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Cartel Market rakes in the cash
Chieftan
Member UncommonPosts: 1,188
http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/12/29/swtor-fan-site-posts-cartel-market-poll-results/#comments
So....if one person spends $100 in the Cartel Market that's the equivalent of 6 people subbing for one month.
And because I was reminded here SO MANY times that even a small sample is an accurate indicator of what the playerbase as a whole is doing, that must mean EA's making money hand over fist right now.
Comments
a lot of people do use it as i see the items all over the place in game (i have bought some coins myself).
i bet most of them are subscribers though. F2P people just want to play a free game.
Having subbed since headstart, I'm hoping the same thing doesn't happen. As soon as it becomes P2W in any fashion that affects endgame raiding or instances at all, I'm out. I don't care about spending money to buff yourself for minigames, Im' talking about selling end-game gear you can only get through raiding.
Now, that aside, I am one of those that has spent more than $100, probably close to $200 to be honest. While I know the F2P'ers don't like the cash shop, as a Subber I like it a lot obviously. I like SWTOR more now than I did before F2P mainly becuase the zones are packed. Was leveling my 32 Shadow and my 43 BH today, zones each had more than 150 people in them. Fun Fun.
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I recently returned. I have only spent the coins I was given, but I did resub. I'm pretty sure I'll buy the "expansion" too.
Considering how cheap even the rare items from cartel packs are lots of peopl are buying them. I admit to buy way more then I should. I know the guy who spent 125 k CC so far LOL... that's equivalent of $1200 - almost 100 subs. And you hear box popping all the time on fleet.
I am not going to say how much I spent though.. LOL.
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2500 darthater visitors voted and 26% of them spent $100 to $200...
Conservative estimate from that sample group alone: $70,000
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2500 people is not a small sample group. Medical tests on life and death medicamentation(like cancer) is done on far smaller sample sizes.
Obviously fansites are mostly visited by people already dedicated to the game. That being said, yes they are making silly amounts of money with the cartel market. All F2P games with a sizeable population do. Its like putting a one armed bandit into a corner of your restaurant, your not selling less food, but you will make extra money with it.
Reason being that many people have no problem a sub, thats fine. However there is a subgroup in those subbers, that don't have any problem spending 10x a subs value on a ingame store if it happens to carry something they like. I spent like 50$ myself, getting field respecs and the like for all my chars, its quite handy and i don't mind the money.
2500 is indeed not a small sample... in a properly randomized public poll or scientific trial. This is anything but one of those. The respondents are self-selected from people who like the game enough to follow a fan site for it and who care enough to take the time to fill out the survey. This is made obvious by the fact that the vast majority of the respondents to the poll are subscribers. If the same poll was conducted here on MMORPG.com the results would be quite different.
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It is all fresh, and exciting, and then you realise you are just flushing your money down the drain, and slow down / stop spending
I do not understand why people would keep spending money on lottery stuff, I did not even do it on SWG TCG not even once, even though there were reports of others doing so. The only time I spent on the TCG was to get a stuffed tauntaun on 3 accounts and several time, but that was for charity and whatever we paid to SOE, SOE paid double to the charity.
Even more now that the realistation of if getting anything will be gone when game shuts down. Although I did top up my ZEN on STO because I am not spending any money on that at all, and getting a fuller gaming experience for free, but that was intended for char slots and stuff, then my friend got an item out of buying one of these packs by chance as bought them for the packs itself and not the item, and I then tried, but failed many many times, and blew all my ZEN. Never again, and now I am just playing STO to grind dilithium and get my ZEN back which I lost, saving me my money
Money would be better spent given to charity / helping out the recessions or flushed down the toilet (as at least you get to see a pretty vortex effect as your money gets sucked away!) Espceially when EA are not progressing the game fast enough, or doing enough with it, and the way they are doing things seems as though they are just trying to get as much money to pay back for the development of everything so far, and have no intentions on updating the game past June 2013, when shortyly aftwrards they will announce its closure.
What would get me to sub and pay money to SWTOR and EA, is if they stop being lazy or purpsosely driving the game into the ground, and just flood the game with content, like SOE did with SWG, Turbine does to LOTRO, Blizzard does to WOW, Cryptic/Perfect World does to STO, Trion does to Rift, Pargon Studios did to City of Heroes etc
I am not subbibing, although did one last time to get the CCC, which was over 3000 CC, and have not spent any of my complimentary coins or any real money in the market at all
I am waiting to unlock more char slots. Hopefully it will be in by the time the expansion comes, although may not be needed as if I sub to get expansion then would not need to buy more char slots, unless they then lock out your extra chars, which will get more crappy as time goes one - people enjoyibng the game for months on F2P from being subbed, with their chars they created when subbed, and then all of a sudden your extra toons are locked out. Hopefully the will do what STO do, not lock out chars, and allow you to buy 2 char slots, and if you have more slots than what you should have under F2P, then you only get one char slot.
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If anything, what I'd expect from EA is to pump the money into corporate profits. Their stock is bouncing around the 5 year low set earlier this year. My guess is corporate wants profits up to make the stock more attractive. They took a huge hit in 2008 when the market fell out, but unlike many of the public traded stocks, it never recovered.
But doesn't that make it much more relevant? It's a poll of people who play and subscribe to the game. A poll here would definitely skew in the other direction, but it would be useless data. It is irrelevant whether some guy who doesn't play, wouldn't play or actively hates on the game would use the item mall or not.
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Now I feel like a tightwad for only spending $4.99 on it. Must_resist_temptation!
But let's say there's another 100k subbers(a modest number) who only spend what I did--that still comes out to a hair under $2 million in revenue. All of a sudden TOR's notorious development budget doesn't look so insurmountable.
This is where the license is really going to pay off for them. Where all other MMOs(outside of LOTRO I guess) are only going to sell Generic Fantasy Item#23234 in their shops, EA's tapping into the lucrative Star Wars collector demographic.
The current selection in the Cartel Market doesn't even scratch the surface of what they can put up for sale.
I'd imagine thats pretty much the entirety of those that care enough about SWTOR to actually spend cash on it. I wouldn't really call it a sample group in the traditional sense due to the specific focus of the fan site.
I hate cash shops and think people who spend large amounts of cash in em are idiots, yet when ever I see a poll asking how much I spent in the cash shop I always pick the highest value available regardless of whether I even play the game. You can take $100 from your total, that was me.
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To be fair, no polling on mmorpg.com would be indicative of any MMO reality...
i agree wholeheartedly with this statement as well. People who have to spend money on pixels ina video game to feel ahead of the rest need to go see a doctor seriously. Obviously though there are way more of them than people like me or we wouldnt see the success these shops see in all these annoying games. I know when i was playing SWTOR before i cancelled my account everyone was riding around on thrones and using purple/pink lightsaber crystals from the cartell packs so im sure EA is laughing its way to the bank. But if you think its so bad in SWTOR you are in for a serious issue as EA does this in all their games especially the ones on android like the sims. Hell you have to buy unlocks on the sims on tablets just to get them to sleep faster or eat faster as its super slow if you do not. IMO the shadiest company in the history of gaming. But as long as people have money to burn they will thrieve , i just feel very sorry for their families if they are spending thousands of dollars in cash shops instead of spending it on their wives or kids seriously.
Quite naive if you think they are answering honestly and not out to prove something.
it looks like the CC is bugged too
some of those, who actually WANT to spend money cant get anything
and IF they were making such a big pile of cash,,,why did they still choose to charge for makeb?
this will continue as long as the the fans will throw money at them,,now lets see how much of that money
gets reinvested in the game
None will get reinvested, they have huuuuuuuuuge debt to service and interests arent going down.
Makeb was just a hint at how things stand at EA.