Roughly what percentage of new players give up the game due to not agreeing with "the tradeoff" (aka radiant drought) that requires 62% additional farming, and roughly how much should OOO expect to gain or lose (in USD) because of this?
Don't worry about factoring the Asian server. (though doing so is considered extra credit)
"Roughly what percentage of new players give up the game due to not agreeing with "the tradeoff" (aka radiant drought) that requires 62% additional farming"
Roughly 98.7% going off of Steam.
Then again, not even 3/4 the players on Steam have even made it to the Rescue Camp...
I'm gonna say a solid 20-40% in actuality though.
"and roughly how much should OOO expect to ... lose (in USD) because of this?"
Obviously not enough to understand that this is wrong...
@Hawksteel
Statistics is math. Watch 3* players until they get to 4* and see how many of them quit, buy energy, etc.
There are many pieces of this, but these aren't out of reach- after all, I said "roughly". A bit of bias is ok, I'm just looking for ballpark numbers.
@Dibsville
But those people didn't necessarily leave the game due to the radiant issue.
How can we even find out someone left because of the radiant issue? New players wouldn't even know about this "tradeoff" until they're at about the defender elite level.
This question I cannot help because I do not have access to the information required (or even methods to estimate said information).
All I can do is speculate and say things like...
I think about 5% really did leave the game because of the forge update. I also think the other 95% left because of an overly aggressive forum community.
^ That is sarcasm. I really don't know.
*Edit: That 62% measurement is likely from my other post here. That is very specific to KoA pre and post forge update only. If I were to run the same numbers on other areas of the clockworks, you would see that post forge would have significantly better rates. There is a major difference between "can't heat" and "can't play more than 10 depths a day".
Additionally, as I noted in the other post... 62% additional farming is from the perspective of F2Pers [Clarified here]. From the P2Pers perspective, you get roughly 360% less items for your energy (or it takes 3.6x more energy to get the same items).
To really make an informed guess we would need access to three different pieces of data across a large sample group. We would need this data from several points in time both before and after the update.
1: We would need to be able to see how many knights belong to each star level
2: We would need to be able to see how often and for how long these knights have been playing
3: We would need to know how much money OOO makes per knight, and we can average this.
Ideally, to get the purest data, we would need to be able to accrue this data from OOO directly, as opposed to trying to build a study of individual knights.
None of the above data is available to us. However, what is available publicly is the unique visitor traffic to the spiral knights servers. This we can call up retroactively to see a history of how many people are accessing the servers. Given that Spiral Knights has been around for almost 4 years now, we should be able to build a rough model on what the trends should do throughout the year, given the activity prior to the update. We can then compare this to the activity seen after the update, and then track it in the coming months, to see if there is indeed a drop in usership of SK. As for the economic impact, I'm afraid we can only see how Sega as a whole is doing (if it is a publicly traded company, I'm not sure).
I don't know where precisely to get these numbers, but I do know they exist, so if someone else knows where to access them, as far as I can see, this seems like the most direct approach.
Three Rings will lose 0%, but gain 69% more USD due this!
I did all that in my head sir!
There is one and only one entity that has the data needed to answer this question. By happy coincidence, this entity is also the entity with the greatest interest in keeping Spiral Knights alive. By happy coincidence, this entity is also the only entity capable of changing the drop rates / pricing structure.
In the spirit of math, I will leave naming this entity as an exercise for the reader.
Roughly How many people do you think own this game? How many of them do you think actually stick around and play Spiral Knights?
I'm actually fairly sure that there are ways to measure this without being OOO... but since NJthug has answered the question, we can all go home now.
The question is a simplified version of a complex situation.
By the time a player is even aware of the lack of Radiants, he/she is among Rank 8-2 and has full 4 star gear and already has Tier 3 clearance. I doubt OOO would consider this audience "new players." Veterans who have played the game for over a year might, though. So in reality, new players are unaffected whatsoever.
This is the dilemma they were faced with when they had Mist Energy--it was a confusing system for new people (ie. the game did not do a good job explaining the difference between Mist and Crystal Energies). Capping new players with the number of levels they could explore via Elevator costs was good at deterring people from their excitement and motivation to quickly level up and advance in the game. Both of these were solved with the energy revamp.
The tricky part here is that it affects player retention--what is the retention rate of new players who've been playing for a month now? That's probably the question you really intend to ask, isolated from the money aspect.
As for money "lost/gained" from Radiants, who says they planned to make money off Radiants in the Supply Depot in the first place? If anything, the high cost is meant to be a deterrent, not a requirement, and the paywall seems to be there to slow down the growth of players. I don't agree with this mentality, but I can see why it was done--if you do enough speed runs you can gather all the crystals you need from opening boxes and hit endgame full 5* gear within a few days. They need something to slow players down from growing too fast, and give players something to grind for.
CE Market is a better indicator of how much money the game is making off players. The amount of CE flowing through the market is directly related to how much CE has been bought by players, since CE is only added to the game when a player buys it at some point. If CE costs are low, it means many players are charging CE and recirculating it throughout the game, or if it's being sold off heavily to buy Featured Auction items (ie. Chapeaus) which require crown. If CE costs are high, it means nobody is interested in buying CE with real money or it is being spent/hoarded to buy Supply Depot promotional items.
Either way, a lot of where the CE charging happens is due to limited time promotions, where people feel the need to obtain a lot of crown/CE really fast in order to get their hands on limited time items.
Few people are willing to spend money to get the CE to buy Radiants, regardless of what their cost is in the depot. Many will pay money to cash out for CE if it comes with a Prize Box though (Rose Regalia, Warden sets as recent examples). Cash charged promotional boxes/items have more effect on how much money they make than Radiants do sitting in the Supply Depot.
It's highly unlikely they have Radiants at a high cost in the Supply Depot as a means of making money. At best, it's a CE sink to annoy people. But to think it's a source of profit is like saying I will sell a pack of gum for $1 million as a means of becoming a millionaire.
@Momofuku
New player = uninvested in the game
Whereas I'm not likely to leave because I have too much time and effort put into the game (and if I do leave could be recalled by a promotion+event+new content), someone with only 3-400 hours, a single set of 5* gear and an air of open mindedness could very easily up and leave the game before becoming attached to it, selling their gear into crowns and transitioning to the next MMO.
My theory is that the deal breaker for people is threefold:
0. Community and community management, especially around hot topics... like what we saw directly before the energy system change, where quite a few threads were graveyarded.. but also the in game community, and to a much much lesser extent, the forum community.
1. What happens when you beat the game and whether you have something to do. If I beat the game, I can go on to become the strongest knight of all time... but if I have to grind for radiants to do that, I'm not going to stick around... especially when all the other "old" players are walking around with honorblades and groundbreaker flaunting all their 5* gear that I have to grind 62% more for.
2. Acceptance of payment and development. People didn't like the energy system before. People leave because they don't like that the developers are slow and small. As unfair as this is, its a thing that happens.
What this is getting at is- "What is the cost of potentially losing a large number of end-game players and how does it compare to facilitating players towards the start of the game? Is it REALLY a good strategy for OOO?" because I have a very hard time believing that this is actually making them money.
I think that OOO knows exactly where their money comes from, and that their money comes from promotional items and that there is absolutely nothing wrong with that and that the whole radiant thing is at most a poorly thought out experiment, if a business strategy at all. I think, that it is the team derping up, because of basically what Bopp said.
"Roughly How many people do you think own this game?"
A lot.
"How many of them do you think actually stick around and play Spiral Knights?"
Depends on what you're asking. I'd say only 50% or so of them stick around to the 'Knight' rank, however I'd say only 2 or 3% or so actually stick around long enough to become a Vanguard. (In modern days, not overall)
But that's just me.
More information.
But I would just make an educated guess and say hundreds of thousands of dollars. Time will tell if the free elevators will compensate for it.