The premium currency you have to buy in order to purchase many of Warhammer 40k: Darktide’s cosmetic items is not just so they can force you to overspend on purchasing cosmetics by not letting you purchase the exact amount needed to buy cosmetics. It’s also allowing them to skirt laws that exist in many countries and states within the US that makes it illegal to advertise fake discounts.
The current example of the false discounts is the cosmetic bundles being shown front-and-center every time you open the shop. They show a total Aquila price of 2,400 and when you click on the bundle it THEN shows you the price of each item as they’re worth individually. This is where the false discount is as you cannot actually purchase these items separately.
However, you’re not actually spending money on these cosmetics, you’re buying the Aquilas. This allows them to skirt the laws that would otherwise be protecting us from these kinds of practices.
I think so, even because you are forced to buy the premium currency to buy the skins.
You cannot say: “you are buying Aquilas and not the skins” because you cannot have the skins in other ways.
ok ive seen this going around with several games, warframe, Paladins, Darktide and others.
first off, just because a game has in game/app purchases, bundles or discounts doesnt make it predatory. yes it doesnt state if these items will remain in the shop after the time limit or that they will or their bundle will disappear,
but them not stating such doesnt mean they are doing it to force people to buy the items quickly. like vermin-tide this game is likely to have years of support, wasting the time to create a cosmetic to only appear only once where as leaving it in the store would generate more revenue doesnt make much sense.
second did you know Darktide is set to release on Xbox, you many not know this but the reason games like warframe, Paladins, Darktide and others have a premium currency rather than cash in app purchases is because if they did, the company who controls the system they are on Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo will get a cut of their earnings.
as where if buy premium currency from steam or them directly they get much more of a slice of the pie, personally i like funding my developers not giving them money they will only get half of.
thirdly them not offering bonuses with premium currency isnt anything new, and its an incentive to get more as their the bonus but theirs nothing stopping someone from choosing to get 2x1000 Aquila & 1x500 Aquila purchases for only 12.50 and you have 100 Aquila waste.
would it be better to offer Aquilas at (400 for $2)(700 for $3.50)(800 for $4)(900 for $4.5) & (2400 for $12)
as an indie developer my self i understand why companies do choose to go this route, and the accusations usually levied against them by those who may not know all the facts. im not saying i know all the facts but id rather look to the situation and ask why rather then assume and accuse what.
You’re right, however.
Doing things like this shop here clearly shows how they treat their community.
A dev can say he loves his community all year long. Maybe that’s true.
But if his marketing dept goes the other way around, his words are worthless.
According to EU laws, you also may refund an in-game purchase (like a cosmetic) if you don’t want it. With Aquilas in-between, you can now only refund the in-game currency but not the actual money as you’ve basically used it already.
Can comfirm, bit of an obtuse way to do it though. Probably should just work the same way as buying a bundle but lets not get into the technicalities of this popular game feature!
I don’t understand how this is even being talked about like it’s a problem… for starters nobody is making you buy these cosmetics, you don’t have to spend more money to keep playing like its some kind of subscription service. you buy the game once and then play it, you don’t have to spend a single cent extra. Secondly I’ve never seen a single in game currency anywhere in any game in the past 10 years that was as reasonably priced as Aquilas. 35 dollars got me 3 full new really nice looking outfits and an extra psyker mask to top it off. 35 dollars in league of legends MIGHT get you 2 decent looking skins with just enough points left over to be mad about. 35 dollars in overwatch gets you like 1 skin and 50% of what you need for a second skin or something insane like that.
I get the leftover currency being annoying but as far as egregious pricing for fake money goes, this is incredibly reasonable and I don’t understand how people can even start getting mad about it unless its like what you’re doing here and its people getting mad about some insane conspiracy theory about Fatshark intentionally teetering on some thin barrier into illegal practices to extort the most amount of money from their community. if that was what they were doing I wouldn’t have spent money at all, I wouldn’t have bought this game and I would have hated Vermintide 2 a lot more than I do. Things like this really show how spoiled this community is and its near maddening to see the disinformation people will spread just to get attention and get people riled up about the most insignificant event of the past 50 years.
i even have a book on Amazon, Anyma RPG
and even a website Anyma RPG
we are working on Revised Edition, and a mobile app,
just because someone says they have experience doesn’t mean they are lying, sometimes starts are slow, my book was originally avalible with another publisher and well i lost alot of money with them. i havent made nearly as much with Amazon but its something.
I want to buy it, but I get scammed in the process. If I want to buy a cosmetic pack that’s allegedly 12 bucks, I need to spend 15 for it, so it always has a bigger impact on my bank account than what the screen price tells you. On top of which the packs are sold at a “discount”, but 1-2 items in it are not even reskins, they’re sub-1-minute-work recolors. You don’t save anything if you avoid those, due to the fake discount, but they get to say that oh we sold you 5 items.
Then there’s also the fake timer, because you bet they’re coming back.
Yes. This was the goal all along. Keep pushing unreasonable prices for years through the entire industry, then drop then down a bit, and people will say it’s not so bad to a price that they never would have agreed to otherwise.
A free to play game. You’re getting a pay to play game, with comparable cosmetic prices. Wow.
Spoiled by Vermintide 2 that let you just pay money for a skin, without using known psychological manipulation methods of phone and f2p games. Methods that are only not illegal because they haven’t been regulated YET.
This is like saying “They’re only trying to stick down a tiny amount of trash down my throat while other companies are trying to stick down a lot of trash, so I should thank them.”
