TL;DR: This is a very, very big suggestion but I really think the game would benefit from a revamp of the entire income model toward the more modern "cosmetics only" model used by many big games today, as opposed to the 5-yr-old+ "paywall" model the game uses now, which feels dated and a little cheap.
First: I recognize and appreciate that your paywall model is more of a "pay-lightly-inclined-slope." You don't have nearly the hard stops that most FtP games have, and it's not too hard to circumvent the walls with a lot of sustained play. However, the end result is that your game tends to encourage a drop in engagement once the initial barriers have been climbed. Here is my personal anecdote as an example:
I just started and have played the crap out of this game for about 3 weeks. I managed to get into the top ~1.5% quickly with my stalker BH, all without: any skills at 10, a 3rd passive, a 3rd companion, or buying a companion. (I'm also using mostly XP gear and don't have full legendaries.) I was pretty proud of all that: but now I am struggling to engage with the game, because all I have to look forward to is grinding up gems so I can buy things like a 3rd passive that will help me get just a little bit higher (and grinding new set pieces, which hopefully you're working on with the crafting update). And while I would love to work on a warrior or a mage, all I can think about is: gem costs for an event hero vs. gem costs for a standard hero. It's roughly 3000 gems cheaper to create an event hero - and they're cheaper in all the places I want (skills/inventory/companion slots). But since I joined right after the last event, it will be months before I can make a new hero... and I have no incentive to work on a warrior or mage in the meantime since they will get replaced with the new event hero which costs 75% less. In other words: for me, the gem prices are killing my engagement; they don't provide any meaningful long-term goal.
(Here's another anecdote: I know a person who used a cracked version of your game to get endless gems; they quickly quit the game because they determined there was nothing else besides the gem walls to keep them engaged or motivated.)
Worse, having things like paying gems to add sockets to low-level gear, re-roll low-level gear, buy low-level epics, buying large treasure chests, or hurrying up needlessly, excessively long wait times (like crafting and ability-boosting): all these practices seem cheap. It ends up feeling like you're putting gem-traps into your game to fool people into wasting gems, which cheapens the overall experience and makes your game seem greedier than it is. And having one of the highest gem costs go toward having one row of inventory space for one character: that just feels frustrating - like you're building in gem-sinks to temp players to spend. FtP gamers are more savvy than we were 5 years ago. We've been fooled; we've been cheated. We are wary and we don't want to feel like our game is trying to trick us into wasting money: we want to feel like we're rewarding you for an awesome job in game development on something that absolutely is not going to give us an in-game advantage. (*cough*, EA, *cough*) Feeling like we need to spend (either to progress or out of competition) leaves a bad taste in our mouths and it only lasts so long. Feeling like we are rewarding you makes us tell every one of our friends about this awesome game because we can engage as much as we want.
I will also say you're doing amazing for a non-gatcha-style game (which are extremely predatory), and that also should be recognized and is much appreciated. The issue is more that your whole income model feels pretty carefully balanced toward moving faster toward a hard end point; more gems, faster XP, and light pay walls. I think you could move those end-game goalposts even further - without introducing gatcha-style predation - with a shift toward cosmetics. The game is a bit small on mobile devices, so it's a little rough to get good art that looks good: but with some talented artists I'm sure you could make some designs that pop. (Hint: the BH does not currently have designs that pop.) And then you also have the built-in seasonal rotation that other games use to keep people re-engaging throughout the year. And let's be frank: the development time on new art is way less than the development time on new levels or new abilities, since there's SO much less to debug. It wouldn't even take that long to shift your income model (once you had it mapped out). It wouldn't even take that long to simply add cosmetics and see if that worked as an income model before pulling back on the gem walls - probably less time that adding Act V, if I can be so bold.
And just to be even more frank, let's talk about how the FtP model even works: whales. 50% of game income comes from 0.1% of players (I think 90% comes from 10%?). You can't get big without big fish, and big fish don't have anything to spend on once they've navigated the pay-slopes you've put in there. There are people on this forum now saying "what else do you have to spend gems on" and honestly that's not a good sign for a bottom line. Cosmetics don't stop; there's no end to what you can do or spend on, so there's no reason to disengage.
I'm sure I don't have to name-drop other wildly successful FtP games that use cosmetics-only models... And while many of them have lots of reasons why they succeed, their income model is absolutely a part of that.
You have a very engaging, fun, extremely well-balanced Diablo-clone on mobile, and the genre is hungry for that. You've got years of blood/sweat/tears invested, and it shows - you have a great commitment to keeping the game updated and engaging. I just hate to see it held back with what I see as an outdated paywall income model when I think it could go a lot further by copying what the very big games are doing.
First: I recognize and appreciate that your paywall model is more of a "pay-lightly-inclined-slope." You don't have nearly the hard stops that most FtP games have, and it's not too hard to circumvent the walls with a lot of sustained play. However, the end result is that your game tends to encourage a drop in engagement once the initial barriers have been climbed. Here is my personal anecdote as an example:
I just started and have played the crap out of this game for about 3 weeks. I managed to get into the top ~1.5% quickly with my stalker BH, all without: any skills at 10, a 3rd passive, a 3rd companion, or buying a companion. (I'm also using mostly XP gear and don't have full legendaries.) I was pretty proud of all that: but now I am struggling to engage with the game, because all I have to look forward to is grinding up gems so I can buy things like a 3rd passive that will help me get just a little bit higher (and grinding new set pieces, which hopefully you're working on with the crafting update). And while I would love to work on a warrior or a mage, all I can think about is: gem costs for an event hero vs. gem costs for a standard hero. It's roughly 3000 gems cheaper to create an event hero - and they're cheaper in all the places I want (skills/inventory/companion slots). But since I joined right after the last event, it will be months before I can make a new hero... and I have no incentive to work on a warrior or mage in the meantime since they will get replaced with the new event hero which costs 75% less. In other words: for me, the gem prices are killing my engagement; they don't provide any meaningful long-term goal.
(Here's another anecdote: I know a person who used a cracked version of your game to get endless gems; they quickly quit the game because they determined there was nothing else besides the gem walls to keep them engaged or motivated.)
Worse, having things like paying gems to add sockets to low-level gear, re-roll low-level gear, buy low-level epics, buying large treasure chests, or hurrying up needlessly, excessively long wait times (like crafting and ability-boosting): all these practices seem cheap. It ends up feeling like you're putting gem-traps into your game to fool people into wasting gems, which cheapens the overall experience and makes your game seem greedier than it is. And having one of the highest gem costs go toward having one row of inventory space for one character: that just feels frustrating - like you're building in gem-sinks to temp players to spend. FtP gamers are more savvy than we were 5 years ago. We've been fooled; we've been cheated. We are wary and we don't want to feel like our game is trying to trick us into wasting money: we want to feel like we're rewarding you for an awesome job in game development on something that absolutely is not going to give us an in-game advantage. (*cough*, EA, *cough*) Feeling like we need to spend (either to progress or out of competition) leaves a bad taste in our mouths and it only lasts so long. Feeling like we are rewarding you makes us tell every one of our friends about this awesome game because we can engage as much as we want.
I will also say you're doing amazing for a non-gatcha-style game (which are extremely predatory), and that also should be recognized and is much appreciated. The issue is more that your whole income model feels pretty carefully balanced toward moving faster toward a hard end point; more gems, faster XP, and light pay walls. I think you could move those end-game goalposts even further - without introducing gatcha-style predation - with a shift toward cosmetics. The game is a bit small on mobile devices, so it's a little rough to get good art that looks good: but with some talented artists I'm sure you could make some designs that pop. (Hint: the BH does not currently have designs that pop.) And then you also have the built-in seasonal rotation that other games use to keep people re-engaging throughout the year. And let's be frank: the development time on new art is way less than the development time on new levels or new abilities, since there's SO much less to debug. It wouldn't even take that long to shift your income model (once you had it mapped out). It wouldn't even take that long to simply add cosmetics and see if that worked as an income model before pulling back on the gem walls - probably less time that adding Act V, if I can be so bold.
And just to be even more frank, let's talk about how the FtP model even works: whales. 50% of game income comes from 0.1% of players (I think 90% comes from 10%?). You can't get big without big fish, and big fish don't have anything to spend on once they've navigated the pay-slopes you've put in there. There are people on this forum now saying "what else do you have to spend gems on" and honestly that's not a good sign for a bottom line. Cosmetics don't stop; there's no end to what you can do or spend on, so there's no reason to disengage.
I'm sure I don't have to name-drop other wildly successful FtP games that use cosmetics-only models... And while many of them have lots of reasons why they succeed, their income model is absolutely a part of that.
You have a very engaging, fun, extremely well-balanced Diablo-clone on mobile, and the genre is hungry for that. You've got years of blood/sweat/tears invested, and it shows - you have a great commitment to keeping the game updated and engaging. I just hate to see it held back with what I see as an outdated paywall income model when I think it could go a lot further by copying what the very big games are doing.
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