you're leading us to believe here. If no businessman ever did something that had "a significant risk attached to" it, we'd live in a much different world right now. Changes can also be gameplay tested, they can be rolled back, I'm sure a lot of businesses actually envy you guys for that actual lack of risk and ability to fine-tune the way you make money. So while I never expected you to do anything, also seein as how the company has made it abundantly clear at almost every opportunity that the monetization system is for some reason entirely carved in stone, surely you could see how it wasn't all that far-fetched to think that you were actually considering implementing some feedback. I mean, you guys even asked for it. This is a bit of a slap in the face.

What you guys did is ask for our concerns about something and then, after one and a half years and five pages of (mostly) constructive feedback on it you come back to basically tell us that if we ever thought you would actually care about those concerns we're almost idiots who clearly have no idea what the "economically sensible" thing is because that thing obviously makes our feedback worthless. And with your quote essentially just brought it all back to the old "Well it couldn't be free to play otherwise!" argument that literally everybody in this thread has acknowledged or at least clearly accepted in one way or another and tried to come up with ideas keeping it in mind. So alright, everything is the way it always was, but now I also feel taken for a fool.

Sorry, couldn't let you get away with that. That wasn't a great way to treat your customers at all.

Uhm the opening post did not mention that we currently plan to rework the business model. The idea of this thread was to have an avenue for players to voice their feedback and concerns regarding this topic. In the past players opened multiple threads about this topic each month, and it got to a point where many players got annoyed by that. So it was figured it would be better to consolidate all those threads into one thread (this one), where players can discuss this without fearing of getting banned. Me discussing this topic here with you is just a bonus but is not the main purpose of this thread. Of course a nice side effect of this thread is also that we get to hear more ideas from the community and we certainly take note of them. So I would never say that any middle finger was pointed here. Even if the proposed changes are not immediately considered, they still create value and are acknowledged.

It is true that businesses should also take risks from time to time, but we are talking about a rather big risk here that most businesses would not explore. I mean imagine you run a successful store at the moment and some customers suggest you change your current store business model completely. Would you do that? Probably most store owners would never do that because changing a well running model for something else would be a move that risks their whole business. Maybe they would try it out with a new store to see how it goes, without risking their old store.

I am also not ruling out that we will experiment with other business models in the future. This may be entirely possible, depending on the development of the business and the market. But when and how is totally not planned yet. It could be as an alternative model for an existing game or it could be an alternative model for a new game.

We actually experimented a little bit into that direction in the past. At one point we had gold-free tournaments and we also had an alliance league where players could create gold-free rounds for a gold fee of 5000 (in the season afterwards 4000). That number would be btw too low as an average entry fee for normal game rounds, but we still ran with it as a test. But these experiments sadly did not turn out to be lucrative. It was especially surprising that such a low amount of players made use of the gold entry fee rounds, and it was also met with alot of controversy in the community. So we decided to spend our time rather on other aspects of the game.

Right now there is no immediate plan to change the business model in S1914. S1914 currently has its best year since the inception 10 years ago. Meaning highest amount of active players and highest revenue. You see, since we still experience growth that many years after the release there is no reason for us to believe right now that the current model is not working in the current times. It would just be an unwise thing to risk the current growth of S1914 by experimenting with the established model right now. Of course this can change in the future and then it is of course our responsibility to act upon that. The final pages of this book have not been written yet.

Btw. this is a pretty transparent response, I hope you appreciate that even if you don't like the answer.

Momo Kawashima

The fact that even the admins admit they dont want to change anything makes it seem like you truly dont care about your playerbase. I mean you shafted everybody by forcing us to play against elite AI by default, which was widely disliked, and still threw the playerbase the middle finger. I guess theres no reason why this issue should be different. I guess there truly are some things that will never change. And unfortunately, it seems Bytro is unwilling to change too.

We care about the player base, but we also care about our business and the employees and their families. We have to have a business in order to offer a game and care for the player base. At this current point in time there just is no good business case for changing the current business model. The numbers pretty much show that, we crunched them alot and discussed all of the possible risks. But as I said in the reply above, this is not to say that it will always be this way. We are looking openly to the future and if the chance or need arises to do change, we will certainly explore that. Also keep in mind that we have more than 1 game, and we may have more in the future. It is also possible to explore alternatives in other games than S1914, and maybe consider the learnings from that in S1914 afterwards.

Oh and yes we acknowledge that you can buy advantages (and potentially wins) in the game with gold, I mean that is pretty clear, no point in hiding that. But as shown by many experienced players you can still win without doing that. In fact I would argue that our games allow for those non-gold wins much more than other free2play games, as the benefit from active and skillful play is pretty high in our games. I mean we even have mechanics like "shoot and scoot" where an active player can eradicate many dollars of a spender on a whim. There are a lot of free2play games with much worse pay2win mechanics which are much bigger than our games, some food for thought.

Bernal I

Can you tell us more on how you define "significant risk" so we have a better idea on what types of changes you are open to?

I posted my suggestion under the "Missing Features" section before realizing this thread existed.

New "Pure Strategy Mode" gold feature

Can you share thoughts on creating a new "Pure Strategy Mode" gold feature? Seems like you could experiment with this pretty easily and turn off the Gold Feature if doesn't work out. You could also adjust the High Command cost to find a good balance between maximizing revenue and increasing new subscriptions/referrals. Perhaps offer a short promotion on 6 month subscriptions when the new feature launches? Just some ideas...

Right now High command is a really small chunk in our revenue. Even increasing the prices would not make up for the loss that would be created by offering gold free games to high command users.

Significant risk is the reduction in our earnings.

If you offer gold-free rounds for an entry fee or for high command the following risks come to my mind right now (there may be more

a) the players who spend a lot of money (which finances the game) could play these rounds and in turn spend a lot less money, which in turn lowers our earnings.

b) It sends the wrong signal to the players who spend money and finance the game (e.g. giving them the impression that what they do is bad, pushing them away)

c) There are a lot of free players who spend no gold at all and who would not accept any gold entry fee, so having only gold free rounds would turn away a big chunk of our playerbase, which creates activity and marketing problems.

d) There are players who would be willing to spend gold but maybe the gold entry fee would be too high for them. In fact we would need to set the gold entry fee to a value which is the average spending per player per game round in order to not have any losses. I won't calculate definitive numbers right now but I estimate that gold value to have 5 digits, and not everyone would spend that. In turn we would lose that chunk of players as well, and as a consequence the fee would have to be even higher to account for that, which in turn drives even more people away and so on.

e) we know very well how to market a free2play game, but marketing for a premium or subscription based game is entirely different. There is no guarantee that we could pull it off with current marketing experience, marketing prices etc.

f) If you offer it as optional game mode you would split the player base between the gold free and the other players, which also creates activity and marketing problems. Since the potential player base who would be willing to pay upfront for no gold rounds is smaller and consists of more players who actually spend and pay in the game, in turn the entry fee has to be higher to account for the higher average spendings that would be lost otherwise.

Of course there are also potential chances, which were mentioned in this thread a lot already. Certainly retention and word of mouth would be better. In the end we have to weigh both sides.

Crasianos

Back to Money and Devs. I am on a good 6 core raid graphics PC with fibre connextion and since the mobile access became active i am experiencing a posativley ANNOYING FRAME LAG. Is this that the cause ? i hear from my coalition patrners that the mobile screen actions are in many cases too small to the point of being useless especially in a 500 game. Can Bytro not separate the mobile / PC versions to different games and servers ???? it may also seem that targets of opporunity wandering into range of ARTY and BG's are ignored, what is this a retrograde step or deliberate restriction.

I am asking freezy for a response or is he too lazy, oops sorry too busy. probably unpaid anyhow.

No, we won't separate desktop from mobile players. Many players actually play from both versions (desktop at home, mobile on the go), so we can't separate that. The cross-platform availability is also the reason why S1914 is still going strong. We rather want to improve the usability on mobile or desktop in problematic areas. Thanks for your feedback regarding that.

Btw. I dont look into this thread all the time, so please don't be offended if there is no timely response from me. I also have to say that it is not even my job to discuss this with you here and I am pretty much doing that in my spare time. I am also not the person who makes the decision which business model to use, that is pretty much a decision for the whole company, I am just discussing this here with you to give you more insights (these should be more regarded as personal than official company statements). In the end this thread was meant as a hub for the community to discuss this topic openly among themselves (with bytro reading and acknowledging the discussion).

Just a suggestion that might increase the players willing to pay for HIGH COMMAND... add legacy mode as an option or Perk to having HC, all new player since 2019 do not have Legacy option, this might create more profit for Bytro and stop the many that whine about not having access to Legacy Mode

freezy

It is true that businesses should also take risks from time to time, but we are talking about a rather big risk here that most businesses would not explore. I mean imagine you run a successful store at the moment and some customers suggest you change your current store business model completely. Would you do that? Probably most store owners would never do that because changing a well running model for something else would be a move that risks their whole business. Maybe they would try it out with a new store to see how it goes, without risking their old store.

See and this is where I disagree. Unless the company considers its business model to be "Let people pay us so they can break our product", tweaking the Goldmark mechanics is absolutely not akin to changing your current business model completely. The better analogy to a store would be picking up a service or an item on customer request or serving a different brand of coffee. Nobody is asking the company to change its entire business model, step away from Goldmark or the ability to buy advantages in the game. It's like the fiftieth time I say that in this thread alone. This is why I find it so hard to understand that the Goldmark mechanic, for as far as I can tell, has not substantially been touched at all in over ten years.

I remember the gold free alliance tournaments and those were an absolute spectacle to watch. I can't say I ever knew of gold free games with entry fees ever existing, probably because they were alliance only from what I gather. Else I would have been in them. But the Goldmark options as they stand right now are essentially the same of ten years ago while many, many changes have been made to the rest of the gameplay. I think this is for better or worse whichever way you look at it, as while surely some failures and losses were avoided, innovation and revenue was as well. And sure, after ten years of it running well enough, it's hard to provide any reasons to not get complacent. The whole mechanic just seems a little antiquated now, especially as the game's entire marketing has shifted generations with the new UI and the website overhaul, stuffing it into a profitable market. Its monetization is still very uninspired and 1.0 from 2010.

And as a pretty meaningless side note - I mean, I'm happy for you that the game is in its best year ever apparently, but you would not phrase it that way from playing it, take my word for it. The target audience for a freemium service has become very young over the past few years and this game is clearly no exception. Again, I'm glad you're doing well, but the product lives off its players here and it's not doing better for that. And to be truthfully honest with you, as by the way I do appreciate the transparency of your reply, I'll be so transparent to express how I find this particular aspect of a business model to be extremely disagreeable. The GO's are to enforce a "family friendly" atmosphere among players, the chat even filters the word "bollocks" for crying out loud, like we're pandering to five year-olds here, yet you know as well as I do that the company has no issue whatsoever gauging these kids for money it deliberately attracts and you also know as well as I do that the reason it does this, like most other freemium platforms, is because these kids are inexperienced with spending money and will soak up microtransactions with absolutely no regard to the quality of the product they are recieving. This works so well because presenting them with a challenge and then providing the easiest solution will have them go for that in the majority of cases. The whole freemium market really is capitalism 2.0. This obviously isn't Bytro's fault at all but they also quite clearly do not think much of participating in squeezing very, very young customers for all they're worth because that's the easiest thing you can possibly do. I think it's despicable quite honestly and while the time for concerns like that has mostly passed, I don't think it gets any better when you consider what a family unfriendly topic this game is about.

I'm aware that someone who gauges money out of children for a living makes it more than clear by doing so that he couldn't give less of a patootie what some random guy on the internet thinks about that. I'm also more than aware that now that Bytro has taken that road and decided to just throw its product into the thousands of other generic games that are in that particular market because it's easy to serve that market and it generates income with almost zero effort, all pretense that the quality of the product is of any particular meaning to the company is out the window, likely never to return. You can throw out random gameplay updates every few months as much as you want, this game is being handled hands-off by the company at this point. You found a way to make this thing a money printer on autopilot and for what it's worth, once again I'm glad you guys are getting payed, but when taking that road the company made it clear that it's not going for a special, high-quality product anymore that sets itself apart. Personally, I think an opportunity was blown there to have a product that's actually valued by your customers.

Oh, and, sorry for the double post but quoting stuff is a ... female dog in this forum.

freezy

e) we know very well how to market a free2play game, but marketing for a premium or subscription based game is entirely different. There is no guarantee that we could pull it off with current marketing experience, marketing prices etc.

Yeah, that's not surprising. This is what happens when you implement one thing and then ride it for ten years, too afraid to touch it. The idea is about as old as Goldmark itself but you guys shot it down for years with the old "Well we gotta eat somehow" logic. You could have tons of experience in doing that at this point, it was your choice not to have it. And come on, if you usually get guarantees that things you do in your life will work out, I'm open to swap.

freezy

There are a lot of free2play games with much worse pay2win mechanics which are much bigger than our games, some food for thought.

Oh look at that, I worked out the quoting. It's actually really nice in this forum, who would have guessed.

This is certanly true, however there are also a lot of free2play games, especially competitive multiplayer ones, that have much less intrusive monetization strategies, often because they're not ten years old. If you're gonna throw food for thought at me, have some of your own.

Another thing just popped into my head, or rather a decent way to phrase it out. Since you apparently consider any change to the Goldmark mechanic a change of business models yet you bring updates upon gameplay every few months, some of them unwarranted, even experimental, I reckon that at this point you guys consider the actual playing of the game to not be a part of the business model at all? You give off that impression when you say that any change to GM would risk people's livelihood whereas gameplay changes can be made at all times. It's like to the company, the spending and the playing are seperate categories, the gameplay being mere bywork to the structure that allows people to give you their money. That's somewhat understandable from a business perspective as without covering the costs, no gameplay could be provided, but I honestly believe it's a harmful way of thinking to the quality of the product, which is also something you can observe in plenty of other businesses as I have in some that I have worked for in my life. People typically don't like to pay if they feel that's all they're good for to the salesman. Alas I now realize with the mobile gaming market, I guess this sadly doesn't apply, so consider this just an idealist tangent.

LostRealist

See and this is where I disagree. Unless the company considers its business model to be "Let people pay us so they can break our product", tweaking the Goldmark mechanics is absolutely not akin to changing your current business model completely. The better analogy to a store would be picking up a service or an item on customer request or serving a different brand of coffee. Nobody is asking the company to change its entire business model, step away from Goldmark or the ability to buy advantages in the game. It's like the fiftieth time I say that in this thread alone. This is why I find it so hard to understand that the Goldmark mechanic, for as far as I can tell, has not substantially been touched at all in over ten years.

I remember the gold free alliance tournaments and those were an absolute spectacle to watch. I can't say I ever knew of gold free games with entry fees ever existing, probably because they were alliance only from what I gather. Else I would have been in them. But the Goldmark options as they stand right now are essentially the same of ten years ago while many, many changes have been made to the rest of the gameplay. I think this is for better or worse whichever way you look at it, as while surely some failures and losses were avoided, innovation and revenue was as well. And sure, after ten years of it running well enough, it's hard to provide any reasons to not get complacent. The whole mechanic just seems a little antiquated now, especially as the game's entire marketing has shifted generations with the new UI and the website overhaul, stuffing it into a profitable market. Its monetization is still very uninspired and 1.0 from 2010.

And as a pretty meaningless side note - I mean, I'm happy for you that the game is in its best year ever apparently, but you would not phrase it that way from playing it, take my word for it. The target audience for a freemium service has become very young over the past few years and this game is clearly no exception. Again, I'm glad you're doing well, but the product lives off its players here and it's not doing better for that. And to be truthfully honest with you, as by the way I do appreciate the transparency of your reply, I'll be so transparent to express how I find this particular aspect of a business model to be extremely disagreeable. The GO's are to enforce a "family friendly" atmosphere among players, the chat even filters the word "bollocks" for crying out loud, like we're pandering to five year-olds here, yet you know as well as I do that the company has no issue whatsoever gauging these kids for money it deliberately attracts and you also know as well as I do that the reason it does this, like most other freemium platforms, is because these kids are inexperienced with spending money and will soak up microtransactions with absolutely no regard to the quality of the product they are recieving. This works so well because presenting them with a challenge and then providing the easiest solution will have them go for that in the majority of cases. The whole freemium market really is capitalism 2.0. This obviously isn't Bytro's fault at all but they also quite clearly do not think much of participating in squeezing very, very young customers for all they're worth because that's the easiest thing you can possibly do. I think it's despicable quite honestly and while the time for concerns like that has mostly passed, I don't think it gets any better when you consider what a family unfriendly topic this game is about.

I'm aware that someone who gauges money out of children for a living makes it more than clear by doing so that he couldn't give less of a patootie what some random guy on the internet thinks about that. I'm also more than aware that now that Bytro has taken that road and decided to just throw its product into the thousands of other generic games that are in that particular market because it's easy to serve that market and it generates income with almost zero effort, all pretense that the quality of the product is of any particular meaning to the company is out the window, likely never to return. You can throw out random gameplay updates every few months as much as you want, this game is being handled hands-off by the company at this point. You found a way to make this thing a money printer on autopilot and for what it's worth, once again I'm glad you guys are getting payed, but when taking that road the company made it clear that it's not going for a special, high-quality product anymore that sets itself apart. Personally, I think an opportunity was blown there to have a product that's actually valued by your customers.

Hey, just wanted to chime in again to clear up some misconceptions. Our game is actually not for children. Our Terms of Service clearly state that you have to be 16 years old to play this game. Of course children can disregard that and still register and still spend, but then it is up to the parents to monitor that and to not hand their children their credit cards. That's the same everywhere in the internet. We definitely do not market the game to children, we have clearly defined audiences our marketing campaigns are running for. The spending playerbase is also mature, with a rather high average age. So we are totally unreliant on any child spending in this game, and we also don't want them to.

It is also not true that we don't care for quality. We care very much about it. But if you think that only a game without the usual free2play model can have any quality, well then we probably can't agree. I think we can aim for a quality game even within the current business model.

I agree that the current monetization mechanics are quite antique, but as I explained it creates too much risk changing them for such a mature and well running product. If anything we would rather explore new monetization options with new games in the future, and perhaps apply those learnings afterwards into our older games. But we won't jeopardize the current success of S1914 with such experiments.

LostRealist

Oh, and, sorry for the double post but quoting stuff is a ... female dog in this forum.

Yeah, that's not surprising. This is what happens when you implement one thing and then ride it for ten years, too afraid to touch it. The idea is about as old as Goldmark itself but you guys shot it down for years with the old "Well we gotta eat somehow" logic. You could have tons of experience in doing that at this point, it was your choice not to have it. And come on, if you usually get guarantees that things you do in your life will work out, I'm open to swap.

Oh look at that, I worked out the quoting. It's actually really nice in this forum, who would have guessed.

This is certanly true, however there are also a lot of free2play games, especially competitive multiplayer ones, that have much less intrusive monetization strategies, often because they're not ten years old. If you're gonna throw food for thought at me, have some of your own.

Another thing just popped into my head, or rather a decent way to phrase it out. Since you apparently consider any change to the Goldmark mechanic a change of business models yet you bring updates upon gameplay every few months, some of them unwarranted, even experimental, I reckon that at this point you guys consider the actual playing of the game to not be a part of the business model at all? You give off that impression when you say that any change to GM would risk people's livelihood whereas gameplay changes can be made at all times. It's like to the company, the spending and the playing are seperate categories, the gameplay being mere bywork to the structure that allows people to give you their money. That's somewhat understandable from a business perspective as without covering the costs, no gameplay could be provided, but I honestly believe it's a harmful way of thinking to the quality of the product, which is also something you can observe in plenty of other businesses as I have in some that I have worked for in my life. People typically don't like to pay if they feel that's all they're good for to the salesman. Alas I now realize with the mobile gaming market, I guess this sadly doesn't apply, so consider this just an idealist tangent.

True, we totally could have garnered experience in other models. But we did not have to. Our current numbers prove us in that regard. Could we have had more success by changing our model? That is highly speculative. It seems following your logic a company has to garner experience in all different disciplines possible? That is just not realistic. There are many companies out there that specialize in different models and businesses. There are successful triple A companies who only market premium 60$ games, who have no idea whatsoever how to market a free2play game. Would you also recommend them to branch out and gain experience marketing free2play games? There are also successful free2play companies out there who have no idea how to market premium games. Maybe all companies should at one point explore different models, but that also creates distractions and might hurt their core business due to a lack of focus. If a business is doing well in its segment it is usually fine for them to stay there and to refine their core business further. Except when the market shows a decline for that segment/model in general. But in our case our numbers suggest the contrary. After all neither model is better and success is possible everywhere. You write as if it is a bad thing that we are a free2play company and that it has to be avoided, but the market trend shows that the free2play segment is actually one of the fastest growing business models in gaming. So if we look at it from a business perspective we are positioned rather well. Of course there are other more modern free2play monetization mechanics that should be explored at some point, as I agreed that ours are quite old by now. But still we have other options to test them in the future without throwing them into a live product.

Smaller changes to the detailed gameplay mechanics are usually too miniscule to affect KPIs, although they can of course. But they won't affect the business model much. After all we still remain a free2play grand strategy WW1. By the way we did very few gameplay changes in the recent past though, compared to for example CoW or S1, so in that respect S1914 is pretty stable.

Indeed your views are rather idealist and from a player perspective I actually share them. But I can also understand the business realities and hope you can, too!

I would suggest running alliance tournament like it was back in 2011-2013 AC

Maps without gold, teams of 7, europe map,changes in flight when someone droops due to afk

we cannot do to much about GMs in maps but there is nothing stopping us from playing gold-free maps in the alliance tournament once a year.

there should be build of the game from 2013 lying somewhere around with a whole setup for tournament.

Give a like if you support idea

freezy

After all neither model is better and success is possible everywhere. You write as if it is a bad thing that we are a free2play company and that it has to be avoided, but the market trend shows that the free2play segment is actually one of the fastest growing business models in gaming. So if we look at it from a business perspective we are positioned rather well. Of course there are other more modern free2play monetization mechanics that should be explored at some point, as I agreed that ours are quite old by now. But still we have other options to test them in the future without throwing them into a live product.

It is true that F2P style is the fastest growing business model in gaming, however there's a catch here, all F2P games that arised from nothing and that now are beasts are not only F2P but they actively avoided P2W, which is the reason this whole thread was created, F2P is not a problem, P2W is.

When thinking of F2P PC games, the following come to my mind, League of Legends, Fortnite, Call of Duty: Warzone, Rocket League(F2P since 23rd September 2020 some time after Epic Games bought it [first time the game reaching 1M actively playing the game at the same time]), Dota 2, World of Tanks, Apex Legends, Hearthstone, Guild Wars 2, Counter Strike Global Offensive(after costing like 5$ for many years).

Let's take some F2P Mobile examples too so it won't be so biased by those huge names in the game industry: Call of Duty Mobile, Brawl Stars, Clash of Clans, PUBG Mobile, Fortnite Mobile, Pokemon GO.

Any way, you get the idea, now, let's compare them and their model to S1914 or Bytro's games in general:

• Bytro's Games:
  • Buying premium currency affects gameplay.
  • In long run games such as 500p maps, if someone is rich as fuck and wants to spend thousands in the game, it actively affects other players experience and therefore ruining months of hard-work and progress.
  • Removed all sense of competitive environment
  • Removal of customization features
  • No such thing as Season Pass
  • Premium Suscription to get extra features (P2W)
  • Business model does exhaust player base

• League of Legends, Clash of Clans, Brawl Stars, etc:
  • Buying premium currency DOESN'T affect gameplay
  • In long run games such as Clash of Clans, if someone is rich as fuck and wants to spend thousands in the game, it doesn't actively affect the other players experience and therefore it DOESN'T ruin months if not years of progress.
  • Building more and more to a sense of competitive environment
  • Hard focus on profile and customization
  • Season Pass (kinda new but still a way to make money)
  • No Premium Suscription to get extra features
  • Business model doesn't exhaust player base

Now I'd like to do a swift change, what do you think it would happen if in this big F2P games, they would apply P2W models too, let's say:

Example 1: League of Legends, you can only play 10 champions by free, if you want to play the rest, there is no way for the F2P user to get them, only to spend money to get the other 140 champions, also you can only get to build half of the items, the other half is locked for premium members(5$ suscription fee/month), do you really think people would keep playing?

Example 2: Brawl Stars, let's get the starter brawler who has a shotgun and say that if you are willing to pay 10€ we will give you a double-damage shotgun, and if you are willing to pay 20€ we will give you a triple-damage shotgun, also there is no way for F2P users to get all brawlers, you can only get 5 for free, the rest you need to pay 5€ for each brawler, do you think people would still want to play it?

Example 3: Fortnite, now you can only build walls and stairs if you are a premium member, also if you are willing to pay 5€ we will give you a legendary assault rifle as head-start in all games, would people still play it?

Example 4: Clash of Clans, now Premium members are able to extract all the resources when attacking a city, by doing so they would also completely destroy the city, meaning it would be game over for the other player. Would people who spent 2 years building their city risk to just get a game over because some whole was bored in his house? I don't think so.

I'll repeat what I said in the beggining, the problem is not about being FREE TO PLAY, is about being PAY TO WIN.

Let's not forget this is a MMORTS, for those not familiar with the term, Massively multiplayer online real time strategy and just to be clear, Massively multiplayer online(MMO) means you need to have a big active player base for the game to keep it success, however I haven't seen a game with +15 active users since 2014, with the exception of 500p where in the last years the 500p wouldn't even get full.

Your actual business model drains the players, and let me tell you, that is not good, in the long run, this business model will kill itself meanwhile League of Legends, Fortnite and all big and successful F2P MMO's won't get killed by their own business model but rather by their competition which sadly you don't have.

I don't see the risk in changing the business model if you are straight up running towards your own death.

You designed S1, the new game, where if morale rises production time gets lower, the idea and the concept are awesome however because of the game being P2W, having it done like that benefits more the P2W user than the F2P user because while I'm sleeping my, let's say, 8 hours I'm only producing 1 unit, meanwhile the premium member is producing 5 units, in terms of balance between a P2W and a F2P, the only thing standing between them was the time required to do things, like building 1 artillery within 24 hours, however in the new game I might get to build 2 artilleries in 24 hours(1 login every 12 hours) while the premium member might get to build 10 artilleries(1 login every 12 hours but has production queue(+4) because premium), so basically you made it worse.

Bytro's model is perfect for Candy Crush, but this ain't no Candy Crush.

PS: I remember like a year ago or so that I told you, Freezy, to look into this mobile game which is a MMORTS called Rise of Kingdoms which is also Free to Play and Pay to Win and has the SAME model, however they did the opposite that you did in terms of keeping the player base alive even if they have WHALES and I'm talking about big WHALES like easily spending thousands by the day, and there are no +1000% bonus, and with a vast majority of adult players that also spends lots of money, I myself spent more there in 1 year than here in 8 years. I won't go into further details but if you haven't checked it yet in order to see what's different between your games and that game I think you are making a mistake.