A 2K DEC price has been suggested recently for Conclave Acana by members of the community. This is a summary of my thoughts and others on why it's important to maintain and possibly even increase the pack price from 4,000 DEC.
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New player affordability concerns.
- New players have various options, but they are free to spend as little or as much as they want on cards on the secondary market, which can be purchased in-game. Many cards are available at a fraction of a cent.
- There will be either the $5 25 card packs or $1 5 card packs, for new players with common & rare cards and no Gold foils. These include summoners and therefore everything they need to get started.
- Purchase of a Spellbook will soon come with a pack/s.
- The new player campaign mode will also contain SB cards that new players can use to start building their deck.
- The fee-to-play options have also been expanded.
- All accounts have ghost starter cards.
- There are other options such as allowing Manual play in Wild without a season pass fee, which would also present a very affordable starting point for new players without increasing card numbers.
Analysis of the actual pack price
- Packs are priced in DEC and therefore, when DEC strays away from peg pack prices are discounted. During full crypto cycles it's possible that DEC could stray to half price for exmaple.
- During the Rebellion sale the bulk discounts plus DEC discounts brought pack prices below $2.50, which did not trigger an immediate surge in pack sales. This indicates that there is not a significant number of price-sensitive buyers as is being claimed. Most likely, many that wanted the cards bought early to get the full benefit of the airdrops, but many players decided not to buy them as they were able to manage sufficiently well using only the Chaos Legion cards, which are around 1/10th of the price, many being near burn value. Clearly, when Chaos Legion rotates out of modern, that situation changes in Modern.
- If packs are priced at 2,000 DEC, these price swings could bring pack prices down to near $1, which is far too low and caused a major ongoing oversupply problems for Chaos Legion when packs were sold that cheap.
Impacts on Modern
- If packs are half the price we would just see more players lower down with higher-level decks. A problem that is currently caused by super cheap Chaos Legion cards and is a problem that many players would like addressed.
- Chaos Legion rotating out in combination with existing pack prices should result in the return of classic bronze, silver and gold style decks with a healthy environment for new players with very small incomplete collections or bronze-level decks. Halving the pack price will impede this development.
Wider impacts on the ecosystem
- Cheap cards will result in many more cards entering the ecosystem, which dilutes the utility of existing cards overall. It stores up DEC debt for later on in the form of the burn value of these cards.
- Once we get card excesses in the ecosystem, they are very difficult to get rid of cost-effectively.
- There will likely be a significant impact on the value of Rebellion cards and packs, centred on this utility angle. This will likely help negatively impact the value of Rebellion cards on rotation to wild in particular. So far Rebellion has been a success exactly because the supply accurately matches the demand. It would be a great shame to undermine that when Conclave Acana is released, both for existing holders and buyer confidence generally.
Gross sales needed to fund Spinterlands game development
- The plan for 2025 is very exciting and looks very promising for attracting new players. Hopefully, after this year, the game will surge and never look back. However, pricing can't assume that we see a flood of new players that are spending heavily.
- The company received sufficient funds during the last year through a mixture of just over 1 million pack sales, the promo sales event, and DAO funding requests. For Conclave Acana I believe the intention is for there to be a main set and a mini-set. However, if pack prices are halved with the apparent lack of buyer price insensitivity, Gross sales would be significantly less overall, all things being equal, which could create very avoidable fundamental problems.
Inflation
- Alpha & Beta packs were sold for $2 each.
- The 4,000 DEC price was originally set for Chaos Legion cards in 2021, which actually ended up selling for nearer $25 per pack with the voucher, and yet this was one of the most successful sales.
- Riftwatchers were then sold for $5 a pack
- Rebellion was sold for 4,000 DEC per pack
- It would seem very strange indeed to halve pack prices at this stage, 3 years later to a price that would be less than Alpha or Beta as they were priced in USD not DEC, which could itself drop in price by half at times during the full crypto cycle.
- Inflation since the Chaos Legion launch has actually risen around 20% officially and probably much more in reality. This would make the case for increasing the cost of packs to around $5, rather than a reduction. So I see maintaining the price at 4,000 DEC as a form of compromise.
I hope the above helps this discussion.
Edit: 19/1/25
The notion of set cost was brought up in chat today. Set cost is a function of pack/card prices and the number units & monsters in the set. So one way to make things a little more affordable would be to have less cards in the set. Set sizes do see to have grown since the early days, but then a larger set size will likely result in more pack sales & therefore potentially impact gross pack sales.
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First, I appreciate a nice detailed reply to what your thoughts are Jedi.
Second, I think you demonstrate a willingness to consider the other side of the issue, and in fact even gave a potential solution that I haven't considered before.
I like the out of the box thinking, stating why you think how you do, and also offering points to form a potential basis for finding a solution. I hope more people bring up ideas so we can think a bit outside the box over the next 3 to 4 months.
Truly the sales of lower priced cards means that for the most part the players can obtain all the cards, but the question is, will it be competitive if we all have the same cards? I think that the competition would be more pleasant if the one with the greatest capital have better cards and well, rebellion is happening, since these cards are brought to you, for me they are better than the previous editions, which means that if you want to be among the best you should obtain them, so we could say that there is competition... Greetings and This is my humble opinion.
Agreed, if this game is healthy with sufficient scarcity, I feel that decks should be personal, where most people do not expect to own every card maxed. I've had to skimp on some of the recent promo cards for example
Two points I would like to point out of to you regarding your post. First would be that people were willing to pay $25 a pack for CL because splinterlands was the "IT" TCG crypto game of that bull run and every content creator and their mother were talking about splinterlands everywhere. That is definitely no longer the case. The only actual talk of splinterlands on Youtube is by content creators that were here from the start of the game or during 2021. The $25 price for CL was also able to be earned back with no issue at DEC was so far above peg and SPS was near a dollar. So people were comfortable with spending that kind of money on a game that had incredible hype and was paying out a decent amount.
And as far as rebellion not selling that wasn't only due to the overprinting of CL but due to the community basically losing all faith in the game itself and the team. After multiple missed promised deadlines and fear after the team having two major layoffs. More then anything I would say sentiment kept people away from Rebellion. The mass exodus of a large number of players also had people things this game was on a crazy train to zero.
Just my thoughts though and what do I know
Thanks, these are both valid observations. Apologies for being simplistic in my wording above. The first point was then further complicated by loads of CL packs as rewards and discounted sales.
Your second point is really important though as there was a genuine concern over the survival of Spinterlands for a few months. Many people place the blame of reduced player numbers on the change in game features, and whilst that may have impacted some people, I suspect the bigger driver was fear of the project not surviving. I'm very pleased to see in the last town hall that game finances are back on track and the plan for 2025 is very exciting indeed, as it drives towards, hopefully well timed, effective marketing of the game.
Thanks for sharing! - @azircon
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