Wibbly Wobbly... Timey Wimey... Stuff.

“You’re not my Dad!”

“Why”

PEOPLE whO CAN dRAW…

PEoPLE WHo CAN wriTE AND DRaW…

me:

The penguin, on the other hand, never expressed anything at all. It’s designed almost explicitly with purpose of not expressing anything. It’s practically featureless, with only the bare minimum of detail necessary to tell you it’s a penguin. It has a face, but it never uses it. It has no sclera, meaning it stares straight ahead at all times. It actively repels most attempts to ascribe any emotion to it – at best, you can feel that it is coldly satisfied, perhaps detachedly frustrated. I’d say it’s like a robot wearing the skin of an animal, but that’s literally the villain of A Close Shave, and he was pretty expressive.

So The Arcana’s pricing scheme is exploitative and terrible and I’m astonished nobody is talking about it.

The standard response from the developers is that all of the paid content is ‘optional’, but you know what I want out of my romance game? Romance. 90% of which is paid content.

Also, this assumes I don’t want to pay for the game. Except I do! I backed it on kickstarter! I want to give these people my money. But I also don’t want to be bled dry.

This isn’t even getting into how the kickstarter promised backers the game itself as a reward, then reneged on their promise, offering a paltry $10 refund to make up for it (which will buy you a grant total of 1 chapter for 1 character’s route). 

This kind of business practice hurts other kickstarter projects down the road, because it erodes people’s trust in the platform. A lot of indie otome game devs rely on kickstarter. But my experience with The Arcana has sure made me think twice about supporting any other projects.

I’m going to talk about @thearcanagame and its company’s business practices. My goal with this piece is to educate and urge consumers to hold all companies to a higher standard in the mobile games industry.

Nix Hydra Games is a company that acquired $5.6 million in funding in 2014.That funding was not for The Arcana (which didn’t begin development until 2016), I point this out only to demonstrate that Nix Hydra is not a struggling indie company. This isn’t their first app and their marketing team is smart; they titled it “The Arcana - A Mystic Romance” to likely capitalize on people searching for Mystic Messenger as this subtitle is seen nowhere else. The player character is faceless and nameless, instilling a sense of ownership in the player who creates their own original character. Nix Hydra apparently have no trouble acquiring funding and only used Kickstarter as a way to gauge interest and marketing.

There’s nothing wrong with any of that, where they mistepped was on their promises to backers and false marketing.

In numerous places they stated that backers will receive the PC/Mac versions in exchange for backing the project. Less than a year later, in an update to their Kickstarter on October 9, 2017, they reneged:

Why would their artist and writers need to stop creating content to port the game to PC unless they’re also programmers? Mobile games are developed on a desktop and get compiled to a mobile device. Bug testing and distribution is required but the major work is already complete - it’s already on the PC. They’re using Unity, a game engine that supports all platforms, and a visual novel is not a complicated program. Porting is not as difficult as they’d like you to believe. There’s even a video in which their programmer states they’re at a point where the game doesn’t need him anymore.

Programmer Zach Vinless said, “We pretty much have the game to a point where the story is totally content driven - data driven - so that, you know, I’m pretty much free to not work on stuff specific to the-the story or the user interface and we can work on, you know, maybe some cool new features.”

The dead look in his downcast eyes and the way he trails off is telling. This man knows what’s up but he’s sitting right next to his boss. Writer Elle Hudson, visibly thrilled to be receiving a paycheck no matter where it comes from, jumps in to say, “Some of those features require content like the Wheel of Fortune […]”

So instead of instructing their programmer to port the game to PC/Mac, they are using their time to implement more blatant pay-to-win gambling “features” like their new Heart Hunter and Wheel of Fortune.

But let’s just say PC/Mac is impossible for some reason. On their Kickstarter update from March 21, 2017: “The purpose of releasing a desktop version of the game on itch.io for backers is to circumvent app store rules that prevent us from giving paid content only to specific players for free.”

It’s true that Google and Apple have strict rules and limits on promo codes, they want their piece of the capitalistic pie. However, what is stopping Nix Hydra from distributing a copy of their app directly to their backers with all of the content unlocked? They could create a download portal on their website strictly for backers and update it with each content release or simply send copies via a mailing list.

Oh right, there’s no money in that. An office in LA with over twenty employees doesn’t come cheap. The founders are Yale graduates, do you really think they aren’t aware they can do this? They are counting on you to not know. The desktop market is far less profitable than mobile, microtransactions and premium currency are a harder sell. They ran the numbers and know that refunding people $10 is cheaper than giving backers what they were promised. They’re hoping their fans grow impatient and just spend more money to unlock the content for which they already paid. This pricing isn’t going to fly with a PC audience:

As of May 25, 2018 all content in the game is unlockable for $180. That’s not too bad until you consider what the current route will cost when complete: $170 each. That’s $510 total for three characters. Now add the three extra routes they plan to complete - we’re up to $1020. That is more than the price of some first edition signed books and certainly more than an AAA game. It doesn’t even include the bonus content acquired through their sordid gambling minigames.

On November 22, 2016 they said the following:

That’s quite a change. Maybe they put the decimal in the wrong spot?

This is a classic bait and switch with some microtransaction bullshit sprinkled on top. Updates are released in increments and not everyone will do the math, leading people to spend more than they might want otherwise. They pressure you to spend premium currency with manipulative wording and make the call to action buttons nice and big:

They give you a time limited chance to earn in-game currency through gambling but they don’t publish their (likely low to impossible) probabilities:

Their argument for their ludicrous pricing is that it’s premium content and unnecessary to the story. Is it not false marketing to declare this is a romance novel then put all romance behind a paywall?

Founder Lina Chen said in the video linked above, “We get a lot of really positive reviews, the only negative ones are often about money. Um, and I don’t think people understand how much it costs to make something like this. How much it costs for a company to run to be able to offer this to people, that, like - and I don’t think people are quite thinking about, like, okay the people who make this also need to, like, buy food, and, like [laugh] and like living-living, you know, with a roof over our heads, that kind of thing.”

Honestly, I’m not sure how any of the employees can afford to live in Silicon Valley with the salaries they make. According to a 2015 Priceonomics article, an employee making $100,000 per year would have to devote 100% of their after tax paycheck to housing if they wanted to live in a 3 bedroom. Okay, not everyone needs 3 bedrooms, but even a studio apartment is going to cost you $2,722 a month. 

Continuing to pay for the Arcana is not doing its developers any favors. By doing so, you are not only paying far more than you should have to be for a game, you are also contributing to keeping your favorite developers in a job that is exploiting. The level of pay they get at Nix Hydra is going to affect them for the rest of their lives. It’s going to keep them from being able to save for their future retirement, it will keep them from being able to ever afford to start a family should they desire to do so, and it’s going to make getting paid the salary that they deserve at their next job harder.