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Should ARK change their revenue model?


Mean2u444

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Should ARK change their revenue model?

The general consensus in the game today is that people love ARK, but are significantly dissatisfied with the multitude of bugs in the game, and apparent minimal effort from Wildcard to address these issues (even going so far on occasion as to bury some of these issues).

I think a major symptom for it is their revenue model; in that they are pumping out new DLC's to make money via downloads from their addicted player base. Once you get a download payment, who cares how broken your game is, right? You already got your cash, why fix bugs if that doesn't pay the bills? 

The question here is, would you accept ARK going to a pay-to-play structure, if it meant that Wildcard had more time and incentive to address the issues in the game? Or would you accept the game allowing advertisements on the main start-up screen? Or some other revenue model?

I'm not suggesting anything, just airing my thoughts and seeing what peoples opinions are ?

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2 hours ago, GrumpyBear said:

To me, there is alot of value added by player generated content (mutated beasts).  It seems silly to me they don't have a marketplace for trading to bring online sellers under control and make a % on each transaction that way.

See I'm ok with that, but one thing they definitely shouldn't do is start introducing items,  exclusive dinos or mutations into the game for a price. Last thing you want to do is create a 'pay to win' environment 

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2 hours ago, Mean2u444 said:

See I'm ok with that, but one thing they definitely shouldn't do is start introducing items,  exclusive dinos or mutations into the game for a price. Last thing you want to do is create a 'pay to win' environment 

Idk man... I get a huge amount of satisfaction in games with a sort of pay to get ahead environment, but with avenues for people to get to the same level with out paying. If I can sit at my computer for a few hours more and destroy something my enemy payed real money for... :D If they did that I might have to switch back to pvp just to hear the salt in global.. "hey you sob I payed 20$ for that and you killed it wah waaaah waaaaah" LOL

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Excuse me for being a cynic, but I have my doubts that the bugs and game design issues would be fixed if they went to a pay to play format. Their past track record regarding these issues would lead me more to believe it was just another way to create revenue without doing the work to fix the problems. They don't have the reputation that longer term developers have of creating and maintaining their game, and tackling problems and complaints of their player base in an efficient and timely manner. My guess is they would lose a significant amount of their player base if they chose to go that route, me included. I love this game, have been playing it consistently (much to my husband's chagrin) since early access, but with all the problems it has I'm not wiling for fork out a monthly fee for a game that is this buggy.

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If they make it pay to play will they refund my money?

I bought the game on the understanding from their advertising that it would be free to play. I never have and never will pay a subscription for a game.

Imagine you bought your PC and it was buggy and kept crashing and the manufacturer told you they couldn't afford to sort it unless you paid them a monthly subscription. Or a car that broke down constantly and the maker said "Oh sorry about that, but, we have an idea! How about you pay us another £10 a month and we will try and make it more reliable"

People are too ready to accept bad practice from games studios, it's become the norm now. If 5 years in the game had run its life and they decided it was time to start shutting down official servers that's fine. But they still have another DLC in the pipeline that people have already paid for so obviously they  are still committed for the time being.    

If you want to pay a subscription, rent your own server. 

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16 hours ago, Mean2u444 said:

Should ARK change their revenue model?

The general consensus in the game today is that people love ARK, but are significantly dissatisfied with the multitude of bugs in the game, and apparent minimal effort from Wildcard to address these issues (even going so far on occasion as to bury some of these issues).

I think a major symptom for it is their revenue model; in that they are pumping out new DLC's to make money via downloads from their addicted player base. Once you get a download payment, who cares how broken your game is, right? You already got your cash, why fix bugs if that doesn't pay the bills? 

The question here is, would you accept ARK going to a pay-to-play structure, if it meant that Wildcard had more time and incentive to address the issues in the game? Or would you accept the game allowing advertisements on the main start-up screen? Or some other revenue model?

I'm not suggesting anything, just airing my thoughts and seeing what peoples opinions are ?

Some sort of payment model should be added in my opinon, or even a shop to buy skins with real $ which in other games people buy the hell out of them. To me after all this time the game breaking bugs, almost no enforcement on rampant aimbot/cheating, horrendous connection issues & complete negligence concerning pvp balance, are that they don't seem to care about the health of the game at all. Beyond anger, just sad to see at this point.

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11 hours ago, Usuallyafk said:

Some sort of payment model should be added in my opinon, or even a shop to buy skins with real $ which in other games people buy the hell out of them. To me after all this time the game breaking bugs, almost no enforcement on rampant aimbot/cheating, horrendous connection issues & complete negligence concerning pvp balance, are that they don't seem to care about the health of the game at all. Beyond anger, just sad to see at this point.

I agree. Although as it has been said in here already by others I also don't trust that they'd actually follow through with fixes. I would only hope that they would lose subscriptions on a P2P model if they didn't fix issues in the game, basically forces them to put in the work

It's a sad state of affairs when your player base has absolutely no faith in what you're doing

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4 hours ago, Mean2u444 said:

I agree. Although as it has been said in here already by others I also don't trust that they'd actually follow through with fixes. I would only hope that they would lose subscriptions on a P2P model if they didn't fix issues in the game, basically forces them to put in the work

It's a sad state of affairs when your player base has absolutely no faith in what you're doing

I'm sure most of us don't mind paying some more to give the incentive to actually fix some of these game breaking bugs, but will they actually do it is the biggest question, you're right. I know nothing about game coding or development, but I'm in marketing and anyone with 2 brain cells knows a skins shop on almost every game is highly sought after. Mobile Ark has some poorly made, but cool ideas for real $ transactions Involving skins for weapons, saddles & armor obviously ect. Also additions of grafts i think Mobile Ark did? Which adds different glows like lightning or lava effects to your actual character (something like this, but i butchered the explanation)

Such an easy thing to make money on & they're missing out on it in a big way.....in my opinion. But from my standpoint and in my profession their absolute 100% biggest issue is the community managers and communication with their community. Trying not be too negative, I have never seen anything like it. Non existent. I don't even know how that is a full time job there.

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On 8/21/2020 at 8:16 PM, Mean2u444 said:

I think a major symptom for it is their revenue model;

It's not. Lack of money is not WildCard's problem, and more money wouldn't fix their issues.

Not long after going to full release there were some figures published (I think it was on Kotaku, but not certain anymore) that showed ARK had made about $500,000,000.00 up to that point, which is to say, half-a-billion dollars. If you spend some time working out the numbers you'll see that this is a lot more money that it has cost them to develop and maintain the game up to that point. By now it's safe to say the the total revenue for ARK is well over $1B.

The owners of WildCard (it's a privately held company) have gotten wealthy, not just rich but truly wealthy from this game. It has made more than enough money to do a better job of fixing problems. This game sprays money into their personal net worth like a large fire hose, the problem is not lack of revenue but lack of knowledge or interest in learning and implementing good software engineering practices (a problem that's fairly common to game companies, but worse with WC than most).

Game companies serve retail customers who have almost no ability to impact the bottom line of the company, there are no SLA's (service level agreements), there are no contractual obligations, there is no way of holding them accountable for their failures in any meaningful way or of hurting them financially as long as their game is popular. The only thing that can affect a game company's behavior is consumer protection laws, and we are years away, if ever, from seeing any laws or consumer organizations that will ever be able to hold a game company accountable.

 

The only things you can do are a) complain on the forums and hope they care and b) vote with your wallet by not spending any more or playing their game. As long as zillions of people keep buying & playing ARK, and as long as it's a privately held company with no one to hold them accountable, there is nothing here that could be fixed by more money.

By all means complain on the forums, we all should, but other than that you need to understand that we play the game we have, not the game we wish we had.

 

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I would and will pay for Expansions.

I would not pay for a subscription as I don't play on official servers. (which means I pay for unofficial ones)

However I did on several other games in the past.

I am surprised that Wild Card does not charge for official server use as they are not free.

Not sure how you can complain about an official server when you don't have to pay for it.

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Jesse Rapczak, Studio Wild card has said things like "we are proud of our revenue modle" and "we've never been about that kind of stuff" in reference to nickeling and diming people for skins and bs economics when they've already paid for the game (not exact quotes was trying to summarize). https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-08-16-how-ark-survival-evolved-fell-into-sustainable-revenue-without-skins-or-loot-boxes

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57 minutes ago, Korizan said:

I would and will pay for Expansions.

I would not pay for a subscription as I don't play on official servers. (which means I pay for unofficial ones)

However I did on several other games in the past.

I am surprised that Wild Card does not charge for official server use as they are not free.

Not sure how you can complain about an official server when you don't have to pay for it.

We did pay for it by buying the game. As mentioned above they've made hundreds of millions at least (idk about billions lol). They have a revenue model where they got money from us and set some of it aside for the network. Since them paying for and maintaining the official servers is part of their own revenue modeling, I feel perfectly justified in complaining about it when the network is so freaked out that I can't play for weeks at a time... that being said my own two cents on the matter is that I would prefer the official network remain as free as it is today. I just wish they'd figure out what is causing all the network instabilities and fix em already.

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 Despite of the technical problems with the game, gameplay wise, this is the best of the best game ever made. It is not just a game, it is as if you're teleported into other world and adapt to the law of nature there, and throughout the years they did an awesome job changing the game reviews on Steam from MIXED review to MOSTLY POSITIVE, that is very very impressive. Ask yourself, what game from your library has the most time spent, I bet the answer is Ark, it's worth every penny you paid for.

If they still want to milk money from Ark, imo the next best thing is making a SINGLE PLAYER DLC, I actually want to make SINGLE PLAYER works, but for some reason I keep leaving my playthrough in SP and go online, because i cannot refrain myself from using cheats/mods it always ruins my game because I can't set limitation anymore once I use it, want high level dino, use dino finder and use force dino spawn level, want dino with high stats keep refreshing spawns, why not just spawn a custom one, then ended up not playing. When playing online, forget all that, just play, survive and thrive, but the problem is always with connection.

Imo they should AT LEAST DO ONE COSMETIC DLC, because lets face it, our character is so limited in cosmetic, and the only cosmetic I like is butchered and never gets fixed FOR YEARS !! I like using the glasses skin, but they messed it up for a very very long time, since I played in Ragnarok years ago, until now not fixed.

1046576025_Screenshot_1015copy.thumb.jpg.531fa41b41e6e34ea0ac543fca3d109e.jpg

722690860_Screenshot_1014copy.thumb.jpg.d6b14bb657a2e01791628bf06418e131.jpg

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All headgear combined with glasses, all messed up, been years like that, I ever posted this and here we are still like that, it's my old screenshots btw, but it's still like that now.

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