[Adam13531]

Are you talking about the monetization model, or is something broken with opening salvage packs?

I assume the former. The goal was always for Bot Land to be free-to-play, and there were many different approaches to monetization discussed throughout development. In the end, I settled on the one you see in-game now, but the tenets were always the same: https://share.bot.land/monetization.html

For reference, salvage packs are the single monetization point of Bot Land. I'm not planning to include advertisements, and I don't want to do subscriptions or anything. Salvage packs contain only cosmetic items, and the rarities are included up-front (which I would have done even if certain platforms like Apple didn't require that).

You can play for free and obtain every item in the game. The game took not only a substantial amount of time to develop (4 years), but also a huge chunk of my savings that I'd built up from my past jobs. I do need some way to make money, and I don't think people would give a game like Bot Land a shot if it weren't free.

[shkkmo]

I appreciate your intent to make the game is not P2W and use IAP only for cosmetic items.

However, why not allow users to purchase those items directly? The use of "loot boxes", even for purely cosmetic items, can create dangerous and unhealthy addictive behaviors as people buy again and again trying to get the item they want. A number of countries [0] have made "loot boxes" illegal or placed restrictions on them, so this isn't a purely humanitarian concern.

Additionally, since you can sell those cosmetic items for "Botcoin, which you can then use to purchase anything else in the game." doesn't that end up giving your game P2W functionality? It seems like moving to direct purchases of cosmetic items would eliminate the need for re-sale and prevent concerns about your game being P2W.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loot_box#Regulation_and_legisl...

[Adam13531]

I think that with the current climate of gaming, this is a minefield to answer, and I don't think it does me any good to answer it. It feels like a "gotcha, I knew it!" kind of question rather than an honest inquiry into how Bot Land's monetization came to be. However, I've always wanted to be transparent where I can, and I'm sure some people are wondering about this, so here's my thinking that led to cosmetic-only salvage packs:

For any game to be monetarily viable, it needs to pull in an average of $X for each player. Any free-to-play game (including freemium but not including something like shareware) skews how that average is formed because typical free-to-play games are lucky to have 5% of their playerbase spending any amount of money. This means that a large portion of the playerbase is actively costing money. Thus, they tend to rely on whales to spend huge amounts of money to compensate for all of the people spending nothing (or next to nothing). For this to work, the spending ceiling needs to allow for purchases of this size to even take place.

I wrote a salvage-pack modeler that would compute how many items of each rarity you would get by opening X packs, and how much Botcoin you could convert those items into should you want to sell them. I determined that at the highest number of packs that you can buy (70 packs, i.e. $100), you unlock nearly every cosmetic item in the game except for the rarest ones (which you actually unlock very few of). However, the average Botcoin value is enough for you to purchase several specific items that you may have wanted. I never wanted players to spend $100 for a single item and not be able to get it somehow.

By allowing direct real-money purchases of individual cosmetic items, I'd have to skew prices so heavily to make the same average revenue that I don't think players would want to purchase them. Also, there wouldn't be the fun or mystery of opening a salvage pack. I know what that sounds like. I even did a parody of EA's famous words for April Fool's last year (https://youtu.be/cCmj2hKbWeQ). But I can unravel a bit of this at least:

1. I'm not a businessperson. I don't know much about the psychology behind sales and how to make various business models work.

2. I have somewhat conflicting goals with Bot Land. I want the game to be free-to-play, I don't want to exploit users, and I want to make a living off of the game.

3. The model which I know can fit those goals is the salvage-pack system that you see in the game now.

4. The payment model is not set in stone. So far, Bot Land has grossed significantly less than $1000, and a large portion of that is from users who already had accounts before the game even launched, likely indicating that those users wanted to support me moreso than get something in the game. It's easy to be ethical until challenged, but I'd like to think that if I found users spending ludicrous amounts of money in the game, I'd do something to curb that behavior.

5. There's been an absurd amount of work just getting to launch, and I'm not positive that I can even continue Bot Land's development beyond 2019 without greatly changing the plans my wife and I made (more about that here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aCE4s5UvVLH7dHuO1OA2m5Sw...). This bullet point's relevance is that I have so few resources to even be able to focus on the game alone right now, let alone any other issues that may pop up.

You may take this as incoherent rambling or mental gymnastics to be able to justify what is typically a predatory business model in gaming. I will be reevaluating as time passes to figure out whether something needs to be changed. I highly doubt Bot Land will be successful enough for me to even be able to make those decisions though.

> doesn't that end up giving your game P2W functionality?

Functional items are supposed to be balanced such that they can be situationally better than other items of the same category, but not outright better. Arguably, being situationally better allows you to be outright better the more situations you come across, but I think that fully exploring the nuances of this would be a much larger conversation when I think that the heart of your questions is around loot boxes. In short: I don't think that even if you could purchase Botcoin directly would the game be pay-to-win.

Finally, one last note that's not the most salient: I never really intended for salvage packs to be convertible into the other items in Bot Land, just cosmetic items. The one monetization point that I've written down for the future is to introduce hardware coupons, that way you can directly purchase functional items. I don't know when this would happen though, if ever.

---

There are parts in this post, specifically with the five points I enumerated, whose connection to the original questions and even to my own supporting points may not be clear to a reader. I took time and care to type this, but I'm sure that I could have made things clearer. I don't mind participating in an honest discussion about this or other aspects of the game. I'll likely stream tomorrow (Monday) if you want to ask me in-person (although I can't guarantee that I have the required amount of time to devote to the conversation).

[shkkmo]

Thanks for taking the time to reply in such a thoughtful manner!

> I determined that at the highest number of packs that you can buy (70 packs, i.e. $100), you unlock nearly every cosmetic item in the game except for the rarest ones (which you actually unlock very few of).

It is these rare items that tend to drive the addictive behavior behind loot boxes. Is there a particular reason you feel like you want to have these rare items be so hard to obtain?

If you don't mind me asking, what is your target revenue per player? $100 seems pretty high...

> By allowing direct real-money purchases of individual cosmetic items, I'd have to skew prices so heavily to make the same average revenue that I don't think players would want to purchase them. Also, there wouldn't be the fun or mystery of opening a salvage pack.

By using a randomized loot box (especially one without published odds) you are effectively tricking players into paying more than they would otherwise wanted to. This seems abusive to me.

> For any game to be monetarily viable, it needs to pull in an average of $X for each player. Any free-to-play game (including freemium but not including something like shareware) skews how that average is formed because typical free-to-play games are lucky to have 5% of their playerbase spending any amount of money.

There are monetization choices that I think do a good job of balancing that distribution. Loot boxes is not one of them, nor is any mechanism by which players are given the option to repeatedly purchase consumable items that aid progress/grinding. This can actually discourage low-value players from paying since they can't pay enough to make a real difference.

I personally think that one-time purchases for ($5-20) that give a permanent bonus to grinding (10-20% boost to rewards earned by playing) are actually more player friendly. They encourage more players to spend a little bit of money on the game while reassuring them that you will not keep raising the bar and pushing for more money to keep progressing. I will almost always buy a package like this (as long as it is reasonably priced.)

> a large portion of that is from users who already had accounts before the game even launched, likely indicating that those users wanted to support me moreso than get something in the game.

Don't under-estimate this. The desire by fans and serious players to support your game and keep you afloat can be a significant factor in the decision to spend money on your game. Predatory monetization can destroy that goodwill, which will in turn make you more dependent on your whales. When I feel like a game is pushing me to spend money, it decreases my respect for the game and the developers and reduces my desire to support them.

> It's easy to be ethical until challenged, but I'd like to think that if I found users spending ludicrous amounts of money in the game, I'd do something to curb that behavior.

An ethical approach to whales can significantly mitigate the predatory effects of monetization. However, it is also a fairly invisible monetization technique that doesn't do as much to engender goodwill across your player base.

> In short: I don't think that even if you could purchase Botcoin directly would the game be pay-to-win.

P2W comes in a couple of different flavors and doesn't really mean just one thing. There are some heavily P2W games where F2P players struggle to compete and spending money becomes necessary past a certain point of the game. (I think of these games as P2W PvP) (Good matchmaking can push a game that would otherwise fall into this category down the the one below.)

There are also a lot of P2W games that don't disadvantage F2P players directly, but just allow players to pay to progress faster. Any games that allows real money to directly convert to a fully unlocked/upgraded account falls solidly into this category. It sounds like your game is one of these. (I think of these games as P2W PvE) (Games with synchronized server starts that would otherwise fall into this category can easily fall into the above category.)

Then there is the whole spectrum of games that provide some in-game advantage, but limit some forms of progression to gample/grinding.

Finally, there are the games that are truly not at all P2W, where real money purchases can only buy cosmetic items and there is no mechanism to provide any in-game advantage to paying players.

I don't like P2W PvP games. I don't mind P2W PvE games, especially when the montization is well done and the money/grinding ratio is high ($1 to save 100hrs of grinding is unacceptable, $100 to save 1hr of grinding is great).

One of my favorite indy P2W PvE games is Hades' Star which is almost entirely unlockable by spending money, but has an extremely high money/grinding exchange. The game also offers a very reasonable permanent package that provides a 10% boost to a couple of specific things.

I hope your stint on HN gives you a boost and helps you reach a sustainable level of income from Bot Land. Good luck!

[soulofmischief]

Should gambling be illegal? If you believe in human freedom then no, it shouldn't, so maybe you're barking up the wrong tree here. Let's focus on the fact that A) this practice is generally turning the AAA industry into grindy garbage and B) this stuff is targeted towards kids