Who is out here paying $8 for ONE coating (Deepcore Red) and $6 for another (Aureate Noon)? You’re getting ripped off if you buy this stuff man, if people would start using that pink mushy thing in their skull they would realize this.
Take the weekly armor sets currently being sold, they’re $12 usually for 9 items. Meanwhile, we have the battle pass, $10 for +/-93 items excluding XP and challenge swaps. Do you guys see what I’m trying to say? The armor bundles should, at most, be $2 based on what 343 values the battle pass.
They’re charging you guys up to 10x the amount they believe the items are worth and people are actually buying it for some reason. They have one heck of a RoI on the store items, and unless people stop buying they’re not going to lower them to a fair value.
I have no problem paying $8 to $10 for a coating I really like and will actually wear. No problem at all.
Once you divide the dollars by hours you can make it worthwhile.
But in terms of just collecting the coating for the sake of it. To complete a collection - without intent to actually wear it - then, yes, it’s too expensive.
I’m just spit-balling here, but with my limited knowledge of how coatings work, they are nowhere near worth that much money. This post definitely over-simplifies things, but it furthers my point that coatings are extremely over-priced
If you’ve ever played Anthem and messed with it’s armor customization, it works very similar to how coatings work, but leaving the power to choose everything to the player. This is oversimplifying it a little for the sake of brevity, but all they have to do is choose from a pool of patterns and materials that have been made and stick a color on them and assign them to a “layer” of the weapon/armor. It took like 5-10 minutes in Anthem to get a good look, so it probably takes them no more than 1 hour to make a coating.
Now I don’t know how much a dev makes hourly, but it’s probably somewhere around $20-$30. Given that and the time spent making a coating, a fair RoI is 20%, meaning they need to aim to make $24-$36 on that coating to make a profit. Since this is a digital item it only needs to be made a total of one time, meaning it’s true value is probably like 5 cents when you account for the amount of people that would more than likely pay for it at that price.
At 5 cents you’d only need 480-720 people to purchase it to make a fair profit on my assumed hourly pay and time to make, which very well could be wrong, but I think it’s in the ballpark. Let’s be honest here, at 5 cents per coating 10s of thousands of people would be purchasing them, meaning they’d be making well over the cost to make them, that is if only one person is assigned to a coating.
I honestly wish 343 would just do what Anthem did, but I’m sure Microsoft won’t let them, because there are people out there that don’t care about the value of the items they are purchasing, that Microsoft is making huge RoI on.