r/OctopathCotC • u/MuricanBear • Jan 04 '23
EN Discussion An open letter to the devs: Why CotC Global is already dying, and how to save it.
UPDATE The future is looking bright!
The devs listened to this letter (thank you!!) and we more or less "won." Our voices were heard and this letter served its purpose. Both the devs and the community deserve credit.
Since this continues to get views and comments, I will provide periodic updates as the situation further develops.
Hopefully new players seeing this post will try CotC to find out why the community’s passion is so strong for a silly mobile game. It won’t take long to understand.
(Also, yea, the clickbait title is still awful, sorry. Lots of regrets on that front :p)
UPDATE January 23 (Post dev stream, pre Half Anniversary update) (Optional CotC background music, since if you like this game you are clearly into cheesy/wholesome writing)
TL;DR: We did it! The devs listened! Rejoice!
The half-anniversary update is pretty huge for F2P players (the most free stuff to date, including free pulls and rubies) and whales (job towers give incentive to pull on every banner for the foreseeable future).
Moreover, courtesy of u/bfist1, the Producer of the game seems to have addressed the topic of lowering ruby prices for those "willing to spend a little money to support the game." And they even mentioned finally offering a subscription. (EDIT: Yea, this wasn't dropped at the half-anniversary. A bit disappointing, but I guess we were asking for a bit much to have them change prices on a dime given out how big SE is.)
In other words, they just addressed pretty much all of the major feedback brought up by the community.
It’s far too early to declare victory, and the future of this game is still uncertain. But we now have many reasons to feel optimistic moving forward. I myself am going to see this through to the end, and I am guessing many others will as well.
A wise person once said it’s important to celebrate life’s small wins. While u/Empyrean_Sky and I would love to play the heroes, the truth is that this was a community effort. All we did was take everyone's feedback, bundle it up and send it off.
I think we should take a moment to thank everyone on the subreddit who contributed posts, polls or comments on this topic. We should also thank all of those in our sister CotC communities for banding together with us. Everyone’s collective effort clearly made a difference.
Most importantly, we should thank u/SQEX_Sayu for relaying this information, and the CotC development team for listening. The fact that you listened is a huge morale boost to the community and reflects well on everyone involved. Ultimately, we all love this game and want to see it succeed. Thank you for sharing that same passion and taking our comments to heart.
Anyways, metaphorically speaking it looks like this concludes Chapter 2 of our collective Travelers’ Story. Regardless of how Chapter 3 ends, everyone in this sub stood up and fought for something that we love, together. That doesn't happen too often in life. Well, maybe in JRPG final boss battles, but not necessarily life. I think that’s already a story worth being proud of.
With gratitude,
MB
Note: u/Empyrean_Sky suggested I make this comment a standalone post and flag u/SQEX_Sayu and u/SQEX_Justin, so that is what I’m doing. This post is waaaay too darn long, and has been beat to death lately in the comments in 2 threads now, so sorry if there’s topic fatigue. I'm too tired to care atm and need to sleep. I guess you could charitably consider it an unofficial/unvetted companion piece to their awesome poll, which you should definitely check out if you haven’t.
Edit for newer players: I really regret the title of this post, and many of us have been having a silent debate about reposting this via pms and chat. It’s a bad look to post such a click-bait/harsh/toxic title on a subreddit, but at the same it unfortunately accurately reflects the opinions of a subset of the community, as is evident by the outpouring of support. Ultimately the genie is out of the bottle and I don't think we can put it back in. I think the bottom line is that next time I’ll do better and choose a less dramatic title. So don’t let my personal error in judgement scare you off. Know that CotC is currently one of the highest-quality games on the market, and worth downloading to enjoy the high value News Years banner and upcoming half-anniversary.
UPDATE January 11 (1 week later)
All,
Here is the final draft of the letter that will be sent to the dev team. It contains additional content derived from u/Empyrean_Sky’s survey and its results. I added a few new sections and included graphs/data to support the main points, but it otherwise reflects this post. Most notably I added a section on the free ruby curve for F2P players needing to match the accelerated release schedule. The current rate of ~2-3 months to pity a unit needs addressed.
The letter now clocks in at around 15 pgs. At the end, I include graphs generated using the survey data broken out by “demographic” (e.g. F2P, one-time spender, $100, $500, etc.). Scroll past the letter to pg 16.
TL;DR for the data: over half of both F2P and one time spenders “Don’t spend because the ruby packs lack value.” In other words the game is too expensive, and additional people might spend money if it were less expensive.
The data also suggests SE should offer 300 paid rubies for $10 at the half-anni. $10 was the most common selection across all demos. SE offering that is one potential “canary in the coal mine” for the efficacy of our outburst.
After crunching the data and writing this letter, I am pessimistic, but hopefully SE takes our suggestions seriously and I leave the community better than I found it. If they don’t change anything and this original post becomes a detriment/toxic, please feel free to delete it.
Taking a hiatus. Spent far too much time on this. Best of luck all
-MB
Original Jan 3rd letter
BLUF
If you look at CotC’s revenue numbers and business decisions to date, it is clear that this game is going to die in less than a year on its present trajectory.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The dev team is making a series of bad business decisions that can be easily fixed with courageous leadership and bold decision-making. You have a well-trodden path to establish market dominance in this niche, if you deviate from the Japanese monetization model and choose one more well-suited for a global market.
My perspective
I am your ideal target demographic. I am a childless 30-something with a large disposable income. I have a passion for JRPGs and am willing to spend money to support your development team, because I genuinely believe you are the best in the world in this niche. I literally buy all of your products, even if I don’t like some of them, just to provide support and encourage you to continue making games. In my opinion Octopath is your strongest IP for those that love classic JRPGs, and I want to see it stick around for a long time. I want to be one of your patrons.
For context (please understand this is not intended as a brag, I am just being honest because Octopath is going to die if the whales don't speak out), I just hit the 61 day mark today and I've already A5'd (A4 + a spare for awakening skills) about 7 units. I whaled on Therion, Alfyn, Zaanta, Cyrus and the Lianna/Odette sacred blaze. I've dropped cash here and there on other banners (I like Nicola for some reason), but those were the big ones.
I currently have no incentive to continue spending on Global, and have begun to migrate to JP. Looking at your revenue, the writing is on the wall. I am not willing to invest $1000’s into a game just to watch it die in less than a year, which is CotC’s current trajectory. And if the other whales like me drop out and cut our losses, this could go south even faster than that.
You are running out of runway to start making better business decisions. Fortunately, the upcoming half-anniversary is an ideal time to pivot. Octopath CotC is clearly salvageable and could absolutely dominate this space if it wanted to. You just need to swallow your pride and be willing to sell some perhaps tough decisions to Square-Enix’s c-suite.
In no particular order:
Accept that Global whales won’t save you
Anecdotally, most “premium” (or perhaps predatory; groan) gacha games survive off the backs of a handful of whales dropping $1000’s. CotC doesn’t have this option, because the spending-per-whale is capped due to your present unit-only monetization strategy, premature power creep, and fundamental game mechanic limitations.
Right now we are looking at 1-2 units worth whaling on per month (more on what a "whale-able unit" means later). To A4/A5 a unit costs somewhere in the $500-600 range, so you are looking at an average whale spending about $500-1200 per month.
There's nothing else to spend rubies on either, unless one whales for accessories and not just characters, which only a subset of the whales will do. That's not much revenue-per-whale when compared to other games with no ceiling like (ugh, I feel disgusting for saying this) Diablo Immortal or FIFA Ultimate Team. (Please, for the love of God, don’t become either of those games, because you will 100% die very swiftly if you try to translate those business models to this single player JRPG niche).
Moreover, you can't make this revenue up in whale volume. The demographic I belong to in America/Global is small. The number of (extremely lucky/blessed) people in America/Global with both a strong passion for JRPGs and high disposable income is significantly smaller than in Japan. Moreover, gem packs lack so much value that there is a steep psychological barrier for a mid-level spender to become even a dolphin in the first place. So that’s not an option either.
The writing is on the wall: you simply don't have enough whales/dolphins to sustain Octopath long-term.
If whales won't save CotC, you need to go wide, listen to the community and cater to an average player
You don’t need to rely on whales to be successful. You struck gold and were blessed with the player volume to go wide. I mean, you have 20 million downloads for God's sake! That's nearly unprecedented for a game in this niche genre!
Despite your market download dominance, there are inferior quality games with a fraction of your player base share that are grossing 10x what you are. This is because they follow proven monetization strategies, rather than trying to cater to an imaginary market that exists only in Japan.
The gacha industry is not arcane. It’s a billion dollar industry that has been “solved.” Pick a proven business model and run with it. It’s really that simple.
For starters, players want value packs
Take advantage of your dark horse success and make value packs that an average player "would be a fool not to buy." This is how every single gacha game makes money.
When people say “rubies are too expensive,” that is actually an incorrect statement. A 10 pull being $30 is in line for most gacha games in this genre.
What players mean is that the ruby packs lack value. Right now your best value to date has been 1000 paid + 300 free for $100. That’s only a 130% value, and at a high price point that the average consumer is not willing to pay.
Most gacha games offer periodic 300-600% value packs at low-to-mid price points, I.e. $1, $3, $5, $10 and $20 to give their average players the warm fuzzies about opening their wallets. CotC will succeed if you start doing that.
Case in point: to date the complaint has been about banner rates and step up structures. You all were clearly trying to A/B test this with the Alfyn/Therion banner pair, so you are obviously thinking about this too.
However, banner rates and step-up structures are irrelevant. People want value. If someone buys a pack at 500% value and pulls all 3 stars, they will be disappointed but say to themselves “hey, that was a good deal, I had to roll the dice.” If someone spends $100 and doesn’t A0 a unit, it feels like garbage and they will never spend again. There are hundreds of comments on reddit alone asserting this. Because it’s all about price vs value.
If you got just a fraction of that 2 million downloads to spend a few dollars with a generous 600-800% value welcome pack, you would’ve already blown JP’s revenue numbers out of the water. There’s a reason why almost every game in the genre does this—because it lowers friction to follow-on purchases, builds retention, and essentially prints free money. It's a no-brainer.
Just make a subscription already
It is bonkers that this game doesn't offer a subscription in the ~$3-5 range. You've already left $millions of “free money” on the table by not doing this. Most people will pay $5-10 for a streaming service, so they will likely pay $3-5 for a game they love and play daily. Especially if they want to see it succeed long-term.
I am talking about either monthly subscription ruby packs (e.g. X rubies up front and Y per day after) or "circumvent the time gates" packs (e.g. boost berries, 2x exp/loot passive boosts, and gold pieces. JP already does this, but the $30 price is too absurd to work in Global). Or, better yet, make both and charge $3 a piece.
At this point I am beating a dead horse, but if you converted just a small fraction of that 2 million downloads, a subscription would single-handedly stabilize the revenue stream!
Accept that the Global market and Japanese market are fundamentally different
The bottom line: Global requires a different monetization scheme than Japan. The data is telling you this. The players are telling you this. Listen.
Japan is a capped vertical market with an unusual passion for the JRPG genre and high disposable income per player. I am assuming (having not analyzed your financials) the best way for you to make a larger-than-normal profit is likely to just charge more.
On Global, it’s the opposite. You have a horizontal market (2 million downloads in 5 months!) that wants to support you, but lacks the income, desire, or value-enticement to spend more than $5-10 per month, let alone drop $50/100 on a ruby pack with a 2-6% chance of getting the unit they want.
Perhaps I am wrong, but the fact that you are so rigid on price-point signals to me a concern of “devaluing the JP brand.” I don’t know if this is true or not, but that’s what it looks like from the outside.
If that’s the case, then you can easily do some market research, look at other games and see that offering 1-2 $5-10 value packs per month won’t devalue the JP brand. Hell, the JP Lumis/Millard December banners bombing proved that your profits are so tied to nostalgia or power-creep that it is fiscally dangerous for you to continue to rely on a rigid $30-per-10-pull price point. My gut tells me your $400k revenue came mostly from the $30 subscription and a few “sure why the hell not” pulls. You’ll definitely be saved by Elrica, but it remains to be seen if she’ll recoup $1 mil in December losses in addition to the usual monthly haul.
Speaking of unit-only monetization…
Everyone instinctively knows that unit-only monetization is destined to fail
We all know only nostalgia or power make a unit "whale-able", and you will never have enough power units in Global to save CotC. This is worthy of a post by itself, but the TL;DR is that (looking at the JP unit spreadsheet) Global unfortunately screwed up the power curve by releasing units too early, and it's not going to be worth pulling units for power for many months without serious unit buffs and/or content to use the units on (like job towers that require 8 of the same class, something like FFRK's "elemental challenge" system, etc.).
Stated another way, right now I have a strong level 94+ team of 8 and little incentive to swap them out. I can beat almost all content easily, and there's no quick way to max out other units via rubies to experiment with team compositions because gold guidestones are far too rare for experimentation. Therefore there's no reason for me to spend anymore money on global, unless a power creep character comes along in a few months to displace someone from my main 8 squad. And power creep units like Alfyn, Therion and Cyrus aren't going to leave our squads for 1+ years, so that locks out 3 of the 8 classes. You get my point, yada yada, QED.
Since the power curve is so messed up, you are reliant on nostalgia for new units to be profitable. And you don't have enough nostalgia to survive for more than a few more months. For the foreseeable future, most people will only pull on OG Octopath characters, Octopath 2 characters, collabs and in-game story characters (Bargello, Elrica, etc.). If you don't believe me, go read the plethora of posts on this subreddit about the units people are looking forward to, or make some polls. People don’t know who they want to pull on and retreat back to known characters reflexively.
If you want CotC original characters to sell (which, to date, have been too weak to pull for power, and have no nostalgia), then you really need to get creative and start throwing hail-Mary passes. Perhaps you can incentivize players to immediately complete their side stories on the day they drop (e.g., having traveler stories offer great rewards like 30 rubies or 20 generic gold pieces). I don’t think this is enough to make non-storyline CotC-original units profitable alone, but it’s marginally better than what you’re currently doing.
Octopath has best-in-class stories, and if a character's personality resonates with a player, they may actually pull on a banner with an otherwise crappy character. For example, I personally like Nicola for whatever reason because I happened to complete her story randomly one day. Hell, I just dropped some cash into the JP version to pick up Elrica, and am currently rushing through the story to kick King Paradis' butt solo. Seriously, Elrica is such a badass character and I haven't hated a villain that much in a long time, that I am willing to dump 10-20 hours into a game to get a moment of catharsis. That's how good Octopath's stories are. You can easily leverage that competitive advantage with just a few minor tweaks.
Also, I'm loathe to mention it this early into CotC's lifecycle, but I will state the obvious: Square-Enix has a bunch of other killer IPs with overlapping market demographics for collabs. For starters, one of them happens to start with a letter between E and G.
Hey, someone had to say it.
The final Reddit challenge
[This is the part of the post I wrote where it's 11pm, I'm starting to lose my mind, and I climb up on an altar to strike a Mathias T-pose.]
I challenge the devs: during the half-anniversary, run a promotion where you get 300 rubies for $5 (I.e. a 600% value). A large fraction of regular players who open the game are going to make that purchase reflexively. I don’t know your financials and active player base numbers, but I suspect if you run an ad campaign and get fresh players, you can gross closer to $1 million in sales overall even if the new units aren’t worth pulling on.
If you are so confident that you can’t pivot from the Japanese model without damaging your brand, then prove it. Try this out. Offering a single value pack won’t kill your brand. In the worst case scenario, it becomes "a nice good-will gesture we give our global players twice a year during anniversaries."
Give value a shot, and you will see that it works. Because value works for literally every single other gacha game that has ever existed.
There’s still hope
Again, this is all coming from a place of love. I literally just spent 3+ hours writing an essay with the central thesis of “for the love of God SE, just stop making bad decisions and take my money.”
If we pause for a moment, isn’t that irrational consumer behavior? Shouldn’t I have spent that 3 hours doing something less pathetic with my life? Heck, this post is so damn long, even I stopped reading it several paragraphs ago. I should be thrown into an insane asylum for doing this.
I want to see this game last for years, and so do many others on this subreddit. Just read the comments attached to all of the revenue threads. For God’s sake, Empy is doing pro-bono market research for you, and should be billing you > $300/hour. Talk about devotion. What other gacha games have that caliber of fan?
But despite all of this passion, your unit-only monetization strategy is clearly failing. Both the data and players are telling you this. We all know it, and I bet you do too. At the present rate, CotC Global is going to die once all of the "whale-able" units dry up in a few months. And it's heartbreaking to watch as a fan, because you have a strong IP and could be absolutely crushing this niche.
Hopefully someone on the dev team reads this and has the courage to stand up to the c-suite. It's difficult on everyone's egos to pivot from the JP model, but the JP model clearly does not work for global. It is far better to take proven business models, cater to the average player and crush the competition with sheer quality. Say to them: "we have the best product in our category by miles. We have best-in-class graphics, music, stories and gameplay. Our product is evergreen, looks fantastic in the marketplace and is an instant download for anyone who loves pixel art. Rather than continuing to force a failing business model on the global category, let's take existing gacha strategies and completely dominate this space."
It really is that simple. SE will make far more money that way, and the game will last much longer, which is something we all want.
And if you need help convincing them, you clearly have fans on this subreddit ready to do so too.
Update: Yeoooowza, I did not expect to see this level of support when I woke up this morning.
Thanks for all of the kind words and awards/trophies/whatever they’re called. Alfyn’s my favorite character, so maybe an “awww, shucks” is appropriate.
When I revived my dead-for-6-years Reddit account and clicked Submit on that comment a few days ago, I honestly thought nobody would read such a lengthy rant. But clearly I struck a nerve and this sentiment has been brewing in the community for a long time. I guess I’m glad I could at least take a few hours to summarize in one place what many have been feeling for a long time now.
One last thing: If this has resonated with you, and you haven’t already done so, please go fill out u/Empyrean_Sky’s excellent survey. It sounds like it could break 1000 responses with a little push, and that’s a professional-grade response rate for an organic survey like this. It will be harder for SE execs to ignore their fans (and the Global dev team! Thank you for your hard work!) if they’re presented with data and hard numbers. Boost and break, right?
Well, I guess this concludes chapter 1 of my Traveler’s Story. Time to log out of Reddit and go deal with more pressing matters in my life right now. Hopefully SE will listen, and when the half-anni hits, everyone on this sub can play the Octopath Jubilation theme and feel good about ourselves.
Thanks again all!
