I made a video on how it will be important to unify the player base in BF1. This video covers everything from DLC to certain game modes. I have included a list of topics and when they appear in the video if you just want to jump to a specific area of discussion. Let me know what you think, lets get some discussion going.
[1:35] Expensive DLC can Divide the Player Base
[1:45] Financial Profitability of DLC–two scenarios
[2:53] Unify Player Base pre-DLC by eliminating superfluous/low traffic game modes.
[3:32] New Game Mode that redefines BF multiplayer experience–is it Operations?
[3:50]THE IDEA OF A CHALLENGING GAME MODE THAT IS DELIBERATELY DIFFICULT (Like Beta Walker Assault in SWB
I’m not really sure if I agree with your point about dividing the player base. People have the tendency to want more for less money, that will always be something they need to deal with.
About paying more for the game and have the DLC’s for free VS paying less for the basegame and pay for each DLC seperately;
I think what you didn’t consider is the option of Premium/Season Pass. This basically allows customers have 3 options:
[LIST=1]
[]Buy the base game and nothing else
[]Buy the base game and all DLC’s you like
[*]Buy the base game PLUS all future DLC’s in advance for less money
[/LIST]
Obviously, if you’re a very active BF player and know you will want to experience the full game with everything it has to offer, chances are you’ll get premium from the get go (assuming you can afford it, but he, you had 3 years to save up, right?)
Making the game more expensive with free DLC’s will probably make the game a little less interesting for casual gamers. Lot’s of people buy the game, play it for a while and move on…you’ll be shocked by how many people are actually like that. They might not buy the game because maybe they’re not interested in the DLC’s or maybe even don’t play multiplayer. Current estimates are that BF4 sold about 17 million copies (maybe even more, no official numbers available) but according to BF4Stats.com only 700.000 people have been registered playing Multiplayer. Lets say that this is a serious underestimation and lets assume it’s more like 2.000.000 (I think Julian Manolv mentioned this figure once)
Then the ratio of Total Copies sold vs. Copies sold for Multiplayer is about 8:1. So for each 8 copies sold, only 1 copy will be used for multiplayer. That 1 copy might also make use of DLC’s (Since DLC’s in general are only Multiplayer focused).
So if they would raise the price of each copy to include free DLC’s, some singleplayer focussed customers might play Multiplayer because of the free DLC’s, but that won’t be many. At the same time, some people might not pick up a copy because it’s to expensive for a Single Player experience alone. So what they do is make the game accessible to both Single Player as well as Multi player focused costumers. The Multiplayer customers can get more out of the experience by buying the DLC’s and expand the options and don’t get bored.
This is a very valid marketing strategy that makes sense. The whole discussion about splitting player base is completely Multiplayer Focussed, which is basically only a fraction of the potential customers…
Makes complete sense. That was primarily what I was concerned about in this video–splitting the multiplayer player base. But here is an interesting point:
7 million bought BF4. Only about 1.6 purchased the season pass. My point is consumers will be less price sensitive at $70 or $75 at the outset when the game is hyped, fresh and new–then $50 up front or $60 down stream (if you buy 4 15$ DLC’s as they come out individually)
Those figures come from BF4Central, hardly a reliable source. Next to that, they’re from early 2014 and are based on reports from the past Fiscal Quarter., making them even older. The 7 million is an absolute minimum, and I’m sure I’ve seen the number 15 million somewhere…now I only need to find where it was…LOL
I for one like the concept of paid DLC. It encourages the developer to continually work on the game in order to earn more of our $$. If there were no DLC I could easily see developers push the product out the door, write 1-2 patches and move onto other projects.
If the game is a buggy mess, no one will open their wallets for DLC until the bugs have been squashed, which I think is part of the reason that Battlefield4 got the attention that it did to fix the release issues.
This a graph published by Pstats a long time ago. It’s the number of unique players over a 7-day period. 1.8 million players for Battlefield 4 in Multiplayer…so this is the absolute minimum number of players who played BF4 multiplayer.