Updated Digital Bro Financials

Options
1356

Comments

  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 6,743 Chairperson of the Boards

    @Phumade said:

    Consider this though.
    If you had maxed out on the day of the debut. The pick two would have been 550 4jugs 672 Sam vs 550 magik (or 550 Agatha) and 672 toni.

    Consensus has been Sam and Toni are the best 2 5* in the last 6 releases. In the old coverswap (Where you could access the newest) people would have been compelled to keep gorgon, WS, hobgoblin at 550 to do an efficient swap.)

    Now the best they can do is whale into the intro store (where you might already have strange or riri at 550 and no opportunity to swap surplus to toni)

    Thats the revenue stream that was lost. The people who were on the 550 train who no longer see it as the efficient way to max out the meta chars.

    Magik/Toni wasn't great on its own-- adding Gorr was what made that team really go, but that's a pick-3.

    Folks might've tried out some of this stuff, but I tried a ton of stuff too, and absolutely nothing is worth anything this week, with Sam boosted.

  • LavaManLee
    LavaManLee Posts: 1,654 Chairperson of the Boards

    @Phumade said:

    Consider this though.
    If you had maxed out on the day of the debut. The pick two would have been 550 4jugs 672 Sam vs 550 magik (or 550 Agatha) and 672 toni.

    Consensus has been Sam and Toni are the best 2 5* in the last 6 releases. In the old coverswap (Where you could access the newest) people would have been compelled to keep gorgon, WS, hobgoblin at 550 to do an efficient swap.)

    Now the best they can do is whale into the intro store (where you might already have strange or riri at 550 and no opportunity to swap surplus to toni)

    Thats the revenue stream that was lost. The people who were on the 550 train who no longer see it as the efficient way to max out the meta chars.

    This is the truth.

    What people aren't understanding is that the 550 gravy train was a combination of making sure one always had the highest meta possible AND bragging rights / wanting to have the newest shiny object.

    It isn't the most rational thing, but everyone (myself included) at the end, just enjoyed being able to roll all the 5s to 550. Good. Bad. Indifferent. At the end of the day, it didn't matter. When a new 5 came out, it was guaranteed to 550 almost immediately. That was fun.

    Taking away the 550 cover swaps, all of a sudden none of it matters. I still play the game because I love it, but I haven't spent a cent since December. Does that matter in the long run? I don't know. But the buy clubs were a fun way to both fund the game and improve your team. Now? Everyone likes to laugh at the buy clubs and think it was all whales, but it wasn't. Just people who actually loved the game and wanted to support it while being able to have some bragging rights and keep up on the 550 train.

    If everyone thinks that was a stupid idea, that's fine. But, for those that don't know, at a minimum, the buy clubs were bring in at a minimum, $800 a day for the game. At a max, it would bring in over $4000 a day for the game depending on the chained event. Not trivial by any stretch of the imagination.

    I have no idea what F2P games make on a daily basis, but I imagine that is not chump change, even if 30% of a customer service person has to deal with it.

  • bluewolf
    bluewolf Posts: 6,176 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited 10 June 2025, 12:13

    The revenue ballpark I'm seeing via Sensor Tower is $400-500K right now vs $800kish a year ago and $600-700K pre-December (death of swaps) (I am giving ranges as basically it bounces along at that level from month to month).

    Do what you want with that but obviously if the buy clubs kind of averaged $2400 a day then that's $72K over 30 days and at least partially explains my observed drop of something like $100-200K a month.

    Swaps were important because with the current policy you need to spend lots of HP to exchange all the extra covers you end up with if you are constantly chasing the newest toon - OR you toss them aside (ha ha, no). Option B is hoarding for 3 months and 550ing and when you don't get a new character champed/550d in their new boost period you basically won't use them at all, other than maybe during their boost week which is approximately once every 27 weeks. (That said it seems like lately the character who just left Latests is boosted the following week, so they kind of get a second hurrah before going away for over half a year). Essentially you would use 1/3 of the new characters under this method (unhoarding every 3 months) unless they were/are super metas, or maybe you just completely skip some because they keep releasing uninteresting ones. So 2/3 of the time it's just using metas endlessly.

    The reason "no CS swaps, you pay now" feels bad and insulting and annoying is because they did it for free because yeah, the people who did buy clubs were injecting like 1/7 to 1/8 of the total revenue, and no, it wasn't a huge drain on CS time, I don't think, but maybe they pay less for CS now. The new swap system is more fair, and they were presumably hoping/thinking "anyone can swap with HP" would translate into getting more revenue in from all the players who could now swap, because no one would argue that a slowly declining revenue stream is desirable or good. I mean leaving free whale swaps while making everyone else pay HP was, let's admit it, not going to feel that good to most of the non-whales. I am pretty certain most of the people using the swap system a lot are the people still willing to spend lots of money on the game so in a way they are correct, and without the HP swaps I guess revenue would be down even further. But there was probably a better choice since it seems like a net loss.

    Using a new character is often, indeed, not about having the best character out there (not anymore since they completely ruined the meta (again) with utterly dominant toons you basically always have to use) but having novelty - which is often THE POINT of a video game like this, chasing and engaging with novel things that keep your interest, especially once you have 550d the metas. Using metas over and over becomes boring and uninteresting and yeah, obviously people keep using them them but using Samjuggs for the 500th time or 1000th time starts to feel like drudgery. You say "just use different people" but regardless, a brand new 550'd toon with a new boost is an appealing and fun thing to have. The boost list itself is not curated or controlled to offer actual synergistic teams - which is in my opinion a complete failure on the part of the developers when the game has 372 characters in it - and would do at least something to shake up meta dominance. Yeah, it would require more work and planning besides "just keep running the pre-determined spreadsheet boost list", but players would be happier.

    I agree the new engine is at least in part being adopted to reduce dev time to update/add new things etc (I have said this many times). I don't think they had much of a choice, really, because I think they have been trying to shrink labor costs (obviously, since they did the massive layoff in Nov 2023). I think the writing was on the wall for the game revenue when the made the decision to update the engine and one reason they keep it going is even with reduced revenue it's still (according to Sensor Tower) a pretty popular game since it seems to rank somewhere in the 100th-200th most popular game in the app stores in various categories. Also/related, they have been talking about the new engine for a while now (not sure exactly how long, maybe like 1.5 years?) and I presume they signed some deals and spent at least some money up front, if not continually, since they started using Unity to build a new version of the game, and they can't exactly throw that money away or stop the process. It would look worse from a business management perspective to not keep the game going until the new engine was in place to at least see how things turn out with it in. And be 100% wasted company money if they never shipped the new engine version.

    So, essentially.... new engine offers the only good answer to "how can we practically keep this thing going for as long as possible", and they aren't going to just stop the new engine process because it's the only thing left offering some path of "reduced costs and maybe new revenue means increase in profits" even though they have screwed themselves in the revenue area with various decisions/mismanagement. (The financial report says they can translate the game into more languages more easily with the new engine which will somehow magically turn into increased revenue in new markets, but I am very skeptical about that given the markets it is already in).

  • DAZ0273
    DAZ0273 Posts: 11,107 Chairperson of the Boards

    OK, this is all well and good but what were they actually doing with these new 550's? Did they need new 550's to compete in PvP? Not if they are colluding and which high level player isn't in a likewise high level Alliance with strict guides on who can be hit? And PvE is just Aunt May, some spreadsheets and Supports for the big boys, no? So what did all this achieve apart from being some sort of self appreciation society? Was it all just for Lightning Rounds??!?!

    $2400 per day - you could have all just gone on holiday together, had a few beers, talked about the good times with Thanos and Black Panther!

  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 6,743 Chairperson of the Boards

    @DAZ0273 said:
    OK, this is all well and good but what were they actually doing with these new 550's? Did they need new 550's to compete in PvP? Not if they are colluding and which high level player isn't in a likewise high level Alliance with strict guides on who can be hit? And PvE is just Aunt May, some spreadsheets and Supports for the big boys, no? So what did all this achieve apart from being some sort of self appreciation society? Was it all just for Lightning Rounds??!?!

    $2400 per day - you could have all just gone on holiday together, had a few beers, talked about the good times with Thanos and Black Panther!

    I've had 550 matchmaking for years and have never, ever, seen folks running the new guy in PvP while he was boosted -- unless the new guy was someone extremely strong, like Chasm. I don't understand where this narrative is coming from at all. Maybe they would try someone like Toni for a few matches, but nobody was ever using these kinds of characters regularly.

  • TheXMan
    TheXMan Posts: 229 Tile Toppler

    I don't know about your slice but I already mentioned seeing all these 550s being used during their boost - Jubilee, Kaine Parker, May Parker, Phyla-Vell, Hotpool. And it was not just for 1-2 matches to try them out.

  • Pantera236
    Pantera236 Posts: 584 Critical Contributor

    @entrailbucket said:

    I've had 550 matchmaking for years and have never, ever, seen folks running the new guy in PvP while he was boosted -- unless the new guy was someone extremely strong, like Chasm. I don't understand where this narrative is coming from at all. Maybe they would try someone like Toni for a few matches, but nobody was ever using these kinds of characters regularly.

    In s4 and s1 it was commonplace.

  • Pantera236
    Pantera236 Posts: 584 Critical Contributor

    Obviously Sam/Juggs and to a certain extent 550 M'baku changed that but swaps were already dead by then.

  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 6,743 Chairperson of the Boards

    @Pantera236 said:
    Obviously Sam/Juggs and to a certain extent 550 M'baku changed that but swaps were already dead by then.

    Yeah, I wonder if these teams would've killed this off regardless.

  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 6,743 Chairperson of the Boards

    @Pantera236 said:

    In s4 and s1 it was commonplace.

    If this only happened in the cupcake slices that'd explain why I never saw it, but it still doesn't make sense to me.

    These folks would rush to get, say, Jubilee, immediately at release, then use her in every event while she had the new character boost (despite having the very best characters, all significantly better than Jubilee, maxed out), and then just bench her forever after that?

    What a bizarre thing to do! And even more so, what a bizarre thing to get so upset about! If you like running the boosted characters, lots of them are very good. Why not use the boosted characters when they're boosted, and not just at release?

  • DAZ0273
    DAZ0273 Posts: 11,107 Chairperson of the Boards

    What a strange situation - is this unique to MPQ? There is no obvious signs that this outsized spending was supporting the game for the sake of it coz it got cut instantly the rules changed! I can generally only see that this was seen as some sort of hold on the Devs, the applicable of political lobbying. I guess the Devs do what they like now, hopefully they made the right choice! Oh well, players can spend or not how they like and up to the Devs to step up with keeping the game fresh enough to keep going.

  • Phumade
    Phumade Posts: 2,567 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited 10 June 2025, 16:38

    @entrailbucket said:

    These folks would rush to get, say, Jubilee, immediately at release, then use her in every event while she had the new character boost (despite having the very best characters, all significantly better than Jubilee, maxed out), and then just bench her forever after that?

    What a bizarre thing to do! And even more so, what a bizarre thing to get so upset about! If you like running the boosted characters, lots of them are very good. Why not use the boosted characters when they're boosted, and not just at release?

    I think you've said it before. All of these chars are VERY USABLE at 672. If the choice for the month was
    672 DP (and the optimal 550 partner) vs 550 Chasm/OR (or whoever the meta was). Alot of people would just say sure lets play the fresh combo for the month while we have it. and maintain our place on the 550 train for as long as the hoard holds up.

    Sure people might choose the 550 1* or another 550 who got boost week. But the new char is gonna be the freshest experience for that month.

    in your specific example.

    if you had 672 jubs /550 jane vs even 550 4jugs/550 sam. I have no doubts jugs sam is gonna hold its own, but I'd have no hesitation running 672jube/550 jane for at least 300/400 matches to learn how she plays.

  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 6,743 Chairperson of the Boards

    @Phumade said:

    I think you've said it before. All of these chars are VERY USABLE at 672. If the choice for the month was
    672 DP (and the optimal 550 partner) vs 550 Chasm/OR (or whoever the meta was). Alot of people would just say sure lets play the fresh combo for the month while we have it. and maintain our place on the 550 train for as long as the hoard holds up.

    Sure people might choose the 550 1* or another 550 who got boost week. But the new char is gonna be the freshest experience for that month.

    in your specific example.

    if you had 672 jubs /550 jane vs even 550 4jugs/550 sam. I have no doubts jugs sam is gonna hold its own, but I'd have no hesitation running 672jube/550 jane for at least 300/400 matches to learn how she plays.

    I mean... exactly? Tons of characters are great when they're maxed out and boosted. I pretty much exclusively use 672s in PvP. Why are/were these players only using the new character when boosted, and only when they got the new character boost? Jubilee would be boosted again after that, and she'd be just as good (actually slightly better since the new character boost is slightly smaller).

  • Phumade
    Phumade Posts: 2,567 Chairperson of the Boards

    @entrailbucket said:

    I mean... exactly? Tons of characters are great when they're maxed out and boosted. I pretty much exclusively use 672s in PvP. Why are/were these players only using the new character when boosted, and only when they got the new character boost? Jubilee would be boosted again after that, and she'd be just as good (actually slightly better since the new character boost is slightly smaller).

    but the set of people who have 2 metapaired 672 for that week or that month is alot smaller subset than the people who can stay on the 550 train for say 6months before the char spend rate outpaces whats probably a very health farm output.

    Candidly, has their every been a good boost week were both 5* synergized? and has that happened 4 weeks in row to make us not want to play the new 5*?

    If the pick 2 is 672 chasm and 672 OR. Sure people would play that over the boost month char. but most will try out the new char (of the month) on their initial climb and swap to their fast meta combos for hops.

  • DAZ0273
    DAZ0273 Posts: 11,107 Chairperson of the Boards

    So what are people spending their $100 a day on now instead? I hope it is fancy, sassy and thirst slackin'. 😎

  • TheXMan
    TheXMan Posts: 229 Tile Toppler

    @entrailbucket said:

    I mean... exactly? Tons of characters are great when they're maxed out and boosted. I pretty much exclusively use 672s in PvP. Why are/were these players only using the new character when boosted, and only when they got the new character boost? Jubilee would be boosted again after that, and she'd be just as good (actually slightly better since the new character boost is slightly smaller).

    Did someone say these characters were only used during their initial boost month and never again? People used Kaine, May, Phyla, etc again when their boost weeks came along.

  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 6,743 Chairperson of the Boards

    @TheXMan said:

    Did someone say these characters were only used during their initial boost month and never again? People used Kaine, May, Phyla, etc again when their boost weeks came along.

    Because the only thing that's ever been talked about is having the new character for the new character boost! By the time Kaine or whoever rolled back around, there would be another new character being boosted, and so (supposedly) all these folks would be exclusively using whoever that new guy was.

  • Phumade
    Phumade Posts: 2,567 Chairperson of the Boards

    @entrailbucket said:

    Because the only thing that's ever been talked about is having the new character for the new character boost! By the time Kaine or whoever rolled back around, there would be another new character being boosted, and so (supposedly) all these folks would be exclusively using whoever that new guy was.

    That was the old system. You got a fresh monthly max leveled 5* at a very low manageable price. You're not precluded from using other 550's or 672s. but for taht month you might as well play the heck out of him in pvp and learn who they work well with and are bad against.

    you might say just wait the month and buy them via the LL trade at 650hp. and maybe thats where the system equalizes at. but that still ignores, they can't get new covers after the debut store weekend.

  • DAZ0273
    DAZ0273 Posts: 11,107 Chairperson of the Boards

    @Phumade said:

    That was the old system. You got a fresh monthly max leveled 5* at a very low manageable price. You're not precluded from using other 550's or 672s. but for taht month you might as well play the heck out of him in pvp and learn who they work well with and are bad against.

    you might say just wait the month and buy them via the LL trade at 650hp. and maybe thats where the system equalizes at. but that still ignores, they can't get new covers after the debut store weekend.

    Who are they playing against?!??!? Isn't high level PvP pre-arranged victories? I still don't get it. Maybe they should go to EB slice and take him on with the new shiny? That would test it out? Or shut him up!

  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 6,743 Chairperson of the Boards

    @Phumade said:

    That was the old system. You got a fresh monthly max leveled 5* at a very low manageable price. You're not precluded from using other 550's or 672s. but for taht month you might as well play the heck out of him in pvp and learn who they work well with and are bad against.

    you might say just wait the month and buy them via the LL trade at 650hp. and maybe thats where the system equalizes at. but that still ignores, they can't get new covers after the debut store weekend.

    ...and that's what this whole thing is actually about. These players found a way to score a bunch of free 550s without spending much of anything, and completely avoiding RNG (since CS would just gift you 100 covers of whatever that character was).

    It's not about new characters or novelty or working out combos or anything like that, this was the cheapest most consistent way to get maxed out characters -- and it was the cheapest and most consistent, by, like, a million miles.

Welcome!

It looks like you're new here. Sign in or register to get started.