Thank you for the response. I checked financial statements of Bytro Labs available at https://www.bundesanzeiger.de/ . I have found quite detailed information for the year ended 31st of December 2021. Information for 2022 is not available yet and information for earlier years is not detailed to make any conclusions. My 2 cents on what I have seen, given that I have very limited information. Company's revenue correlates quite a lot with marketing expenses (Fremdleistungen). However it appears, that although the company has been growing its revenue quite well it has been unable to maintain the profitability due to high costs of marketing and profits are decreasing. Marketing expenses are required to attract new customers (players), however the inability to maintain profitability signals me that the company is experiencing quite high churn of existing customer base. To compensate for leaving customers company has to spend substantially for marketing. In my opinion the company could easily fix this by focusing on decreasing customer churn and increasing the lifetime value of each customer by optimizing gaming experience for a broad base of moderate spenders. I checked a number of forums and found out that heavy GM spending is among top complaints and one of the main reason players stop playing (you could make a much accurate survey based data on this). Somehow I think, that the customer base for this type of games is quite limited, therefore the strategy of totaly ingoring customer complaints about heavy GM spending is very shortsighted and eventually will lead to even lower profitability.
Posts by JulDuke
-
-
Looks like the topic hasn't been active for some time, however this is my take on the problem after running in a heavy spender in one match. First of all thanks for the explanation from the game designer, where the business model and justification for current monetization is explained. I clearly understand that the business is to make as much money out of the game as possible. Developer's observation that they are doing ok financially might not be because of good features in the game, but rather general trend in the market towards mobile gaming. Currently game developers use the strategy to have few big spenders that bring most of the revenue. The model is designed to exploit the willingness to win no matter the cost. This might look ok on the surface, however in longer run it makes the gaming experience worse for quite many moderate spenders, that churn and stop spending sooner or later. So my suggestion would be to improve the monetization strategy a bit with an aim to make the game better by focusing on increasing the number of moderate spenders. This would increase gaming experience a lot and would make income for the company higher. Few concrete proposals how to improve the gaming experience:
1. Raise prices for GM's.
2. No ability to instantly build a building or unit, just shorten the construction time with GMs by 25-50%
3. Daily CAP limit on GM spend.
4. An paid option to start the game with 1 - 1.5x to double army size (5-10 EUR per game). I think this feature would be a fair one and would bring substantial amount of revenue for game developer.
5. Disable the feature of destroying other player buildings / lowering morale with GM.
I strongly believe if implemented these changes would not only increase revenue for the company, but it would also lead to a much broader player base, better gaming experience, better reviews and even more users.
