It's so important to Cozy and I that we have the opportunity to have tough conversations on the Snap Chat. We take our roles in the community very seriously, and recognize that our voices are among the loudest when advocating for change. We love the game, and we love the community we've build around this podcast; it is legitimately our pride and joy. However, it is unfair for either person to be targeted with personal attacks under any circumstance. What makes conversations about challenging topics so interesting is in fact, the differing of opinion. Everyone who has been watching our podcast since it's inception knows that both Cozy and I have done our best to approach such topics in a balanced and fair way, in order to provide constructive feedback to the development team while at the same time fostering an environment that encourages community discussion. When that devolves into attacks and insults, there is nothing to be gained, and the message gets lost in the noise. Let's make an effort to be constructive with our comments and constructive with our feedback so that we can make the Snap Chat the best podcast that it can be.
Alex makes GREAT points! As much as I enjoy Cozy’s stuff, I feel he’s trying to play both sides and being a little too careful. I feel he probably does agree more with Alex, but publicly wants to not be seen as attacking SD. Im all for calling out companies on BS so this video actually has made me lean more towards Alex’s channel now. Cosy’s position is understandable as you don’t want to tick off the developers but they really should take notice of what people are saying and try to find a middle ground themselves. Right now, they aren’t there.
@@tom2point0 the concern is when someone who appears in the release videos and has a CL of 30K, it doesn't give the appearance of being a player spokesman, but quite the opposite
Im going to echo my earlier comment, hopefully it wasn't taken as not constructive. A big reason why I've always enjoyed this podcast for over a year now has been due to the fact that you guys advocate for the player base when topics like monetization come up. Whenever that stops being the case, you lose my trust. I know Cozy is a good guy and a dear friend to you, and to us. But he can't fence sit on an issue like monetization and not get called out for it.
One of my biggest problems is the increase of monetization and prices and decreased value of gold, without any real quality of life changes. The game needs to make money, yes, but some of that money needs to be put back into the game in a visible way. It's great that the game can release new cards every week, it keeps the game fresh and exciting, but they didn't need to add in the extra card in the first week, it just makes progression harder and devalues existing currencies, and, I would imagine, takes up dev resources that could have otherwise been spent implementing things people have been asking for for so long - selectable card borders, viewable discard pile/graveyard, more deck slots, better events with non-garbage UI, to name a few. This game is wonderful, I'll give it so much credit for all the things it does right and I wouldn't say trying to make money is wrong, it's necessary for the game and company's survival. But user experience should, at the very least, *feel* like it's important and right now... it just doesn't. And that makes me really sad.
This is the real constructive critisism here. Thank you for pointing out the correct thing instead of just ranting out on SD. We have a great game to play and things currently are certainly going downhill. I imagine the same would be happening with the business side too which in turn is leaving a sour taste in the mouth of the player base as a result. A really good solution to this problem would be to put more resources in towards elevating the game experience, making it feature rich and then saying "hey pay us to keep this experience going(the ridiculous for you bundles) " instead of just creating a drought of resources and being wallet predators that they are being currently. I really don't want this game to die. (Also the in game feedback thing they used to do every month earlier, is nowhere to be seen now)
The thing is, SD _want_ progression to be harder. It's not a coincidence that adding an extra card release makes it harder to keep up, they're basically admitted they noticed it was too easy to keep and and it's a deliberate choice. This all comes back to their core ethos that they don't think anyone should have a "full" collection, which is just a fundamentally bad idea IMO. In any game with a PVP competitive aspect, there will always be people min-maxing the "best" deck. If SD had their way, only a small subset of people would ever be able to play the best deck at any one time, which just sounds like a recipe for a lot of people being unhappy with the game. I don't know why they're so tied to this idea of incomplete collections, but it's antithetical to how everyone wants to engage with the game and it's the main reason for a lot of the friction between the gamers and the developers.
I said the same thing on Reddit last week, I've put a lot of money into the game and I don't mind supporting games I enjoy, but I need to feel like I'm getting a good deal, and I need to feel like my money is helping to make the game better, and that's just not the case.
@85UKDan I dont know who these "whales," are. I understand content creators snatch everything up as part of their job. I live in Beverly Hills, and i drive a mercedes, and I still find it painful to spend money on a digital card game. Who in their right mind spends 100$ or 50$ on these bundles that give you nothing. I've only bought the season pass once. Progression was great when the game first game out, but it became a cash grab to stay competitive. That's usually my cue to leave.
@@85UKDanI can understand your logic here, but its not like there is a finite amount of digital goods available. If they sell 100 bundles at $100 each or 200 bundles at $50 each, they make the same amount money. The only difference is that they wont seem so greedy and out of touch if they were to lower their pricing.
There are plenty of stupid people in the world with money. A mix of them and developers have ruined the gaming industry. I was all for selling skins and skins to make money but no mobile game does this. Snap is some what better for FTP if you save or just buy the battle pass. But I use to play Marvel strike force and a guy spent millions within a year on a damn mobile game and that’s who the cater to even tho that guy ending up quitting due to them trashing on the player base.
I know right it's absolutely ridiculous and daylight robbery. I only pay for the season pass but I was lucky to have started playing early so it was much easier to progress
I'm just coming down off my marvel snap high. I am card complete as of pixie card drop and hope summer's drop. I started on launch of game. The predatory system in place that's been getting a tighter bite the more and more I play lately.i have 1 spotlight and 1000 tokens and I am burnt out and woken up to what I've done. I am more sad that I can't get the cards coming out than I am of spending money I cut myself off I think.... but I just want to play and have fun I haven't even hit infinite once. But I do enjoy the game thoroughly. Just this getting nerfed after obtaining every card is tiring.and it's not like I have had an advantage ever I get paired with players who have same amount of cards in there library so now I'm afraid I'm gonna be limited to what I have now and that's that.
@@omgsouthpark7659 the card is "worth" whatever the person buying it wants to pay. If it's just variants, why should you care if someone else would rather buy a piece of Shang art than a new game?
I am glad you guys are talking about the monetization concerns, between Alex's video on collector's reserves and how expensive things have been getting I'm starting to worry. Hopefully 2nd Dinner is listening.
Yep, I’m with you. I spent probably five or 600 on the game overall before I realized what a waste of money. The game is fun, but I’ll only be buying seasonpass unless things get more reasonable in the shop
@@Ghost88o9when ur series 3 complete spending any money isn’t going to provide much progress besides provide more keys and tokens for upcoming cards or maybe the few series 4-5 cards ur still missing. And I think the insane price of a $100 that can’t even get u a new release card because ur not getting enough tokens, can’t get u a card through keys because your not getting enough credits is not one bit worth it unless u have crazy money to blow. Its really annoying as a new player to catchup, I myself started playing December and I haven’t missed a single mission or shop rotation and I’m still 6 months out from finishing series 3 and both my decks that I had worked towards were smacked by the last OTA and I was left with nothing good to play so as a new player all this sucks even more.
They do not listen, that cache video was uploaded now but is like 3+ months old and these issues have been prevalent for a good 9-10 months now. It's over, they are milking this game dry and then we're done.
In other countries, it's a even worse situation I'm Brazilian, and this $100 Shang-chi bundle actually costs $500 in the local currency. That money is more than 33% of the minimal monthly salary here! I wonder who could compromise that much in a mobile game.
The prices are what kills me. Id probably buy more than the season pass if they werent so outrageous. The only ones that are in my acceptable range are garbage.
So you're saying there are already bundles in your range and you're not buying them, but if they added more in your range you would buy them. You can see why someone might doubt you there, right? And I mean, SD aren't dumb, they have _actual metrics_ to back up their bundle prices. If they're pricing them higher and not lower, then it's because that's what drives the most profit for them. They're not just doing it to piss you off personally, they're doing it based on actual data they've collected based on past sales. If enough people had bought the really amazing value low cost bundles in the past, I am 100% sure we'd be seeing more of them, but unfortunately a lot of the people who claim they would buy cheaper bundles just don't do that when they are offered cheaper bundles.
SD clearly aren't dumb but it depends on what are their objectives. It is possible that they are making the best choices possible for their monetary return, and doing so also making anti-player choices. I actually think that's where it's going. There are still some funny bugs in the app that have been there for a while, but we get a new feature that offers your personalized bundles fresh out of development. It shows where the resources are being directed, and it's not player's quality of life. It's also interesting how they mention "their understanding of psychology and engagment" in connection to their data to guide their decisions. It feels they are overestimating their ability to understand trends, or at least using it for the only aim of just to extract money out of players pockets. I can't believe people enjoy slower progression over faster ones, and yet they are (self admittingly) slowing down progression. Only reason for that is the supposed fact that players drop if they reach full collection? Well damn at least for me I dropped because I couldn't have all the cards ever, even investing in the game. I guess I'm the outlier, but I wonder if I actually am seeing all the uproar under this video.
Treat player better and they will keep investing in your game, make greedy choices and people will have to make the choice whether they can afford it or not
@@TheDelineari think op was saying something like: the bundles that are in his acceptable pice range dont offer enough value. which is also true to me, some bundles i could buy, i'll not starve and money wouldt be an issue, but the value that those bundles offers are not entincing enough. and about the "arent dumb" part, data driven decision making is a illusion, SD might have metrics to use, but they are usually less valuable than the "gut feeling" of the heads that gives the final words. i'm not saying they are worng or that their strategy isnt the best one around, i'm just saying they are as dumb as any other person is, no amount of data will change that
I played since the world release and the monetizarion makes me want to play less and less. Helped by the fact that there is no regional pricing so in certain places almost every bundle is extremelly expensive I started only doing my dailies and now I need to force myself to do even that because is just not that fun anymore for me
Nah this game is established and the whales are going to whale. The thing with these types of games is that statistics show it is only a small percentage of the player base that spends the lion's share of the money. They dont need to worry about free to play numbers as much as some games do because it's single player at this point so you don't need to have big numbers to support clans/alliances/guilds. As long as they can retain the majority of the top 5% spenders, then they can monetize the game on an increasing scale and continue to profit.
I remember buying the Kai Lun Qu bundle by saving gold and I was so happy with the awesome variants and large amounts of credits which helped me progress a lot as I wasn’t series 3 complete at that time. But watching them no releasing gold bundles, hiding info about spotlights and bundles.
18:12 - It's a good topic. The last months: - 2/3 of the spotlight 4 series cards; - offers for gold s*ck; - new cards only 5 series; - Collect 6000 tokens for 4-6 months.
Thank you Alex for speaking out for the f2p players. I, being one of them, am at the verge of quitting the game. Gold bundles are worsening every month. Plus just look at the way they released the cards in spotlight caches this month. Only one good card in every spotlight. So you might even need to spend 4 keys just to get that card that you like. The game is completely aligning towards p2w players. And that makes me sad... Coz I loved the game.
Mailbag: What would you do to Reserves to make them feel better? I have a few things: 1. Remove gold tickets 2. Increase Token Rewards 3. Add back the chance of pulling S4/S5 cards from the new card reserve 4. Link the Avatars to the cards across the board, if you get a new variant or base card, you automatically get the avatar too 5. Put the titles somewhere else or make them all available.
Something y'all hit quick then kinda brushed by was an increase in monetization without an increase in features? We haven't had a new features since... albums? Then what before that?
I love marvel snap, been playing about a year and it's become a legit hobby. It's discouraging to be someone who buys the season pass every month, plays regularly, buys the occasional bundle and still feel like it's impossible to keep up with the new cards. Cozy and Alex are totally right about Snap needing the monetization to succeed, but I feel like Snap should be a $10 month kind of game and instead it feels like I need to be spending $60 per month to be at all relevant. For a mobile card game I just feel like SD is asking way too much, having spent $120 on season pass alone, more than any other game I play, it baffles me how impossible it feels to increase my progression in game
I'm 💯 in agreement with Alex. I have 15k in gold and for what? Just purchasing variants? There's no value to that as far as maintaining your collection and keeping up with the new cards. So yeah...gold is pretty much a worthless currency (at least to me). Can only keep up now by purchasing credits and token bundles for real cash. And as someone else pointed out, you can get a lot more value (time and game quality) out of a full AAA game for less money than one of these recent bundles. Really love this game and have enjoyed it for almost a year, but at this point, I'm considering moving on since it's really become too expensive to try to keep up.
You can literally buy credits with gold in the store, and credits = progression. It's beyond ridiculous to say your gold is _worthless_ because you can only buy credits with real cash when there's a whole section of the store for buying credits _WITH_ gold. You're sitting on almost 20,000 credits worth of gold, complaining about how you can't get progression - that's like 3-4 spotlight keys in a currency you're claiming is "useless", so use it! I'm definitely not going defend SD's monetisation, but your own claim is simply not true and you're stating it as if it were a fact. By all means raise valid concerns with the monetisation (there are plenty) but in this instance claiming something as true which is provable false is not helping the anti-monetisation argument at all, it's just making gamers look like they have no clue what they're talking about.
Alex, you’re the man. Thank you for the honest discussion about predatory monetization that’s killing this game. I want this game to succeed (and I want SD to make money), but there has to be a more ethical/less scummy way of going about it. Also, crazily priced cosmetics wouldn’t be such an egregious subject if the game wasn’t missing so many core features. How can you charge $100 USD for a bundle when there’s still no discard/destroy pile and we still play on the stupid asteroid background?
I have stopped playing the game because monetization felt predatory and progression felt too slow and I couldn't have fun with experimenting because of the lack of cards I had. It also doesn't help that nerfs and balances are blatantly aimed at making new cards relevant and nerfing old cards. Since resources are so limited and so expensive, it feels disrespectful from SD to nerf cards just after making them available on spotlight caches (see Darkhawk, I didn't have time to play with the card because I was missing Rockslide). This disregard towards player's resource investment also made me drop. I have to say these few days I have just had my sensations confirmed: SD even saying that progression is too fast for their calculations. I am happy I dropped now before investing any more money in it, frankly.
Same thing with having Thanos in the Spotlight, then nerfing Lockjaw. It actually took me a lot longer than I wanted to get Lockjaw (I had almost the whole Hela package), and when I finally did, he was nerfed within the week. Literally less than a week to play with it. No way to focus the card to get it, to craft it, nothing. Had to wait it out, then finally get it randomly, then it gets nerfed. Sucks man.
It’s the reasonI quit a few months ago. I really love the game but the FOMO, predatory prices, nerfs and lack of communication drove me off. Still like hearing about the game but I feel that 3-5 new cards a month isn’t worth $20. Let alone the 100s on packs and other things. You get more cards for the same money with MTG and can sell them when you’re done.
This is a real issue for the majority of the fan base. Thank you for speaking up on it before it eliminates half of the players and we get stuck playing bots twice as much.
I know it's a mobile game but I can't rationalize how getting 2 or 3 cards for 100€ is the price of 2 or 3 full games AA games. Like for that price you can buy Palword, Helldivers 2 and Last Epoch. Or you could get Dragon's Dogma 2 and one of the three mentioned above. Mobile game pricing is not for common folks. It's for people for whom spending 100€ is a very small amount of their budget and I don't like it because it reminds me we're not equal. I know I could never buy a castle but I don't see it, in snap it's in my face. With all that said the game itself is still fun and I keep playing it 10-30min everyday and to be fair my rant applies to the whole mobile game industry not just snap, just sad they follow a similar path.
Well spending money on games in general is just for Temporary Pleasures it's a waste of money, most people who Spend money on games either know its a waste or Have some return in some way, either content creation or Whatever. Helldivers is behind a 40$ Entrance Fee that is made to reimburse their cost of creation they don't have to make continued content to make a profit they just need to sell X amount. Snap is a free Game thats needs to sell you something in order to Continue content And return on creation cost. I think what's off putting is How rare a game like snap is, and the scary reality of what it could devolve into. NGL Its a weird Space for Snap to be in where they have to make money because that's how you continue supporting the game, but how do you make people happy?
Games developers are stupid now and Uber greedy they don’t see that. Hell fortnite and league are free and sell skins and have been around for years. There is 0 reason for for macro transactions!
@@Silversamuri876 so two of the HUGE game company with billions of dollars should set the standard and not the average? Mind u both of those games thrive off micro transactions.
@@Synical02 exactly micro transactions. When the hell did gamers settle for 50 to 100 dollar offers that come daily to weekly. Next thing people will think it’s ok to pay 100 dollars a week to play a game.
Yeah, I love this game too Alex! But I just hate when games craves money from their players! That’s why I began playing this game so dang much! Bc I loved that it did not just needed to take money for you to progress in the game!
There were times in the past that I purchased a $ bundle because it had enough gold in it to also get a gold bundle that was available at the same time. It was a satisfying win win. I can’t do that anymore.
@@Evilgreg2 yeah me too. I bought a $ bundle and then a gold bundle, and it felt like I didn’t even spend one dollar! Bc back then gold had value unlike today
Alex, thank you SO MUCH for speaking up for us. These subjects needed to be addressed from the platform of you and Cozy. Second Dinner has tough decisions to make in navigating these monetizations, but they have to make progression better overall.
I appreciate Alex for just being a man of the people and having the conversation. He voiced his genuine points and concerns for the game, and I completely agree with it. The game is getting more expensive, it’s easy to see. Especially if you want the new card every week. The downgrade of gold is a huge callout and needs to be examined..I also don’t want to use it just for a variant I don’t even like to get 3/12 on an album. It feels awful spending gold on stuff like that. And heaven forbid I get gold in the collection track. The game is expensive and it’ll quickly turn away longtime players seeing the change, AND scare new players looking to get in.
Finally, THE discussion. Seeing a lot of complaints and no ideas though. I feel like if you could pass on the varients for 1000 tokens, and getting a dupe card gave you 2k or 3k tokens, there would be at least somewhat of a guaranteed card progression. Nothing is worse than being credit broke, getting all the way to one spotlight key for the week, and then getting a variant that you dont even want. Despite what everyone is saying, i feel like its not so bad for new players when you might actually have 3 cards to pull that you dont have, but when youre just pissing away credits to get nothing week after week, it does start to feel like a broken system. Tried to post this comment and was broken hearted to see the comments turned off, and at first I was honestly disappointed, but after seeing your pinned comment, i totally understand, so thank you for that. MAN OF THE PEOPLE.
I missed a major thing in your monetisation discussion: I don't see what I'm paying for anymore (so Istopped paying a while ago). the game is getting buggier and slower with every update and literally every new "feature" that has come out in the past months is solely focused on generating revenue. albums, "for you" bundles, popular tags, increasingly expensive bundles with less and less value but no actual improvement for the playerbase.
Regarding monetization, here in Brazil, music plays in a different way. A bundle that in the United States or Canada costs 100 dollars, for us it costs R$499.90. Which for many is prohibitive. For my part, I can buy the premium every month and another bundle up to $25, maybe a little more when it is very interesting due to the change in currency. But I miss more bundles that can be purchased with Gold that I can plan ahead for. And even so, with this strategy and playing since the game's launch, today I have a collection in which I'm only missing 7 cards, which in terms of the metagame play very little, things like Hercules, Howard and Kang for example. Anyway, I think things can change in the game's monetization so that new players can have access to more cards in a simpler way.
And consider yourself one of the top Brazilian spenders. Not many people gonna use 50 BRL monthly. It's half of the price of medium internet connection, for example. 5 months of Google Play Pass signature to play free games on Android. More than 1 month of Xbox Game Pass to play on PC or console. It's not healthy, in Brazil, to play at this cost
The best part of the conversation about the longevity of monetisation is that no one can pronounce either word. In all seriousness, keep up the good work gents!
Clearly Cozy was uncomfortable with both monetization criticism and Pixie fair assessment. But everyone is entitled to have their own opinion. I just liked Alex's evaluation more.
I’m so glad you brought this up Alex. I love snap and I’ve been a free to play player since release, but I felt like I needed to buy the pass for February and March if I wanted to keep up with the game. I have nearly 10k gold saved from the past few months and nothing to spend them on. Even a bundle with cool variants and credits would make me happy, but it just feels like there’s nothing out there anymore.
@@AlexanderCocciaeven if they release the 5$ a month 1800 gold pass which kinda doubtful it'll only be 5$ but probably will be but even if they do that it still won't be nearly enough.
I’ll be the first one to say I HAVE ZERO PROBLEMS occasionally spending $100 in a mobile game that I genuinely love. But spending $100 every weekend is just absurd. The season pass, variants, and emotes should be the only thing monetized in this game. NOT progression!
Thank you Alex for having this tough discussion. It is evident that you are very passionate about this game and its community which is wonderful to see. You are a great speaker and brought up many valid points whilst remaining professional and encouraging positivity moving forward. I am a f2p and for me, gold is worth nothing and I have a total of more than 22k gold saved up. On a similarly vein, I also have 195 collectors reserve unopened and your last video resonates strongly with me; I feel nothing opening these so why bother? I actually would appreciate if second dinner would open them up automatically for me so I don't need to waste time waiting for the loading. All the best for your future videos and please continue to advocate for improving this game.
Lots of thanks for bringing up this topic and discussing about it, Alex and Cozy. It is really important I think, because a bad monetization can make people turn away from the game, or the new player to leave because it seems too expensive to them, and if the player base goes down, the games slowly die. A problem I have, closely related to the monetization, is the spotlight cache / card acquisition system, especially for cards released in the past months. Every month, there is one new card added to pool 5 every week (given the last two months, it seems that the one new card per month added to pool 4 instead of pool 5 is over?) plus one (the season pass card). In the spotlight caches, the usual pattern is: the new card, one pool5 and one pool4 card (sometimes there are 2 pool4 - like with Mockingbird, or last month with Proxima and Supergiant; sometimes 2 pool5 - like with Corvus Glaive last month; but I’d say both are about as frequent and rules out each other), so one old pool 5 card per week in average. So, every month, there are more card added to the pool 5 than old pool 5 card that appeared in the spotlight rotation. And this is a problem: this means that the delay between a card release and its next appearance can only go up, and at this rate, this delay increases by one month every month…! Without series drop, it will be above 6 months at the end of march, at 7 months in April and so on. And as spotlight cache is the only ‘true’ way to acquire old pool 5 card (tokens take so much time to have enough for a pool 5 card), having to wait half a year or more for the reappearance of a card in the spotlight feels really bad. And this is not even accounting for the OTA/patch that can suddenly change a card usage.
I completely agree with Alex on this one. I'm fine with a bit of monetization here and there and I'd most definitely buy a 20$ bundle if it has a card I like, but the prices are getting out of hand way too fast while the F2P progress gets slowed down way too fast.
Alex, you're and absolute MVP for bringing up this topic. Like you, many of us really enjoy this game and want to see it do well and tactics like this only make it harder for fans to support a product they love. Apart from this topic, its very important for a popular platform like this be a space where all sorts of conversations can be had and its great that the two of you are not shying away from calling out things that need to be called out. Keep up the awesome work guys!
Even in the realm of mobile gaming, Marvel Snap has a bizarre economy. Tokens and Gold exist as premium currencies for the purposes of card acquisition and cosmetics, with real money purchases being the "premium++" currency used for every bundle now. Despite Tokens and Gold, to be acquired in any significant quantity, also requiring real money purchases. Why not convert everything into a singular premium currency? If SD believes players then have too much Gold, then the solution is to add more ways to spend it. Emotes, more cards, card backs, conquest tickets, Series 3 fast track bundles. Whatever it takes.
Great talk and discussion as always guys! While I agree that Pixie shouldn't be TOO predictable, that RNG chaos and all, she should be able to swap the bigger cost cards with lower ones, guaranteed. She's a series 5 card, Second Dinner, c'mon!? This could be as bad as a 2 cost swapping with a 1 cost, but it could be as good as a 6 cost swapping with a 1 cost. I feel like that's the buff that SD would do. As for monetization, I agree the Demonized Shang-Chi bundle could've been a 7.5k or 8k gold bundle, but I firmly believe the game's NOT getting too monetized or P2W, cause it's all cosmetics. Coming from MtG Online & MtG Arena, Shadowverse, and your typical Japanese / Chinese gacha games, the spend-to-win-ness is not an option, it's a necessity.
But in lower ranks, it absolutely is P2W. I am of the opinion that if you do not own a card, you should not be able to buy a variant for it, because otherwise it circumvents natural progression. Back when I was in the 30-40 area a couple seasons back, the festival wong variant came out, and no one at that level could deal with him. Wong suddenly crashing into a series 1-2 meta is not fun. I'm sure that there was a similar effect when the nebula variant came out in december as well, although I'm much higher rank now. Overall, it's hard to see how this monetization style could be considered p2w from the top, but you have to think about the players that have barely any cards, and are getting thrust into situations where they have to contend with pre-nerf Ms. Marvel, or Wong.
I too notice the switching of gold to a more cosmetics resource as opposed to being able to hoard for bundles to get large bursts of progression , that, frankly didn't do much with the spotlight system. Now with caches being mostly boring I have, after not believing I would, been somewhat coerced into the album mechanism to get what rewards I can using gold on variants to get album rewards while also filling in the variant store punch card to get 2000 more credits every ten buys. 😐 I haven't done the math ,nor will I , but it feels like the game feels like buying stuff is fun and the more ways people have to buy stuff in different ways , how many shops do we have now?, and more often is even more enforced fun . Please stop I can only have so much fun 😐.
I still don't see why microtransactions aren't MICRO anymore. In any game. If the prices were lower, I would've bought a lot more season passes perhaps. Every bundle or something above €20 is crazy.
Easier to convince 1 person to spend $100 rather than 100 people to spend $1. Its honestly not a bad model, the prices are so outrageous that there's no literally no incentive for me to spend lol
Sadly these companies aren't doing it on a whim, but it's backed by internal data. We all assume that they'd make more by pricing it less, but if they see an increase in profits that's all the justification they need to continue in that direction. Really a sad thought when you realize that means those dissavowing these practices are a minority in the gaming space, because otherwise change would've been made years ago. We live in too much of a consumerist society for this to ever change in a widespread manner, and that can't be fixed in just the gaming space alone to stop it
@@mglikeabossplaysMC exactly this. The reality is, if everyone had bought the cheap bundles when they did them, we'd probably be seeing more cheap bundles, but a lot of the "I'd buy more stuff if it was cheap" crowd are just being disingenuous and provably didn't do so. The model might be awful, but these companies aren't dumb, they've honed the model to be as profitable as possible, they know for a _fact_ that expensive bundles make them more money than cheap bundles. No amount of gamer feelings are going to trump those facts.
@@TheDelinear Not necessarily the conclusion I would arrive at. The point is, people WERE buying the cheap bundles, so much so that they raised the prices and saw that people continued to buy them. So those wanting cheaper bundles aren't in the wrong, I'm just pointing out that Second Dinner doesn't make these choices without coming out on top. They have to be making a great deal of money compared to previous bundle pricing because even with the outcry of content creators they still push it
For the Mailbag: I was bored so I went back and watched an old episode from December 2022, which was very interesting to hear what the game was like back then. Alex mentioned Iceman was a card that was really bothering him at the time. What other cards in the history of snap have been a menace but never actually saw a balance change?
I just came back to the game after a 10 month hiatus and I foolishy spent big on some bundles only to then realize that they've nerfed collectors reserves to the ground. We get tickets that are being converted to BOOSTERS??? Yes, I had a decent chunk of spotlight keys because of it BUT I neeeded to invest 8 keys in order to get Corvus and Pixie ( I regret pixie a lot!). It's impossible to keep up with new releases in the current system and as we barely get any tokens acquiring new cards is way too random.
I find it funny that so few people are complaining about the gold tickets. Remember back when you could straight up get boosters from collector's reserves and people _hated_ it? And yet now, for many of us, gold tickets just = boosters. They told us they were removing boosters from reserves because it wasn't rewarding, and then they found a way to stealthily add boosters back into reserves. I hate it so much. Having said that, if conquest wasn't such a grind fest slog, I would be fine with tickets. If I didn't have to invest over an hour for a single gold ticket (just to lose to RNG or a bad deck matchup on the last battle), then I'd be fine with the tickets, but right now I play conquest pretty casually and I still get enough medals to buy the shop out and have 30 - 40 silver and 10-20 gold tickets left over every season.
I made a decision a couple of months ago that i was not going to spend more than the season pass on Marvel Snap. Also i decided to stop chasing infinite ( ive grinded for infinite every season since Modok). Its definitely been a better experience for me personally just playing for fun and not making this game a second job.
F2P player that recently came back from months away from the game. I'm averaging about 1 key every week or so, to do things the smart way, I need to make sure I have to have 4 keys when a certain card I like comes out. So, I'm looking at month of playing for maybe spending keys to get a card? What happens on months where cards I'm on iffy on? What about all the cards that came out that I'm missing? 100 tokens here and there? I'm well aware of the limitations of a f2p player, ( did the clash of clans and royale games), I'm just trying to rationalize grinding in a game that doesn't really reward grinding. Just not seeing it.
Most people are not seeing it. Its great for newer players because they can basically just blindly throw down a key a week and get a new card. But the more your collection gets filled... the less valuable those spotlights become. I basically skipped spotlights all last month in anticipation for the cards this month. Meanwhile the tokens are so slow going that you can't guarantee a card unless grind for 2 months.
Alex is right. Particularly about the datamine stuff. SD should take a hint from the community and give more advanced notice about upcoming bundles. Officially! The reason we are interested in datamines is to plan to spend our currency - and then spend it! It would be better for the players, and for SD to plan ahead more and just stick to the plan. Cozy - saying that they are looking month to month like "what should we do with this bundle? This cache? This release?" based on their projected income or something is just bad business. If that's the case, they need to plan ahead more. And certainly, they do! Didn't they say it takes 3 months to develop a new card? They are capable of planning series drops, bundles, and whatever else, and letting us know, and getting us hyped for it. They're just dropping the ball in this area, and Alex is rightly pointing it out. Good job as always guys. Love the podcast!
Their main monetization strategy is absolutely impulse buying and fear of loss. Telling you stuff ahead of time doesn't allow them to scare you into buying a bundle or risk missing out.
The value of gold has actually changed how i feel about the season pass. I had bought every one since launch until skaar. Ive skipped the last 3. I dont believe they are an auto purchase anymore. To get max value from spotlights you need multiple unowned cards in the pool and unknown slot. So the one thing i thought was worth it in snap i no longer buy. second dinner doesnt care about my 10 dollars a month because whales are the ones who fund these games and thats what the new money bundles reflect.
If you don't buy the season pass then who knows when you'll get that card. You're not getting enough tokens to get it and more than likely you're not getting it in a spotlight. So then it becomes ten bucks a month just to stay meta relevant. And you could argue the cards aren't meta but, M.O.D.O.K, Surfer, Phoenix, Zabu, Nimrod, MS. Marvel, Loki, Elsa, Black Panther, Hope.... These are all cards you find in the best decks on the regular. And Baron Next month is going to be a winner as well. To me that's pay to win. And you get gold for variants on top of it all.
Yeah but I don’t fear not having a card. If it’s too good it gets nerfed anyways. It was second dinners vision ppl can’t get full collections so I’ve decided to not fight that anymore and engage the system as they intended lol.
This is a conversation that needed to happen, and its sad to see the game just slowly burning into the ground. Respect the passion we all have for this game, hopefully change comes asap 💯
Solid talk. Alex is a man of the people and making very legit points. I enjoy the game even though now I only touch it to completely dailys then close out of it. Hopefully some better changes can be done.
One of the things I really liked about Snap's currencies was that while Gold was a premium currency that you paid for, you used to still be able to earn enough to (fairly) consistently USE the gold while still remaining F2P (or by buying the season pass). That's simply not a thing anymore and it's just like every other mobile game now, where you get truck loads of the basic currency that does very little, and very little of the premium currency that you almost never get to use, cuz you need to hoard large amounts/stay in fomo
I agree with Alex on his views about monetization in Snap. It's such a great card game and needs to be more accessible so more players can be competitive.
I've been playing for about 6 months, decided to call it quits a few weeks ago. It's not only the fact that there are too many cards to keep up with, it's that you can't even safely invest as any card that looks good will probably be nerfed in the future
Really appreciate the topic & argument of the gold value reduction was made. Especially when creators could face backlash from Second Dinner. Thanks Alex!
The aggressive monetisation as of late has put me off the game, seeing a £100 "for you" Wasp bundle legit made me sick. I've spent a lot of money on the game because I love it, but they're losing me with their greed. Everyone hates the direction that they're going in, and they need to be called out for it. Like you I want to enjoy Snap for years, but I can honestly see it being an expensive, distant memory in a year's time. Cozy's comment about not needing to spend money to have fun was so tone deaf, I'd like to see him start a new F2P account and see how much fun he's having in a month or two. And if he doesn't want to be called a shill he needs to stop acting like he's bought and paid for. He's a great guy, but he obviously has a conflict of interest when it comes to Second Dinner.
Re: monetization, I completely agree that my main complaint point is the hostility toward planning and calendars. I agree that even just the current month would be enough. What's happening in March released on March 1st. If I can't plan, I won't spend. I'm allergic to FOMO tactics and to me that is definitionally "manipulative".
Monetisation is a joke. Some simple things SD could do to make the experience fairer: 1: let people choose their spotlight reward. Some weeks I just want the new card. Some weeks I don’t want the card but I want a variant. Just let us choose. 2: make the climb more rewarding. Gold collectors should contain variants and tokens. Credits to be gained through weekend missions and playing. Boosters as it is. 3: reduce costs of bundles/variants.
Hey guys, just figured I would give my 2 cents about the Gold subject. I am at collection level 2k and for me the variants still have insane value to me. I am constantly unlocking new meta cards and for me finding new variants is a big part of the game for me! Hope this helps! Thanks for the content!
It's impossible to keep up with new cards every single week, I know I could just skip cards but damn knowing you can't have complete collection as f2p no matter how much you play sucks
I think the same. There should be another way to get tier 4-5 cards. I get frustrated that I don't have all the cards and I've been playing for approximately 7 months, I don't want to imagine someone starting to play this now. Either they should lower the cards from tier 4 to 3 faster or add a way to get tokens to unlock cards.
@DariusVincentHughes the game when first released was great and progression on the CL gave great rewards where you could easily get gold and tokens for cards plus series 3 cards only cost 1000 tokens. It was so easy to complete series 3.
Im collectionlevel 7k and still miss 20 cards, while also been sending around 200$ on this game, played for 1,5 years, a year ago it was much easier to catch up, now it's impossible if you don't put your whole salary on this game, they need to stop being greedy or ill give this game up
Mailbox: Personally you should have been able to change the color of their names on the cards. It defeats the purpose of changing the border to any color other then the name on the card. Call it OCD but it looks whack 99% of the time as they based the colors 99% of the time on each of these borders. And not sure why everyone likes to destroy the background art especially foil . You really take away the moment the art of the character was captured in. Also, you should be able to choose more than 1 variant at a time that will randomly be added to your decks.
All my friends who used to play have all stopped due to monetization issues. Such a bummer. I totally get they need to make money, but it definitely doesn't feel good right now. Every new move feels they're just digging for more and more out of their players.
As a casual player who buys the season pass each month, my gold goes towards the Tuesday bundle to get some token... And that's boring but otherwise I just can't keep up with some of the key cards I can buy from time to time with tokens. It's not an exciting way to spend gold for sure...
I love Cozy, but I don't get how he can objectively say he "hasn't ever felt he has to spend money to have fun..." well of course not, he already is spending tons of money, so he's not going to see it from that perspective. If he isn't spending money then SD is giving him tons of free shit, either way he wouldn't even know if the game is fun or not without spending money. thank you Alex for saying what needed to be said.
I feel like the next patch will be really make or break. Series 5 is way to big we already need another series drop and if they hide the new cards we are getting into gacha levels of fomo tactics.
I been playing marvel snap since day 1 and I wanna start by saying thank you to both of you for stepping up and bringing attention to the monetization in this game. I agree with everything you said Alex, but I would like to add that the collectors reserves are terrible now. I am someone who has been saving up my reserves and was happy that I did when the series drop happened, but now I am hesitant to open my reserves because of what you said on your pack opening stream. Players are given too many gold tickets and not nearly enough collectors tokens. I saved up 6000 tokens to buy Thanos for over 6 months, and now that was before the token nerf. Make the rewards better so players who have packs saved up are incentivized to open them and not keep hoarding them. Sorry for the rant I just been frustrated by this and also happy that you two have spoke about this glaring issue
I am an active FTP player, but don’t focus much on good other than to buy variants (I like pretty things, what can I say?), so I generally stay out of monetization discussions. But this week was the first week that I’ve actually felt affected, and the reason might not be what you think. I have been saving Spotlight Keys for about 4 weeks now (ever since Cull) for the Mockingbird/Ms. Marvel cache, only for them to significantly worsen the cache AFTER their monthly hype video. I agree with Cozy’s point about datamines taking away from the marketing team, but when they make changes even after the marketing announcements, it feels VERY scummy even though I’m sure that’s not their intention. That’s been the biggest annoyance for me personally. Anyway, love the content from both of you!
I agree with the many comments on the cost for a single bundle in comparison to AAA games. I have teetered on the border of do I stop playing or not. So far I continue to enjoy it, however I feel the value for money is not compelling.
How can a content creator who is a whale ever say i don't think the game requires you to spend money ??? At the very least be honest and say I'm not sure.
while it’s true there’s not an energy limit or anything, it feels a little pointless sometimes to play if I’ve complete all missions and can’t really earn much more, especially later in the season
Alex about the Gold, I have 7k as a f2p and there is nothing I can do with it, I want to play new cards, I have been playing the same 3 decks for 2 3 months now man. The shield said he is getting to play a good game, its not when you play the same deck for a month.
Love the podcast guys. Respect to you both, you guys are my buddies on my morning commute every Monday morning! Mailbag question: what, if any, tournaments do you guys like to enter? Any to shout out, either to enter or streams to watch?
This was such a refreshing honest conversation. When I voice these concerns people just tell me I’m complaining and I begin to wonder if they were even valid originally
It sounds to me like consistency is key here. Instead of random bundles at random prices, what can be consistent pricing? There's the monthly season pass cost which remains the same. Similarly can there be consistent types of bundles each month for players to budget for / expect?
Thank you for speaking out. The core game is easily transferrable if any other game company wants to give it a go, and it's possible that this iteration of it is just not the version that succeeds until your retirement. Second Dinner spent a fortune licensing MARVEL and for the beautiful 3D art on cards, and they most definitely have to make that money back, especially since they are now leveraged on serious VC money. So, I am not sure we will see the game ever becoming affordable like it was a year ago. I suspect it will continue to become more and more expensive and players will slowly coalesce into making unhealthy purchases (being whales, when they really can't afford to be whales), and die hard fans who cannot stop playing for fear that if they stop, they won't be able to afford to catch back up. Until there's a breaking point, and either not enough people play to keep the bots away, or SD themselves do not see it as a revenue generating game and move on to other projects. Also, something else I agree with you on Alex, the core philosophy the founders design for, seems quite at odds with the way people actually interact with the game. There are a set of cards you need to even enjoy playing the game, or you get bored with the ones you have, or worse you get stuck on the ladder system. Only the most competitive players will continue to push through the pain to climb, and they are the players who want the best cards. Yet, the SD philosophy dictates players should not be collection complete, and decks should remain random. Anyway, I'll end my thoughts here, by saying, the biggest problem with the game is that I am not sure the actual game mechanics are aligned with the acquisition system in any realistic way. The two remain at odds with each other, and SD doesn't seem interested in solving it. It's like Cozy hinted it, SD is all "focus on generating profit that would make the VC happy and then we can fix the cohesion part later."
Alex was cooking! To be honest I’m sitting on 15k gold and have been unwilling to spend because of the lack of gold bundles with worth while progression. I think we’ve seen 3 $100 bundles in a 4 week period all with gold to entice us when they’re making gold feel useless. Another issue I have is how often the Random S4/5 card in spotlight caches hits a duplicate that only gives 1k tokens essentially wasting a spot light key that their monetization has valued at around $30-$40. It feels horrible losing a spotlight key to get 1k tokens in return especially when there’s so many S5 cards coming out that cost 6k tokens. The token rebate for weekend missions consistently being 200 when silk was a 1000 token rebate is rough. Also get gold tickets out of reserves. I have over 100 reserves I don’t even open because I don’t want to get a bunch of tickets that will go to waste in one season so I’m piece meal opening a few every month. Just give me double the tokens to increase card acquisition agency as a player if you can’t think of a better reward. Plus the lack of planning sucks now man, this one I do blame the community for they complained whenever a spotlight week changed a card and they complained if bundles changed no matter how good or bad when all that information was always prefaced with the text “Subject to change”. But at the very least the leaks served as a guiding light to maximize our resources. But regardless the vocal minority on social media made SD react and now the silent majority who just played and planned peacefully lost a valuable resource. I still enjoy the game it’s become part of my routine but I find myself playing less and less each season because I can’t keep up. I’ve gotten 3 new cards since January; caiera, super giant and pixie a pretty slow cadence. And I can only imagine that a month like this with all potentially great cards that inability to keep up will be felt and frustrate alot of people now more than previous seasons.
Having recently posted on Reddit asking the community what their biggest frustration with the game was currently, I can say for certain majority of the comments were ab the state of monetization. It’s just sad to me for a game I’ve been playing since launch. This video NEEDS to be seen by the eyes of those at SD. Thanks for posting this video Alex!
Great points by you both. There is the game and the systems surrounding it. I love the GAME. It’s those systems I’m growing concerned with. I tend to agree with Alex’s points about monetization. The decrease in transparency compounds my concerns. I’m hardly spending gold now. My trust is on edge. As a result, I no longer purchase anything with real money beyond the season pass. If my wallet continues to feel like a mark for Second Dinner that will stop, too. There is hope. All my available digits are crossed that we’ll be happily surprised.
Just wanted to say shout out cozy for handling the conversation gracefully i'm sure it wasn't the easiest one to have and shout out alex for being able to voice his opinion as well. love u guys both ur the reason i still play the game
It is very obvious to me as a F2P player, that Snap (the higher ups or whoever) do not want people to play this game for free, yes you can play it for free however long you want, but they are making every decision to put F2P players in a chokehold, its very VERY obvious to us From actively getting rid of datamines, to making collectors tokens borderline non existent, now they are doing the same thing with Gold, they even put a cap on how many credits you can hold and I cant help but see that as "whoa hey there fella we dont like you saving your resources like this you need to spend it" And dont even get me started on Albums, a feature exclusively meant for paying players To put it into better perspective, I had to save gold for 3+ months to get a bundle back in november, and that was barely worth it. Since then I havent seen a gold bundle even worth looking at, I genuinely think its more worth my time and will be more fun at this point to just spend the gold I get on the overpriced variant shop, cuz at least then I can sorta crawl my way to completing an album maybe hopefully Tried to be constructive but this has been happening for months now and it just feels like its getting worse and worse
It's funny that your comment about it being obvious to F2P players that they are in a chokehold expected to spend money to have fun is right next to @rensan1287's comment saying they're F2P, have never spent money or felt the need to spend money, and is having fun with the game. Clearly you are both engaging with the game in different ways, and one of those, the one who isn't getting mad about FOMO trash like albums, seems healthier than the other.
If that were the case here i could not afford to play this game. The season pass is kind of expensive for me...but 50$, i could almost buy an almost nee ps5 game every month. Or pay for xbox gamepass and still have money for a nice dinner
@@eneeaflutur4096 it's sad, even that bad shang bundle is about 600$+ which is way too much here, with that much i could literally buy any game or have home supplies for months
I saw the thread on Reddit about this video and I just came here to say thank you Alex for bringing this view and supporting F2P player's experience. You are the man!!
Ive been playing since release day and buy all the season passes plus about 20ish a month on bundles. Used to be more when the bundles felt fairer. I also get most twitxh drops and never miss a daily mission and i feel like i can only just maintain a collection. God knows how new players can ever catch up
Thank you guys for talking about the monetization. I’ve been playing since the release of the game and have noticed how much harder it is to be free to play then it was before. I understand they need to make money but I wish they would reward these people who log in every single day to complete missions and enjoy the game. Snap is the best and I wish my friends could join up and want to stay but unfortunately they get overwhelmed when they meet thanos 😂
Personally I’d say RNG is becoming the biggest problem in Marvel Snap. If they are making money with the bundles they ate releasing, all the power to them.
It's so important to Cozy and I that we have the opportunity to have tough conversations on the Snap Chat. We take our roles in the community very seriously, and recognize that our voices are among the loudest when advocating for change. We love the game, and we love the community we've build around this podcast; it is legitimately our pride and joy. However, it is unfair for either person to be targeted with personal attacks under any circumstance. What makes conversations about challenging topics so interesting is in fact, the differing of opinion. Everyone who has been watching our podcast since it's inception knows that both Cozy and I have done our best to approach such topics in a balanced and fair way, in order to provide constructive feedback to the development team while at the same time fostering an environment that encourages community discussion. When that devolves into attacks and insults, there is nothing to be gained, and the message gets lost in the noise. Let's make an effort to be constructive with our comments and constructive with our feedback so that we can make the Snap Chat the best podcast that it can be.
Thank you for posting this video and being our voice Alex. Let's not kill this game by milking the cow dry Second Dinner
Alex makes GREAT points! As much as I enjoy Cozy’s stuff, I feel he’s trying to play both sides and being a little too careful. I feel he probably does agree more with Alex, but publicly wants to not be seen as attacking SD. Im all for calling out companies on BS so this video actually has made me lean more towards Alex’s channel now.
Cosy’s position is understandable as you don’t want to tick off the developers but they really should take notice of what people are saying and try to find a middle ground themselves. Right now, they aren’t there.
@@tom2point0 the concern is when someone who appears in the release videos and has a CL of 30K, it doesn't give the appearance of being a player spokesman, but quite the opposite
Im going to echo my earlier comment, hopefully it wasn't taken as not constructive. A big reason why I've always enjoyed this podcast for over a year now has been due to the fact that you guys advocate for the player base when topics like monetization come up. Whenever that stops being the case, you lose my trust. I know Cozy is a good guy and a dear friend to you, and to us. But he can't fence sit on an issue like monetization and not get called out for it.
Either way, I love both of you and will continue to listen/watch every episode. I just hope this isnt a recurring issue.
One of my biggest problems is the increase of monetization and prices and decreased value of gold, without any real quality of life changes. The game needs to make money, yes, but some of that money needs to be put back into the game in a visible way.
It's great that the game can release new cards every week, it keeps the game fresh and exciting, but they didn't need to add in the extra card in the first week, it just makes progression harder and devalues existing currencies, and, I would imagine, takes up dev resources that could have otherwise been spent implementing things people have been asking for for so long - selectable card borders, viewable discard pile/graveyard, more deck slots, better events with non-garbage UI, to name a few.
This game is wonderful, I'll give it so much credit for all the things it does right and I wouldn't say trying to make money is wrong, it's necessary for the game and company's survival. But user experience should, at the very least, *feel* like it's important and right now... it just doesn't. And that makes me really sad.
An absolutely excellent comment, thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts
This is the real constructive critisism here. Thank you for pointing out the correct thing instead of just ranting out on SD.
We have a great game to play and things currently are certainly going downhill. I imagine the same would be happening with the business side too which in turn is leaving a sour taste in the mouth of the player base as a result.
A really good solution to this problem would be to put more resources in towards elevating the game experience, making it feature rich and then saying "hey pay us to keep this experience going(the ridiculous for you bundles) " instead of just creating a drought of resources and being wallet predators that they are being currently.
I really don't want this game to die. (Also the in game feedback thing they used to do every month earlier, is nowhere to be seen now)
The thing is, SD _want_ progression to be harder. It's not a coincidence that adding an extra card release makes it harder to keep up, they're basically admitted they noticed it was too easy to keep and and it's a deliberate choice. This all comes back to their core ethos that they don't think anyone should have a "full" collection, which is just a fundamentally bad idea
IMO. In any game with a PVP competitive aspect, there will always be people min-maxing the "best" deck. If SD had their way, only a small subset of people would ever be able to play the best deck at any one time, which just sounds like a recipe for a lot of people being unhappy with the game. I don't know why they're so tied to this idea of incomplete collections, but it's antithetical to how everyone wants to engage with the game and it's the main reason for a lot of the friction between the gamers and the developers.
I said the same thing on Reddit last week, I've put a lot of money into the game and I don't mind supporting games I enjoy, but I need to feel like I'm getting a good deal, and I need to feel like my money is helping to make the game better, and that's just not the case.
Do you think Adding a new card every other week, with the in between weeks featuring previously released cards could be a bit more balanced?
When a single card or a bundle costs more than an entire new "AAA" game... I find it ridiculous
@85UKDan I dont know who these "whales," are. I understand content creators snatch everything up as part of their job. I live in Beverly Hills, and i drive a mercedes, and I still find it painful to spend money on a digital card game. Who in their right mind spends 100$ or 50$ on these bundles that give you nothing. I've only bought the season pass once. Progression was great when the game first game out, but it became a cash grab to stay competitive. That's usually my cue to leave.
@@85UKDanI can understand your logic here, but its not like there is a finite amount of digital goods available. If they sell 100 bundles at $100 each or 200 bundles at $50 each, they make the same amount money. The only difference is that they wont seem so greedy and out of touch if they were to lower their pricing.
There are plenty of stupid people in the world with money. A mix of them and developers have ruined the gaming industry. I was all for selling skins and skins to make money but no mobile game does this. Snap is some what better for FTP if you save or just buy the battle pass. But I use to play Marvel strike force and a guy spent millions within a year on a damn mobile game and that’s who the cater to even tho that guy ending up quitting due to them trashing on the player base.
And the worst is even if you buy it it feels so bad cuz you don't get much like in other card games
Thanks for continuing to speak up about this Alex, cause not many do. Much respect for you always homie 💪🏿
Yeah, the man really did not mince his words, and he was bang on
It is was the silent minority feel
There are some card bundles (you literally get 1 card) that cost more than GTA6 when it comes out.. let that sink in.
I know right it's absolutely ridiculous and daylight robbery. I only pay for the season pass but I was lucky to have started playing early so it was much easier to progress
and?
@@MrGhostTheBigRoast and... the point is 1 card variant is worth more than a AAA game. I know you're not that stupid to put 1 and 1 together.
I'm just coming down off my marvel snap high. I am card complete as of pixie card drop and hope summer's drop. I started on launch of game. The predatory system in place that's been getting a tighter bite the more and more I play lately.i have 1 spotlight and 1000 tokens and I am burnt out and woken up to what I've done. I am more sad that I can't get the cards coming out than I am of spending money I cut myself off I think.... but I just want to play and have fun I haven't even hit infinite once. But I do enjoy the game thoroughly. Just this getting nerfed after obtaining every card is tiring.and it's not like I have had an advantage ever I get paired with players who have same amount of cards in there library so now I'm afraid I'm gonna be limited to what I have now and that's that.
@@omgsouthpark7659 the card is "worth" whatever the person buying it wants to pay. If it's just variants, why should you care if someone else would rather buy a piece of Shang art than a new game?
I am glad you guys are talking about the monetization concerns, between Alex's video on collector's reserves and how expensive things have been getting I'm starting to worry. Hopefully 2nd Dinner is listening.
Agreed. That reserves vid is what I've been saying for over 6 months...such a why bother
@@andrewerickson3006 Something needs to change. I think if they just got rid of titles alone it would be a massive improvement.
Yep, I’m with you. I spent probably five or 600 on the game overall before I realized what a waste of money. The game is fun, but I’ll only be buying seasonpass unless things get more reasonable in the shop
@@Ghost88o9when ur series 3 complete spending any money isn’t going to provide much progress besides provide more keys and tokens for upcoming cards or maybe the few series 4-5 cards ur still missing. And I think the insane price of a $100 that can’t even get u a new release card because ur not getting enough tokens, can’t get u a card through keys because your not getting enough credits is not one bit worth it unless u have crazy money to blow. Its really annoying as a new player to catchup, I myself started playing December and I haven’t missed a single mission or shop rotation and I’m still 6 months out from finishing series 3 and both my decks that I had worked towards were smacked by the last OTA and I was left with nothing good to play so as a new player all this sucks even more.
They do not listen, that cache video was uploaded now but is like 3+ months old and these issues have been prevalent for a good 9-10 months now. It's over, they are milking this game dry and then we're done.
In other countries, it's a even worse situation
I'm Brazilian, and this $100 Shang-chi bundle actually costs $500 in the local currency. That money is more than 33% of the minimal monthly salary here! I wonder who could compromise that much in a mobile game.
That's actually insane
I play In iran here 100$ is like 78% of minimum monthly wage!!
In here, Myanmar, it doesn't even close to buy with the whole month income which is under 100 USD for 90% of people.
Yep, in my country, that is 85% of my monthly petrol bill. I can buy 2 AAA game on cdkeys and be a happy man.
any game that don't localize prices is purely cashgrab, it can be a good game, like snap, but it's just a cashgrab after you strip to the core
The prices are what kills me. Id probably buy more than the season pass if they werent so outrageous. The only ones that are in my acceptable range are garbage.
So you're saying there are already bundles in your range and you're not buying them, but if they added more in your range you would buy them. You can see why someone might doubt you there, right?
And I mean, SD aren't dumb, they have _actual metrics_ to back up their bundle prices. If they're pricing them higher and not lower, then it's because that's what drives the most profit for them. They're not just doing it to piss you off personally, they're doing it based on actual data they've collected based on past sales.
If enough people had bought the really amazing value low cost bundles in the past, I am 100% sure we'd be seeing more of them, but unfortunately a lot of the people who claim they would buy cheaper bundles just don't do that when they are offered cheaper bundles.
SD clearly aren't dumb but it depends on what are their objectives. It is possible that they are making the best choices possible for their monetary return, and doing so also making anti-player choices. I actually think that's where it's going. There are still some funny bugs in the app that have been there for a while, but we get a new feature that offers your personalized bundles fresh out of development. It shows where the resources are being directed, and it's not player's quality of life.
It's also interesting how they mention "their understanding of psychology and engagment" in connection to their data to guide their decisions. It feels they are overestimating their ability to understand trends, or at least using it for the only aim of just to extract money out of players pockets.
I can't believe people enjoy slower progression over faster ones, and yet they are (self admittingly) slowing down progression. Only reason for that is the supposed fact that players drop if they reach full collection? Well damn at least for me I dropped because I couldn't have all the cards ever, even investing in the game. I guess I'm the outlier, but I wonder if I actually am seeing all the uproar under this video.
Treat player better and they will keep investing in your game, make greedy choices and people will have to make the choice whether they can afford it or not
@@TheDelineari think op was saying something like: the bundles that are in his acceptable pice range dont offer enough value. which is also true to me, some bundles i could buy, i'll not starve and money wouldt be an issue, but the value that those bundles offers are not entincing enough.
and about the "arent dumb" part, data driven decision making is a illusion, SD might have metrics to use, but they are usually less valuable than the "gut feeling" of the heads that gives the final words. i'm not saying they are worng or that their strategy isnt the best one around, i'm just saying they are as dumb as any other person is, no amount of data will change that
You're not thinking too hard about this Alex - absolutely spot on.
Monetization is killing off OG players and sucking the wind out of the sails of new players. A recipe for disaster.
I played since the world release and the monetizarion makes me want to play less and less.
Helped by the fact that there is no regional pricing so in certain places almost every bundle is extremelly expensive
I started only doing my dailies and now I need to force myself to do even that because is just not that fun anymore for me
@@Elliecesa same
Nah this game is established and the whales are going to whale. The thing with these types of games is that statistics show it is only a small percentage of the player base that spends the lion's share of the money. They dont need to worry about free to play numbers as much as some games do because it's single player at this point so you don't need to have big numbers to support clans/alliances/guilds. As long as they can retain the majority of the top 5% spenders, then they can monetize the game on an increasing scale and continue to profit.
@@batmanwins5701How many of these types of games do you think are successful? Unless you work for SD, you really don’t know what you’re talking about
I'm a whale and I don't buy the bundles anymore. It was tolerable when we had Google pass coupons and the webstore tracks...
Alex, thank you so much for speaking out. For having the balls to speak out. Because others clearly have not.
Cozy, "Coming from sales I can tell you this..." cuts to RUclips ad, well played.
Manipulative is the absolute right word based on the actions of the collective actions of the developer and publisher.
It’s not manipulative but it is hard, cold, calculated commercialism. Neither are great and they need to change.
@@andbarker6218 use whatever words you want, it's manipulation lmao
I remember buying the Kai Lun Qu bundle by saving gold and I was so happy with the awesome variants and large amounts of credits which helped me progress a lot as I wasn’t series 3 complete at that time. But watching them no releasing gold bundles, hiding info about spotlights and bundles.
Becoming a problem? This question was prudent a year ago. Now it is a disaster.
The whales are finally waking up
To be fair to Cozy and Alex they have discussed this in the past when the Dark Hawk bundle landed. The situation has only got worse since.
18:12 - It's a good topic. The last months:
- 2/3 of the spotlight 4 series cards;
- offers for gold s*ck;
- new cards only 5 series;
- Collect 6000 tokens for 4-6 months.
Thank you Alex for speaking out for the f2p players. I, being one of them, am at the verge of quitting the game. Gold bundles are worsening every month. Plus just look at the way they released the cards in spotlight caches this month. Only one good card in every spotlight. So you might even need to spend 4 keys just to get that card that you like. The game is completely aligning towards p2w players. And that makes me sad... Coz I loved the game.
Mailbag: What would you do to Reserves to make them feel better?
I have a few things:
1. Remove gold tickets
2. Increase Token Rewards
3. Add back the chance of pulling S4/S5 cards from the new card reserve
4. Link the Avatars to the cards across the board, if you get a new variant or base card, you automatically get the avatar too
5. Put the titles somewhere else or make them all available.
Something y'all hit quick then kinda brushed by was an increase in monetization without an increase in features? We haven't had a new features since... albums? Then what before that?
Conquest, no? They talked about a lot of features I was ecstatic for that's yet to come. Card Mastery today would be fantastic.
Alex, a man of the people. Thanks for your voice in this community.
I love marvel snap, been playing about a year and it's become a legit hobby. It's discouraging to be someone who buys the season pass every month, plays regularly, buys the occasional bundle and still feel like it's impossible to keep up with the new cards. Cozy and Alex are totally right about Snap needing the monetization to succeed, but I feel like Snap should be a $10 month kind of game and instead it feels like I need to be spending $60 per month to be at all relevant. For a mobile card game I just feel like SD is asking way too much, having spent $120 on season pass alone, more than any other game I play, it baffles me how impossible it feels to increase my progression in game
I'm 💯 in agreement with Alex. I have 15k in gold and for what? Just purchasing variants? There's no value to that as far as maintaining your collection and keeping up with the new cards. So yeah...gold is pretty much a worthless currency (at least to me). Can only keep up now by purchasing credits and token bundles for real cash. And as someone else pointed out, you can get a lot more value (time and game quality) out of a full AAA game for less money than one of these recent bundles.
Really love this game and have enjoyed it for almost a year, but at this point, I'm considering moving on since it's really become too expensive to try to keep up.
Summed it up perfectly 💯such a fun game with great potential but the money hungry way of acquiring cards is getting so annoying.
You can literally buy credits with gold in the store, and credits = progression. It's beyond ridiculous to say your gold is _worthless_ because you can only buy credits with real cash when there's a whole section of the store for buying credits _WITH_ gold. You're sitting on almost 20,000 credits worth of gold, complaining about how you can't get progression - that's like 3-4 spotlight keys in a currency you're claiming is "useless", so use it!
I'm definitely not going defend SD's monetisation, but your own claim is simply not true and you're stating it as if it were a fact. By all means raise valid concerns with the monetisation (there are plenty) but in this instance claiming something as true which is provable false is not helping the anti-monetisation argument at all, it's just making gamers look like they have no clue what they're talking about.
The progression now is very slow with the credit, so his statement is quite true...
Alex, you’re the man. Thank you for the honest discussion about predatory monetization that’s killing this game. I want this game to succeed (and I want SD to make money), but there has to be a more ethical/less scummy way of going about it.
Also, crazily priced cosmetics wouldn’t be such an egregious subject if the game wasn’t missing so many core features. How can you charge $100 USD for a bundle when there’s still no discard/destroy pile and we still play on the stupid asteroid background?
I have stopped playing the game because monetization felt predatory and progression felt too slow and I couldn't have fun with experimenting because of the lack of cards I had. It also doesn't help that nerfs and balances are blatantly aimed at making new cards relevant and nerfing old cards. Since resources are so limited and so expensive, it feels disrespectful from SD to nerf cards just after making them available on spotlight caches (see Darkhawk, I didn't have time to play with the card because I was missing Rockslide). This disregard towards player's resource investment also made me drop. I have to say these few days I have just had my sensations confirmed: SD even saying that progression is too fast for their calculations. I am happy I dropped now before investing any more money in it, frankly.
I feel you!! I also dropped last week.
Fwiw they buff old cards more often than they nerf them.
Same thing with having Thanos in the Spotlight, then nerfing Lockjaw. It actually took me a lot longer than I wanted to get Lockjaw (I had almost the whole Hela package), and when I finally did, he was nerfed within the week. Literally less than a week to play with it. No way to focus the card to get it, to craft it, nothing. Had to wait it out, then finally get it randomly, then it gets nerfed. Sucks man.
It’s the reasonI quit a few months ago. I really love the game but the FOMO, predatory prices, nerfs and lack of communication drove me off. Still like hearing about the game but I feel that 3-5 new cards a month isn’t worth $20. Let alone the 100s on packs and other things. You get more cards for the same money with MTG and can sell them when you’re done.
@@Crucio78Lack of communication but they kinda listen and do what people asked for everyone 2-4 weeks?
This is a real issue for the majority of the fan base. Thank you for speaking up on it before it eliminates half of the players and we get stuck playing bots twice as much.
I know it's a mobile game but I can't rationalize how getting 2 or 3 cards for 100€ is the price of 2 or 3 full games AA games. Like for that price you can buy Palword, Helldivers 2 and Last Epoch. Or you could get Dragon's Dogma 2 and one of the three mentioned above. Mobile game pricing is not for common folks. It's for people for whom spending 100€ is a very small amount of their budget and I don't like it because it reminds me we're not equal. I know I could never buy a castle but I don't see it, in snap it's in my face. With all that said the game itself is still fun and I keep playing it 10-30min everyday and to be fair my rant applies to the whole mobile game industry not just snap, just sad they follow a similar path.
Well spending money on games in general is just for Temporary Pleasures it's a waste of money, most people who Spend money on games either know its a waste or Have some return in some way, either content creation or Whatever.
Helldivers is behind a 40$ Entrance Fee that is made to reimburse their cost of creation they don't have to make continued content to make a profit they just need to sell X amount.
Snap is a free Game thats needs to sell you something in order to Continue content And return on creation cost.
I think what's off putting is How rare a game like snap is, and the scary reality of what it could devolve into.
NGL Its a weird Space for Snap to be in where they have to make money because that's how you continue supporting the game, but how do you make people happy?
Problem is they can have 100 sales of $100 or 50,000 sales of $5.
Games developers are stupid now and Uber greedy they don’t see that. Hell fortnite and league are free and sell skins and have been around for years. There is 0 reason for for macro transactions!
@@Silversamuri876 so two of the HUGE game company with billions of dollars should set the standard and not the average?
Mind u both of those games thrive off micro transactions.
@@Synical02 exactly micro transactions. When the hell did gamers settle for 50 to 100 dollar offers that come daily to weekly. Next thing people will think it’s ok to pay 100 dollars a week to play a game.
Yeah, I love this game too Alex! But I just hate when games craves money from their players! That’s why I began playing this game so dang much! Bc I loved that it did not just needed to take money for you to progress in the game!
There were times in the past that I purchased a $ bundle because it had enough gold in it to also get a gold bundle that was available at the same time. It was a satisfying win win.
I can’t do that anymore.
@@Evilgreg2 yeah me too. I bought a $ bundle and then a gold bundle, and it felt like I didn’t even spend one dollar! Bc back then gold had value unlike today
Alex, thank you SO MUCH for speaking up for us. These subjects needed to be addressed from the platform of you and Cozy.
Second Dinner has tough decisions to make in navigating these monetizations, but they have to make progression better overall.
I appreciate Alex for just being a man of the people and having the conversation. He voiced his genuine points and concerns for the game, and I completely agree with it. The game is getting more expensive, it’s easy to see. Especially if you want the new card every week.
The downgrade of gold is a huge callout and needs to be examined..I also don’t want to use it just for a variant I don’t even like to get 3/12 on an album. It feels awful spending gold on stuff like that. And heaven forbid I get gold in the collection track.
The game is expensive and it’ll quickly turn away longtime players seeing the change, AND scare new players looking to get in.
Yes Cozy, the bad pricing does come off bad.
Finally, THE discussion. Seeing a lot of complaints and no ideas though. I feel like if you could pass on the varients for 1000 tokens, and getting a dupe card gave you 2k or 3k tokens, there would be at least somewhat of a guaranteed card progression.
Nothing is worse than being credit broke, getting all the way to one spotlight key for the week, and then getting a variant that you dont even want. Despite what everyone is saying, i feel like its not so bad for new players when you might actually have 3 cards to pull that you dont have, but when youre just pissing away credits to get nothing week after week, it does start to feel like a broken system.
Tried to post this comment and was broken hearted to see the comments turned off, and at first I was honestly disappointed, but after seeing your pinned comment, i totally understand, so thank you for that. MAN OF THE PEOPLE.
You are truly the voice of the masses, speaking for those who are not heard, Alex. Please don't ever stop speaking out and being honest, brother.
I missed a major thing in your monetisation discussion: I don't see what I'm paying for anymore (so Istopped paying a while ago). the game is getting buggier and slower with every update and literally every new "feature" that has come out in the past months is solely focused on generating revenue. albums, "for you" bundles, popular tags, increasingly expensive bundles with less and less value but no actual improvement for the playerbase.
Fr my game crashes pretty consistently now
Regarding monetization, here in Brazil, music plays in a different way. A bundle that in the United States or Canada costs 100 dollars, for us it costs R$499.90. Which for many is prohibitive. For my part, I can buy the premium every month and another bundle up to $25, maybe a little more when it is very interesting due to the change in currency. But I miss more bundles that can be purchased with Gold that I can plan ahead for. And even so, with this strategy and playing since the game's launch, today I have a collection in which I'm only missing 7 cards, which in terms of the metagame play very little, things like Hercules, Howard and Kang for example. Anyway, I think things can change in the game's monetization so that new players can have access to more cards in a simpler way.
Yeah the fact they don't change the pricing to fix the currency is probably the biggest issue not being talked about enough.
And consider yourself one of the top Brazilian spenders. Not many people gonna use 50 BRL monthly. It's half of the price of medium internet connection, for example. 5 months of Google Play Pass signature to play free games on Android. More than 1 month of Xbox Game Pass to play on PC or console. It's not healthy, in Brazil, to play at this cost
The best part of the conversation about the longevity of monetisation is that no one can pronounce either word.
In all seriousness, keep up the good work gents!
Clearly Cozy was uncomfortable with both monetization criticism and Pixie fair assessment. But everyone is entitled to have their own opinion. I just liked Alex's evaluation more.
I’m so glad you brought this up Alex. I love snap and I’ve been a free to play player since release, but I felt like I needed to buy the pass for February and March if I wanted to keep up with the game. I have nearly 10k gold saved from the past few months and nothing to spend them on. Even a bundle with cool variants and credits would make me happy, but it just feels like there’s nothing out there anymore.
Hopefully they release a solid progression bundle for gold. I think that would help.
@@AlexanderCocciaeven if they release the 5$ a month 1800 gold pass which kinda doubtful it'll only be 5$ but probably will be but even if they do that it still won't be nearly enough.
Spot on! if you don't buy the season pass you can't compete.
I’ll be the first one to say I HAVE ZERO PROBLEMS occasionally spending $100 in a mobile game that I genuinely love. But spending $100 every weekend is just absurd. The season pass, variants, and emotes should be the only thing monetized in this game. NOT progression!
Thank you Alex for having this tough discussion. It is evident that you are very passionate about this game and its community which is wonderful to see. You are a great speaker and brought up many valid points whilst remaining professional and encouraging positivity moving forward.
I am a f2p and for me, gold is worth nothing and I have a total of more than 22k gold saved up. On a similarly vein, I also have 195 collectors reserve unopened and your last video resonates strongly with me; I feel nothing opening these so why bother? I actually would appreciate if second dinner would open them up automatically for me so I don't need to waste time waiting for the loading.
All the best for your future videos and please continue to advocate for improving this game.
Lots of thanks for bringing up this topic and discussing about it, Alex and Cozy. It is really important I think, because a bad monetization can make people turn away from the game, or the new player to leave because it seems too expensive to them, and if the player base goes down, the games slowly die.
A problem I have, closely related to the monetization, is the spotlight cache / card acquisition system, especially for cards released in the past months. Every month, there is one new card added to pool 5 every week (given the last two months, it seems that the one new card per month added to pool 4 instead of pool 5 is over?) plus one (the season pass card). In the spotlight caches, the usual pattern is: the new card, one pool5 and one pool4 card (sometimes there are 2 pool4 - like with Mockingbird, or last month with Proxima and Supergiant; sometimes 2 pool5 - like with Corvus Glaive last month; but I’d say both are about as frequent and rules out each other), so one old pool 5 card per week in average. So, every month, there are more card added to the pool 5 than old pool 5 card that appeared in the spotlight rotation. And this is a problem: this means that the delay between a card release and its next appearance can only go up, and at this rate, this delay increases by one month every month…! Without series drop, it will be above 6 months at the end of march, at 7 months in April and so on. And as spotlight cache is the only ‘true’ way to acquire old pool 5 card (tokens take so much time to have enough for a pool 5 card), having to wait half a year or more for the reappearance of a card in the spotlight feels really bad. And this is not even accounting for the OTA/patch that can suddenly change a card usage.
I completely agree with Alex on this one. I'm fine with a bit of monetization here and there and I'd most definitely buy a 20$ bundle if it has a card I like, but the prices are getting out of hand way too fast while the F2P progress gets slowed down way too fast.
My issue is that i have to scroll past 5x real money offers on my screen. Not a single gold offer either.
Alex, you're and absolute MVP for bringing up this topic. Like you, many of us really enjoy this game and want to see it do well and tactics like this only make it harder for fans to support a product they love. Apart from this topic, its very important for a popular platform like this be a space where all sorts of conversations can be had and its great that the two of you are not shying away from calling out things that need to be called out. Keep up the awesome work guys!
Even in the realm of mobile gaming, Marvel Snap has a bizarre economy. Tokens and Gold exist as premium currencies for the purposes of card acquisition and cosmetics, with real money purchases being the "premium++" currency used for every bundle now. Despite Tokens and Gold, to be acquired in any significant quantity, also requiring real money purchases.
Why not convert everything into a singular premium currency? If SD believes players then have too much Gold, then the solution is to add more ways to spend it. Emotes, more cards, card backs, conquest tickets, Series 3 fast track bundles. Whatever it takes.
Great talk and discussion as always guys! While I agree that Pixie shouldn't be TOO predictable, that RNG chaos and all, she should be able to swap the bigger cost cards with lower ones, guaranteed. She's a series 5 card, Second Dinner, c'mon!? This could be as bad as a 2 cost swapping with a 1 cost, but it could be as good as a 6 cost swapping with a 1 cost. I feel like that's the buff that SD would do.
As for monetization, I agree the Demonized Shang-Chi bundle could've been a 7.5k or 8k gold bundle, but I firmly believe the game's NOT getting too monetized or P2W, cause it's all cosmetics. Coming from MtG Online & MtG Arena, Shadowverse, and your typical Japanese / Chinese gacha games, the spend-to-win-ness is not an option, it's a necessity.
But in lower ranks, it absolutely is P2W. I am of the opinion that if you do not own a card, you should not be able to buy a variant for it, because otherwise it circumvents natural progression. Back when I was in the 30-40 area a couple seasons back, the festival wong variant came out, and no one at that level could deal with him. Wong suddenly crashing into a series 1-2 meta is not fun. I'm sure that there was a similar effect when the nebula variant came out in december as well, although I'm much higher rank now. Overall, it's hard to see how this monetization style could be considered p2w from the top, but you have to think about the players that have barely any cards, and are getting thrust into situations where they have to contend with pre-nerf Ms. Marvel, or Wong.
I too notice the switching of gold to a more cosmetics resource as opposed to being able to hoard for bundles to get large bursts of progression , that, frankly didn't do much with the spotlight system. Now with caches being mostly boring I have, after not believing I would, been somewhat coerced into the album mechanism to get what rewards I can using gold on variants to get album rewards while also filling in the variant store punch card to get 2000 more credits every ten buys. 😐 I haven't done the math ,nor will I , but it feels like the game feels like buying stuff is fun and the more ways people have to buy stuff in different ways , how many shops do we have now?, and more often is even more enforced fun . Please stop I can only have so much fun 😐.
I still don't see why microtransactions aren't MICRO anymore. In any game. If the prices were lower, I would've bought a lot more season passes perhaps. Every bundle or something above €20 is crazy.
It's because people will shell out more if Devs charge more so there's no incentive for them to make "micro" microtransactions
Easier to convince 1 person to spend $100 rather than 100 people to spend $1. Its honestly not a bad model, the prices are so outrageous that there's no literally no incentive for me to spend lol
Sadly these companies aren't doing it on a whim, but it's backed by internal data.
We all assume that they'd make more by pricing it less, but if they see an increase in profits that's all the justification they need to continue in that direction. Really a sad thought when you realize that means those dissavowing these practices are a minority in the gaming space, because otherwise change would've been made years ago. We live in too much of a consumerist society for this to ever change in a widespread manner, and that can't be fixed in just the gaming space alone to stop it
@@mglikeabossplaysMC exactly this. The reality is, if everyone had bought the cheap bundles when they did them, we'd probably be seeing more cheap bundles, but a lot of the "I'd buy more stuff if it was cheap" crowd are just being disingenuous and provably didn't do so. The model might be awful, but these companies aren't dumb, they've honed the model to be as profitable as possible, they know for a _fact_ that expensive bundles make them more money than cheap bundles. No amount of gamer feelings are going to trump those facts.
@@TheDelinear Not necessarily the conclusion I would arrive at. The point is, people WERE buying the cheap bundles, so much so that they raised the prices and saw that people continued to buy them. So those wanting cheaper bundles aren't in the wrong, I'm just pointing out that Second Dinner doesn't make these choices without coming out on top. They have to be making a great deal of money compared to previous bundle pricing because even with the outcry of content creators they still push it
For the Mailbag: I was bored so I went back and watched an old episode from December 2022, which was very interesting to hear what the game was like back then. Alex mentioned Iceman was a card that was really bothering him at the time. What other cards in the history of snap have been a menace but never actually saw a balance change?
I just came back to the game after a 10 month hiatus and I foolishy spent big on some bundles only to then realize that they've nerfed collectors reserves to the ground. We get tickets that are being converted to BOOSTERS???
Yes, I had a decent chunk of spotlight keys because of it BUT I neeeded to invest 8 keys in order to get Corvus and Pixie ( I regret pixie a lot!).
It's impossible to keep up with new releases in the current system and as we barely get any tokens acquiring new cards is way too random.
I keep up with new releases fine only buying the season pass. Have you tried High Evolutionary Pixie?
@@Ryuuk00 I think that only applies to players who play consistently since beta
I find it funny that so few people are complaining about the gold tickets. Remember back when you could straight up get boosters from collector's reserves and people _hated_ it? And yet now, for many of us, gold tickets just = boosters. They told us they were removing boosters from reserves because it wasn't rewarding, and then they found a way to stealthily add boosters back into reserves. I hate it so much.
Having said that, if conquest wasn't such a grind fest slog, I would be fine with tickets. If I didn't have to invest over an hour for a single gold ticket (just to lose to RNG or a bad deck matchup on the last battle), then I'd be fine with the tickets, but right now I play conquest pretty casually and I still get enough medals to buy the shop out and have 30 - 40 silver and 10-20 gold tickets left over every season.
I made a decision a couple of months ago that i was not going to spend more than the season pass on Marvel Snap. Also i decided to stop chasing infinite ( ive grinded for infinite every season since Modok). Its definitely been a better experience for me personally just playing for fun and not making this game a second job.
F2P player that recently came back from months away from the game. I'm averaging about 1 key every week or so, to do things the smart way, I need to make sure I have to have 4 keys when a certain card I like comes out. So, I'm looking at month of playing for maybe spending keys to get a card? What happens on months where cards I'm on iffy on? What about all the cards that came out that I'm missing? 100 tokens here and there? I'm well aware of the limitations of a f2p player, ( did the clash of clans and royale games), I'm just trying to rationalize grinding in a game that doesn't really reward grinding. Just not seeing it.
snap doesn't reward grinding. it demands it.
Most people are not seeing it. Its great for newer players because they can basically just blindly throw down a key a week and get a new card. But the more your collection gets filled... the less valuable those spotlights become. I basically skipped spotlights all last month in anticipation for the cards this month. Meanwhile the tokens are so slow going that you can't guarantee a card unless grind for 2 months.
No matter what, Alex and Cozy are my goats. Thank you for fostering such a great community
Alex is right. Particularly about the datamine stuff. SD should take a hint from the community and give more advanced notice about upcoming bundles. Officially! The reason we are interested in datamines is to plan to spend our currency - and then spend it! It would be better for the players, and for SD to plan ahead more and just stick to the plan. Cozy - saying that they are looking month to month like "what should we do with this bundle? This cache? This release?" based on their projected income or something is just bad business. If that's the case, they need to plan ahead more. And certainly, they do! Didn't they say it takes 3 months to develop a new card? They are capable of planning series drops, bundles, and whatever else, and letting us know, and getting us hyped for it. They're just dropping the ball in this area, and Alex is rightly pointing it out.
Good job as always guys. Love the podcast!
Their main monetization strategy is absolutely impulse buying and fear of loss.
Telling you stuff ahead of time doesn't allow them to scare you into buying a bundle or risk missing out.
The value of gold has actually changed how i feel about the season pass. I had bought every one since launch until skaar. Ive skipped the last 3. I dont believe they are an auto purchase anymore. To get max value from spotlights you need multiple unowned cards in the pool and unknown slot. So the one thing i thought was worth it in snap i no longer buy. second dinner doesnt care about my 10 dollars a month because whales are the ones who fund these games and thats what the new money bundles reflect.
If you don't buy the season pass then who knows when you'll get that card. You're not getting enough tokens to get it and more than likely you're not getting it in a spotlight. So then it becomes ten bucks a month just to stay meta relevant. And you could argue the cards aren't meta but, M.O.D.O.K, Surfer, Phoenix, Zabu, Nimrod, MS. Marvel, Loki, Elsa, Black Panther, Hope.... These are all cards you find in the best decks on the regular. And Baron Next month is going to be a winner as well. To me that's pay to win. And you get gold for variants on top of it all.
Yeah but I don’t fear not having a card. If it’s too good it gets nerfed anyways. It was second dinners vision ppl can’t get full collections so I’ve decided to not fight that anymore and engage the system as they intended lol.
This is a conversation that needed to happen, and its sad to see the game just slowly burning into the ground. Respect the passion we all have for this game, hopefully change comes asap 💯
Solid talk. Alex is a man of the people and making very legit points. I enjoy the game even though now I only touch it to completely dailys then close out of it. Hopefully some better changes can be done.
good talk Alex , well said , your opinion will come to light very soon , alot of people will soon start dipping as it continues
One of the things I really liked about Snap's currencies was that while Gold was a premium currency that you paid for, you used to still be able to earn enough to (fairly) consistently USE the gold while still remaining F2P (or by buying the season pass).
That's simply not a thing anymore and it's just like every other mobile game now, where you get truck loads of the basic currency that does very little, and very little of the premium currency that you almost never get to use, cuz you need to hoard large amounts/stay in fomo
I agree with Alex on his views about monetization in Snap. It's such a great card game and needs to be more accessible so more players can be competitive.
Alex was fired up this episode!
Love that he's really speaking up for the players
Alexander Coccia, a true man of the people🙏👏👏. Your voice is appreciated.
Well said about usage of gold being shift to variants only. I think that's really key.
Thank you Alex! A shop bundle for 1 card and credits/gold being priced close to the cost of weekly groceries for 1 person is insane.
I've been playing for about 6 months, decided to call it quits a few weeks ago. It's not only the fact that there are too many cards to keep up with, it's that you can't even safely invest as any card that looks good will probably be nerfed in the future
Really appreciate the topic & argument of the gold value reduction was made. Especially when creators could face backlash from Second Dinner. Thanks Alex!
The aggressive monetisation as of late has put me off the game, seeing a £100 "for you" Wasp bundle legit made me sick. I've spent a lot of money on the game because I love it, but they're losing me with their greed. Everyone hates the direction that they're going in, and they need to be called out for it. Like you I want to enjoy Snap for years, but I can honestly see it being an expensive, distant memory in a year's time.
Cozy's comment about not needing to spend money to have fun was so tone deaf, I'd like to see him start a new F2P account and see how much fun he's having in a month or two. And if he doesn't want to be called a shill he needs to stop acting like he's bought and paid for. He's a great guy, but he obviously has a conflict of interest when it comes to Second Dinner.
Re: monetization, I completely agree that my main complaint point is the hostility toward planning and calendars. I agree that even just the current month would be enough. What's happening in March released on March 1st. If I can't plan, I won't spend. I'm allergic to FOMO tactics and to me that is definitionally "manipulative".
Monetisation is a joke. Some simple things SD could do to make the experience fairer:
1: let people choose their spotlight reward. Some weeks I just want the new card. Some weeks I don’t want the card but I want a variant. Just let us choose.
2: make the climb more rewarding. Gold collectors should contain variants and tokens. Credits to be gained through weekend missions and playing. Boosters as it is.
3: reduce costs of bundles/variants.
Hey guys, just figured I would give my 2 cents about the Gold subject. I am at collection level 2k and for me the variants still have insane value to me. I am constantly unlocking new meta cards and for me finding new variants is a big part of the game for me! Hope this helps! Thanks for the content!
It's impossible to keep up with new cards every single week, I know I could just skip cards but damn knowing you can't have complete collection as f2p no matter how much you play sucks
I’m not even f2p and I’ll never have a complete collection lol
I think the same. There should be another way to get tier 4-5 cards. I get frustrated that I don't have all the cards and I've been playing for approximately 7 months, I don't want to imagine someone starting to play this now. Either they should lower the cards from tier 4 to 3 faster or add a way to get tokens to unlock cards.
What's your cl? I have every card but one that has come out since the move to Spotlight Caches.
@DariusVincentHughes the game when first released was great and progression on the CL gave great rewards where you could easily get gold and tokens for cards plus series 3 cards only cost 1000 tokens. It was so easy to complete series 3.
Im collectionlevel 7k and still miss 20 cards, while also been sending around 200$ on this game, played for 1,5 years, a year ago it was much easier to catch up, now it's impossible if you don't put your whole salary on this game, they need to stop being greedy or ill give this game up
Mailbox: Personally you should have been able to change the color of their names on the cards. It defeats the purpose of changing the border to any color other then the name on the card. Call it OCD but it looks whack 99% of the time as they based the colors 99% of the time on each of these borders. And not sure why everyone likes to destroy the background art especially foil . You really take away the moment the art of the character was captured in. Also, you should be able to choose more than 1 variant at a time that will randomly be added to your decks.
All my friends who used to play have all stopped due to monetization issues. Such a bummer. I totally get they need to make money, but it definitely doesn't feel good right now. Every new move feels they're just digging for more and more out of their players.
I'm the only one of my friends who still plays too :(
Same. Shame as the mechanics are very fun and the effects are great. Bit grindy.
Alex=man of the people!
As a casual player who buys the season pass each month, my gold goes towards the Tuesday bundle to get some token... And that's boring but otherwise I just can't keep up with some of the key cards I can buy from time to time with tokens.
It's not an exciting way to spend gold for sure...
It is actually amazing to see how Cozy is squirming and dancing around the theme.
Mr. Coccia, you have my resprct, sub and like. Stay true.
I love Cozy, but I don't get how he can objectively say he "hasn't ever felt he has to spend money to have fun..."
well of course not, he already is spending tons of money, so he's not going to see it from that perspective. If he isn't spending money then SD is giving him tons of free shit, either way he wouldn't even know if the game is fun or not without spending money.
thank you Alex for saying what needed to be said.
I feel like the next patch will be really make or break. Series 5 is way to big we already need another series drop and if they hide the new cards we are getting into gacha levels of fomo tactics.
I been playing marvel snap since day 1 and I wanna start by saying thank you to both of you for stepping up and bringing attention to the monetization in this game. I agree with everything you said Alex, but I would like to add that the collectors reserves are terrible now. I am someone who has been saving up my reserves and was happy that I did when the series drop happened, but now I am hesitant to open my reserves because of what you said on your pack opening stream. Players are given too many gold tickets and not nearly enough collectors tokens. I saved up 6000 tokens to buy Thanos for over 6 months, and now that was before the token nerf. Make the rewards better so players who have packs saved up are incentivized to open them and not keep hoarding them. Sorry for the rant I just been frustrated by this and also happy that you two have spoke about this glaring issue
I am an active FTP player, but don’t focus much on good other than to buy variants (I like pretty things, what can I say?), so I generally stay out of monetization discussions. But this week was the first week that I’ve actually felt affected, and the reason might not be what you think. I have been saving Spotlight Keys for about 4 weeks now (ever since Cull) for the Mockingbird/Ms. Marvel cache, only for them to significantly worsen the cache AFTER their monthly hype video. I agree with Cozy’s point about datamines taking away from the marketing team, but when they make changes even after the marketing announcements, it feels VERY scummy even though I’m sure that’s not their intention. That’s been the biggest annoyance for me personally. Anyway, love the content from both of you!
I agree with the many comments on the cost for a single bundle in comparison to AAA games. I have teetered on the border of do I stop playing or not. So far I continue to enjoy it, however I feel the value for money is not compelling.
How can a content creator who is a whale ever say i don't think the game requires you to spend money ???
At the very least be honest and say I'm not sure.
while it’s true there’s not an energy limit or anything, it feels a little pointless sometimes to play if I’ve complete all missions and can’t really earn much more, especially later in the season
Alex about the Gold, I have 7k as a f2p and there is nothing I can do with it, I want to play new cards, I have been playing the same 3 decks for 2 3 months now man. The shield said he is getting to play a good game, its not when you play the same deck for a month.
I'm so happy these come out as early as they do. Love having something to watch on them Monday morning slogs through work.
Love the podcast guys. Respect to you both, you guys are my buddies on my morning commute every Monday morning!
Mailbag question: what, if any, tournaments do you guys like to enter? Any to shout out, either to enter or streams to watch?
This was such a refreshing honest conversation. When I voice these concerns people just tell me I’m complaining and I begin to wonder if they were even valid originally
It sounds to me like consistency is key here. Instead of random bundles at random prices, what can be consistent pricing? There's the monthly season pass cost which remains the same. Similarly can there be consistent types of bundles each month for players to budget for / expect?
Thank you for speaking out. The core game is easily transferrable if any other game company wants to give it a go, and it's possible that this iteration of it is just not the version that succeeds until your retirement.
Second Dinner spent a fortune licensing MARVEL and for the beautiful 3D art on cards, and they most definitely have to make that money back, especially since they are now leveraged on serious VC money. So, I am not sure we will see the game ever becoming affordable like it was a year ago. I suspect it will continue to become more and more expensive and players will slowly coalesce into making unhealthy purchases (being whales, when they really can't afford to be whales), and die hard fans who cannot stop playing for fear that if they stop, they won't be able to afford to catch back up. Until there's a breaking point, and either not enough people play to keep the bots away, or SD themselves do not see it as a revenue generating game and move on to other projects.
Also, something else I agree with you on Alex, the core philosophy the founders design for, seems quite at odds with the way people actually interact with the game. There are a set of cards you need to even enjoy playing the game, or you get bored with the ones you have, or worse you get stuck on the ladder system. Only the most competitive players will continue to push through the pain to climb, and they are the players who want the best cards. Yet, the SD philosophy dictates players should not be collection complete, and decks should remain random.
Anyway, I'll end my thoughts here, by saying, the biggest problem with the game is that I am not sure the actual game mechanics are aligned with the acquisition system in any realistic way. The two remain at odds with each other, and SD doesn't seem interested in solving it. It's like Cozy hinted it, SD is all "focus on generating profit that would make the VC happy and then we can fix the cohesion part later."
Alex was cooking! To be honest I’m sitting on 15k gold and have been unwilling to spend because of the lack of gold bundles with worth while progression. I think we’ve seen 3 $100 bundles in a 4 week period all with gold to entice us when they’re making gold feel useless.
Another issue I have is how often the Random S4/5 card in spotlight caches hits a duplicate that only gives 1k tokens essentially wasting a spot light key that their monetization has valued at around $30-$40. It feels horrible losing a spotlight key to get 1k tokens in return especially when there’s so many S5 cards coming out that cost 6k tokens. The token rebate for weekend missions consistently being 200 when silk was a 1000 token rebate is rough.
Also get gold tickets out of reserves. I have over 100 reserves I don’t even open because I don’t want to get a bunch of tickets that will go to waste in one season so I’m piece meal opening a few every month. Just give me double the tokens to increase card acquisition agency as a player if you can’t think of a better reward.
Plus the lack of planning sucks now man, this one I do blame the community for they complained whenever a spotlight week changed a card and they complained if bundles changed no matter how good or bad when all that information was always prefaced with the text “Subject to change”. But at the very least the leaks served as a guiding light to maximize our resources. But regardless the vocal minority on social media made SD react and now the silent majority who just played and planned peacefully lost a valuable resource.
I still enjoy the game it’s become part of my routine but I find myself playing less and less each season because I can’t keep up. I’ve gotten 3 new cards since January; caiera, super giant and pixie a pretty slow cadence. And I can only imagine that a month like this with all potentially great cards that inability to keep up will be felt and frustrate alot of people now more than previous seasons.
Having recently posted on Reddit asking the community what their biggest frustration with the game was currently, I can say for certain majority of the comments were ab the state of monetization. It’s just sad to me for a game I’ve been playing since launch. This video NEEDS to be seen by the eyes of those at SD. Thanks for posting this video Alex!
Great points by you both. There is the game and the systems surrounding it. I love the GAME. It’s those systems I’m growing concerned with. I tend to agree with Alex’s points about monetization. The decrease in transparency compounds my concerns. I’m hardly spending gold now. My trust is on edge. As a result, I no longer purchase anything with real money beyond the season pass. If my wallet continues to feel like a mark for Second Dinner that will stop, too. There is hope. All my available digits are crossed that we’ll be happily surprised.
Just wanted to say shout out cozy for handling the conversation gracefully i'm sure it wasn't the easiest one to have and shout out alex for being able to voice his opinion as well. love u guys both ur the reason i still play the game
Alex keep speaking the truth this is why you’re the best content creator on RUclips. Keep it up brother!!!
It is very obvious to me as a F2P player, that Snap (the higher ups or whoever) do not want people to play this game for free, yes you can play it for free however long you want, but they are making every decision to put F2P players in a chokehold, its very VERY obvious to us
From actively getting rid of datamines, to making collectors tokens borderline non existent, now they are doing the same thing with Gold, they even put a cap on how many credits you can hold and I cant help but see that as "whoa hey there fella we dont like you saving your resources like this you need to spend it"
And dont even get me started on Albums, a feature exclusively meant for paying players
To put it into better perspective, I had to save gold for 3+ months to get a bundle back in november, and that was barely worth it. Since then I havent seen a gold bundle even worth looking at, I genuinely think its more worth my time and will be more fun at this point to just spend the gold I get on the overpriced variant shop, cuz at least then I can sorta crawl my way to completing an album maybe hopefully
Tried to be constructive but this has been happening for months now and it just feels like its getting worse and worse
It's funny that your comment about it being obvious to F2P players that they are in a chokehold expected to spend money to have fun is right next to @rensan1287's comment saying they're F2P, have never spent money or felt the need to spend money, and is having fun with the game. Clearly you are both engaging with the game in different ways, and one of those, the one who isn't getting mad about FOMO trash like albums, seems healthier than the other.
I'm fine with gold being used for only variants. I would say a good balance would be for variants to cost 500G for a Rare and 1000G for a Super Rare?
i'll never forget that collector bundle costing 500R$ here, not just counting the fact that every season pass costs 50R$..
If that were the case here i could not afford to play this game. The season pass is kind of expensive for me...but 50$, i could almost buy an almost nee ps5 game every month. Or pay for xbox gamepass and still have money for a nice dinner
@@eneeaflutur4096 it's sad, even that bad shang bundle is about 600$+ which is way too much here, with that much i could literally buy any game or have home supplies for months
I saw the thread on Reddit about this video and I just came here to say thank you Alex for bringing this view and supporting F2P player's experience. You are the man!!
Ive been playing since release day and buy all the season passes plus about 20ish a month on bundles. Used to be more when the bundles felt fairer. I also get most twitxh drops and never miss a daily mission and i feel like i can only just maintain a collection. God knows how new players can ever catch up
Thank you guys for talking about the monetization. I’ve been playing since the release of the game and have noticed how much harder it is to be free to play then it was before. I understand they need to make money but I wish they would reward these people who log in every single day to complete missions and enjoy the game.
Snap is the best and I wish my friends could join up and want to stay but unfortunately they get overwhelmed when they meet thanos 😂
Also Spotlight caches was the sneakiest way to slow people down
Personally I’d say RNG is becoming the biggest problem in Marvel Snap.
If they are making money with the bundles they ate releasing, all the power to them.