It is true that businesses should also take risks from time to time, but we are talking about a rather big risk here that most businesses would not explore. I mean imagine you run a successful store at the moment and some customers suggest you change your current store business model completely. Would you do that? Probably most store owners would never do that because changing a well running model for something else would be a move that risks their whole business. Maybe they would try it out with a new store to see how it goes, without risking their old store.
See and this is where I disagree. Unless the company considers its business model to be "Let people pay us so they can break our product", tweaking the Goldmark mechanics is absolutely not akin to changing your current business model completely. The better analogy to a store would be picking up a service or an item on customer request or serving a different brand of coffee. Nobody is asking the company to change its entire business model, step away from Goldmark or the ability to buy advantages in the game. It's like the fiftieth time I say that in this thread alone. This is why I find it so hard to understand that the Goldmark mechanic, for as far as I can tell, has not substantially been touched at all in over ten years.
I remember the gold free alliance tournaments and those were an absolute spectacle to watch. I can't say I ever knew of gold free games with entry fees ever existing, probably because they were alliance only from what I gather. Else I would have been in them. But the Goldmark options as they stand right now are essentially the same of ten years ago while many, many changes have been made to the rest of the gameplay. I think this is for better or worse whichever way you look at it, as while surely some failures and losses were avoided, innovation and revenue was as well. And sure, after ten years of it running well enough, it's hard to provide any reasons to not get complacent. The whole mechanic just seems a little antiquated now, especially as the game's entire marketing has shifted generations with the new UI and the website overhaul, stuffing it into a profitable market. Its monetization is still very uninspired and 1.0 from 2010.
And as a pretty meaningless side note - I mean, I'm happy for you that the game is in its best year ever apparently, but you would not phrase it that way from playing it, take my word for it. The target audience for a freemium service has become very young over the past few years and this game is clearly no exception. Again, I'm glad you're doing well, but the product lives off its players here and it's not doing better for that. And to be truthfully honest with you, as by the way I do appreciate the transparency of your reply, I'll be so transparent to express how I find this particular aspect of a business model to be extremely disagreeable. The GO's are to enforce a "family friendly" atmosphere among players, the chat even filters the word "bollocks" for crying out loud, like we're pandering to five year-olds here, yet you know as well as I do that the company has no issue whatsoever gauging these kids for money it deliberately attracts and you also know as well as I do that the reason it does this, like most other freemium platforms, is because these kids are inexperienced with spending money and will soak up microtransactions with absolutely no regard to the quality of the product they are recieving. This works so well because presenting them with a challenge and then providing the easiest solution will have them go for that in the majority of cases. The whole freemium market really is capitalism 2.0. This obviously isn't Bytro's fault at all but they also quite clearly do not think much of participating in squeezing very, very young customers for all they're worth because that's the easiest thing you can possibly do. I think it's despicable quite honestly and while the time for concerns like that has mostly passed, I don't think it gets any better when you consider what a family unfriendly topic this game is about.
I'm aware that someone who gauges money out of children for a living makes it more than clear by doing so that he couldn't give less of a patootie what some random guy on the internet thinks about that. I'm also more than aware that now that Bytro has taken that road and decided to just throw its product into the thousands of other generic games that are in that particular market because it's easy to serve that market and it generates income with almost zero effort, all pretense that the quality of the product is of any particular meaning to the company is out the window, likely never to return. You can throw out random gameplay updates every few months as much as you want, this game is being handled hands-off by the company at this point. You found a way to make this thing a money printer on autopilot and for what it's worth, once again I'm glad you guys are getting payed, but when taking that road the company made it clear that it's not going for a special, high-quality product anymore that sets itself apart. Personally, I think an opportunity was blown there to have a product that's actually valued by your customers.