Trion World’s Scott Hartsman took to Reddit to offer up an apology regarding the controversial $100 box (Orphiel’s mount crate) that awarded one of 42 random premium mounts. This was on top of their attempt to put an end game virtual currency (that can be used to purchase end game gear) into their RIFT cash shop. With the latter, Trion backed off for the time being on implementing Collected Intel packs by switching it off on their store after seeing the backlash by the community
As for the premium mount crates, these are RNG boxes so it’s not like you can get all 42 mounts by just spending $4200 in total. If that sentence I just wrote looks ridiculous, that was on purpose because my point is that what clueless moron(s) at Trion even thought this would come across as looking sane?
Likewise after additional negative feedback regarding the mount crate, Trion pulled those crates and its CEO offered up an apology about that decision. The following comes to mind again when he made this statement surrounding the issues during ArcheAge’s 3.0 release… and that still remains a “laughing out loud” moment for me because the opposite of competence is incompetence (and I do realize it’s taken slightly out of context because he meant it in terms of what he stated next… but it just came across the wrong way to many).
While his message had all of the right words and had a tone of sincerity, the MMO community in general are still raking Trion and Hartsman over the coals because this isn’t the first time that the company has pulled these sort of cash grabs in their free-2-play games (or where Hartsman needed to make a public statement).
The above sentence I wrote exemplifies how something like this should not have even passed the “is this a rational transaction?” sniff test by the decision makers who thought this would come across ok outside the company. This is something any morally conscious company would say “no, this pricing point is NOT ok” without having to put it out there to the public to get their actual feedback on.
The issue here isn’t about not having any sort of monetization scheme; the bills need to be paid for operations and the supporting personnel. What is the issue is how these monetization systems are designed and the pricing points. We all make mistakes on occasion but when there are repeated instances of them, the mea culpa’s (which sound good on paper), don’t fly when people feel they have been bitten more than once. In this case, it was two separate cash shop schemes for the same game in a close timeframe.
Trion is like any other medium to large sized business where there are great people who work the front lines, but have to put up with boneheaded decisions by “out of touch” higher level management. As someone who once worked in those senior management ranks, I can attest to the “out of touch” aspect where some of my colleagues operated in their own bubble. Trion’s leaders have shown this tendency to make the above type of decisions that gives the company as a whole, a generally poor reputation. And that is unfortunate for the good hardworking individuals that really do care about their customers, but are hamstrung by the higher ups who come up with these ideas. Those same higher ups are also the ones who also fail to listen early on and then only react after the fact (or in some cases, never listening/acting at all).
They often rely on the fact that they know most of their games have a captive audience and that there is a certain amount they can get away with. They ended up going too far with just RIFT in two separate incidences hoping to strike gold during the holidays. Instead, they struck a nerve with its community while for those who have moved away from Trion, provided yet another example of the cash grabbing reputation the company developed when it came to their business model and monetization methods.
In many other industries. those kind of poorly continued business practices would drive many customers and their money away. Larger companies in the gaming industry have been able to get away with all types of shenanigans while being mostly spared from the whole “vote with your wallet” power that consumers have.
The whole loot box controversy and the fact that it hit the mainstream media as well as government lawmakers is just the tip of a wakeup call for this industry (and its powerful lobbyists) where they can either self-manage themselves in many areas or eventually have regulations imposed on them.
I’ve written about it before but as far as microtransaction model goes, Grinding Gear Games has one of the best with Path of Exile. And they are successful with their model because of how they as a company came about to develop that game while being fully engaged with their community. That community developed a symbiotic trust with GGG in the process and the company has tried to be a trustworthy company in the process in terms of transparency and communications.
This fine nuance is what many game companies fail to grasp or nurture and why even if they did try to emulate the mostly cosmetics MTX model, would not generate them the same amount of revenue per player the way that GGG does with PoE.
