Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-3215051-20160118085129/@comment-142.196.37.76-20160119161531

This was the best free-to-play game I've played, and I've been playing for over a year. But I have to say, at least from my perspective, it wasn't actually worth ever spending money on. The one time I felt motivated to spend money, the game crashed out of the battle I wanted to continue (was trying to get Rolo). I think that's a really revealing issue.

Gumi had a real gem here I think, but they may have lacked solid system thinkers or perhaps didn't analyze their data enough. They certainly must have lacked a marketing team with a solid understanding of human psychology. Again, my experience is anecdotal, but I had a ton of fun with this game and because I am a follower of the games industry, I usually try to support even free-to-play games with a little purchase at some point. It is a vote for the game with my money. But unlike some other games where I spent some dough almost right away, it never actually seemed worth it to spend money in Chain Chronicle. None of the options met my "needs". The fear of regret I'd feel if purchased prysma landed me 3-star cards outweighed the joy of a potential target arcana because the risk was so high.

A good game should give players what they need and reward them for desired behavior. If Gumi wanted me (and who knows, maybe I'm alone in this) to spend money on the game, they needed to realize that behaviorally, anticipated pain (regret in this case) motivates aversive action almost as much as actual pain. People also tend to overweigh small percentages and will pay a premium for certainty; in my case, I was willing to spend significantly more money on a "sure thing", like reviving my party and getting Rolo in a challenge mission, than I was spending it on what was basically an unknown chance to potentially get some rare card or another. In fact, the price of prysma was such that I NEVER felt it was worth it to spend money on prysma to do a recruit. Not once in a whole year!

As a counterexample, when I downloaded Fallout Shelter and they had a 50% off sale on 15 lunchboxes (think a pack of cards kind of like arcana, except it is a four-pack and at least one is Rare), I made a $5 after just a week of playing. Why did I make a purchase for that game when it isn't even remotely near the richness or longevity of gameplay that CC offers? Because I wanted to spend $5 to support a free game that I liked, and also because 15 lunchboxes was sure to net me at least $5 worth of enjoyment from the new cards I got. $5 in chain chronicle was much, much more likely to result in a dissappointment.

I hope Gumi can use the CC Global experience to improve their handling of monetization in future games so that this doesn't happen again to a good game. They need to discover how to not only monetize from the "gambler" player type, but from "safe bet" types like myself and also from "opening purchase" types who will spend money right away to get something that they know for certain is valuable and is a good deal.

One thing is clear, though; now I can't trust Gumi's handling of games, since gameplay-wise Chain Chronicle was one of the best games of all time that I have played on mobile and they couldn't make enough revenue on it to continue. It makes me really, really hesitant to invest my time or money in any of their games, including Brave Frontier.