AnY

First, there’s the love bomb. In this phase, the company is typically very generous to its players in order to hype up and attract new players and make sure that these players get too invested to leave. This phase is necessary for growth and typically starts immediately or even before the launch of the game but note that the generosity steadily declines over time.

Then, the stabilization. This is the moment of peace where everyone wins. The company slowly profits and the players enjoy the diverse arrangement of content that the game presents. This phase may last for quite a while with many down-spikes of the player-base and/or profit being met with new items to gacha (units, cards, characters, outfits, pets, mounts, you name it) or new mechanics to unlock.

Then, comes the bombardment. In this phase, the company starts to realize that their profits are declining due to a lack of new content and boredom in the fanbase so they churn out new content at an accelerated pace in order to force people to pay for their (limited-time) items. Typically, the items are also slowly becoming more and more expensive because the company knows that there is a demand and they are the sole suppliers so there’s no alternative.

With the bombardment comes powercreep. Powercreep comes in when the company realises that the incentives to gacha are lacking and so they add an incentive to gacha and therefore to pay more. In this phase, the units of the game become increasingly specialised in one area and more importantly the game becomes designed around this New Strongest Character thus the feeling of weakness when playing older and more generalised characters.

After powercreep comes the paywall. If profits still don’t rise after the powercreep, the game will altogether lock several functions behind a paywall requiring every player to spend money to just progress. Eventually, the game will reach a point where most if not all progression is locked behind a paywall and a premium character.

This is where a matter of respect is brought up. In an environment where the players and the game company are treated as equals, if an issue is brought up by a big part of the player-base then the issue will be quickly acknowledged, assessed, and fixed. However, a problem arises in an environment where the players are not all treated as equals.

In this environment, the players are put in a hierarchy where the lowest spenders are put on the bottom. Any criticism or comment given by this portion of the player-base are pushed down and silenced with the excuse of “needing to spend more”. This will push the player-base away from the game. Now, there’s no criticism for the game company, what do they do? They use the lack of negative feedback to raise the prices of the units of gacha—whether this is by adding new paywalls or jacking up the amounts of units to gacha or any other method under the sun. Now, the low spenders are pushed to spend more and some may cave but many others will criticise similar to past f2ps. And what happens? The past will repeat and they will be pushed down until they are forced to pay or leave.

This cycle will forever repeat until either every player is a high-paying whale or no one pays the price. In this environment, only money is respected.

However, the result of a paywall is not a single dead end but a fork in the road. The players can choose to either allow the game to snowball into an unplayable collector’s nightmare and eventual end of service or take action to stop the snowballing and allow the company a second chance to balance the game and unlock the paywalls—not all mind you just enough to be balanced.

This action may look like anything from a united confrontation to a full stopping of any payment. The most important part of this action is that the player-base is united in action to show that without change the company will not profit in the short or long term and that the player-base will not support any behaviour that disrespects consumer rights to hold back money when the product is not satisfactory.

At the end of the day, the player-base are the ones with the money. If you as the player feel disrespected with the returns for basically investing in the company then you have the rights to comment and criticise the company and the product. If the player-base is silenced in return, then a bigger action is required but a bigger action requires everyone to participate. Any power against the action can be used by the company to refute the action.

The choice is in the hands of the players.

We all can agree that a company requires profit in order to thrive. However, profit must then be looped back to a good customer experience in order to have lasting returns. For a company to neglect a majority of its players’ wants and needs in order to gain more profit is short-sighted and plainly stupid.

In order to have a long lasting run, a game should be able to balance out profit with player retention. Silencing out player comments and ignoring them is not the way to go.

Thank you for reading.

It would be like, he likes to take pictures of things he sees throughout his day; he takes a picture your favourite colour on a bird, he takes pictures of the sky and his cloud observations, he takes a picture of a shirt that looks like it would fit you well. At the end of the day he would show it to you and tell you how every picture reminds him of you.

Since he’s in charge of laundry, he makes sure that both of your clothes are always fragrant regardless of condition; and when you’re feeling down he’ll snuggle up on the bed with you just right so you can smell the shampoo that you share on him and cheer you up.

He’ll always cook you homemade meals and make lunch boxes that pair with his to bring to work. Every time you both eat out together, you always pick different things and share half your plate with him and vice versa, making sure that the both of you get a taste of everything (even drinks!)

When you’re together, he shares an earphone every time he walks along side you. When you are apart the two of you would often listen to the same songs as well; with a shared account one can always join the other to listen to the same song. Not only music, Caleb would also tell you of stories that he’s heard from other people so that you’re as up to date as he is.

And of course, he’ll make sure that you enjoy being at home as he does so the house is as comfortable as it can be; the temperature is perfect, the blankets are soft, and the floors are clean.