i cant argue with you about what direction targem is going because i dont know what they see or what the metrics are.
but i can say that its pretty damn suspicious to me when the game has meta that beats everything and suddenly a new type of weapon comes out which happens to work well against the current meta, locked behind a battle pass. ice weapons are good, dog builds are good, and i know that once the battle pass is over, dogs and or ice weapons will be getting nerfs to make space for the new meta.
i cant predict the future but i know once every single meta slave has their build perfected it is time for a new cash grab, which will be achieved one way or another.
i dont think its a coincidence that something from every new battlepass inevitably ends up on top of the food chain
another thing is that you can buy battle pass levels for a lot of real money, which i would say caters more so to the whales than the average player filling their daily challenges.
my point is that the battle pass is a great way to juice players for money, but mainly due to balance changes being used to advertise the battle pass, as if we are supposed to say āthank god, targem is finally balancing their broken game by letting us buy the cureā. i always say it, an obvious cycle of intentional bad balancing
Hey, Iām not trying to say they stopped offering stuff marketed to whales. Iām just pointing out that the bulk of their efforts arenāt going towards them.
The basic BP is all you need to get the new items, and those are very cheap. People that want to spend more can get more out of them, but that is still at a better value than the old methods.
Iām not describing a binary, Iām talking about the trajectory of the shift of their focus across a spectrum of monetization strategies. Yes they still make money from whales, and yes that is less central to their strategy than it used to be.
What you describe is a big change from how it used to be, when the OP new item was locked behind an expensive pack. $10 to get the hot new toys is not a cash grab by any definition, and is a big shift from their original system.
Also, if things were really as contrived and thought out as you describe, why would so many BP items turn out to not be particularly strong? Just to cover their tracks? And with the last BP, why didnāt they bother buffing cryo until after the season ended? Thatās a pretty sloppy way to get people to feel like they have to buy the pass.
hard to justify that when the top 500 players only get the rewards. the problem here is top clans are going to get the prizes for the top tier. meaning they get 250 - 400 uranium and newer players or players at a lower level get nowhere fast. sure they might get 100 uranium if they do good butā¦ its not much of a consolation prize is it?
this is exactly what i mean above. top clans will always get that 400, 300, 200, 200 uranium prize. there is no competition there as only the top clans will get the top prizes and rake in a free 10 - 20k coins for themselves.
this is what i meant before. top players will only ever get the top prizes for uranium. they just keep getting richer and then what does that equal? it equals when another battle pass comes, someone dumps all that coin into getting the new weapons, modules, wheels, etc and dumping them into the market for ridiculous prices. they dont care about dumping hundreds of dollars into the game to get everything before others cause they got the money to drop on it and the coin to try to make a profit off it.
and this also ties in with the uranium giveaway to. give them 10 - 20k free coins and when the next battlepass comes out, oh look these items are already in the market for stupidly high prices!