Sure, but the reason your tub of butter costs more is because of the increase in delivery costs, primarily. Fuel prices and supply chain disruptions are the major causes of inflation at the moment.
CCP, on the other hand, doesn’t have an increase in delivery costs. Yes, energy prices in the UK are spiking, but most of the costs associated with delivery of a digital service have been steadily dropping, for years. And while the email and devblog imply the biggest factors are costs incurred, CCP Paragon explicitly stated in his Q&A that the ‘primary reason’ for the price hike… is that CCP’s Russian customers can’t pay, at the moment. Which is a massive problem for the ‘stuff costs more’ defense… because ‘stuff costs more’ apparently isn’t CCP’s issue. CCP’s issue is ‘We don’t have enough customers around the world to absorb the loss of 2 countries’—and their response is a move that will only reduce the number of customers they do have.
Now, set aside the issue of ‘should we subsidize the Russians?’ That inevitably leads to pointing fingers in ways that don’t help anyone. Instead, let me simply redirect that chain into this:
If Paragon’s correct, why is CCP lying to us in the devblog/email?
If Paragon’s wrong (and I doubt he is), why is CCP lying to us in a Q&A?
In either case, why should we be charitable in what we expect for our subscription fee, if they’re going to be lying to us?
But to more directly address the issue of ‘why should customers expect new and/or improved content with a change in price?’, I’d say rather that that’s a misunderstanding of the objection.
It’s not that customers should expect new and/or improved content with a change in price, but that customers expect new and/or improved content regardless, as part of the subscription model. One of the justifications for the subscription model is continued development of the product, which means periodic improvements and expansion. In the eyes of many of their customers, CCP has not delivered on that—they have not provided actual improved gameplay, merely hampered pre-existing gameplay, and then claimed ‘improvement’ when they have partially mitigated some aspects of the deterioration they themselves inflicted upon their service.
The comparison in your analogy would be if your local dairy took the butter you had been buying, and introduced just the tiniest amount of rancid egg yolk, then tried to claim a ‘new and improved’ version ‘now with 50% less rancid egg yolk’… and then used that as the justification for raising the prices.
Had CCP not spent over 2 years actively destroying the viability of a number of the styles of gameplay their customers enjoyed, this price increase would likely not be receiving as negative a response as it is. Had they taken 18-24 months to introduce a number of smaller increases, like $1-2, they’d probably have been just fine.
Instead… as you’ve said, they have not handled this well. Even Paragon admitted ‘the optics here are horrible’. But he’s not helping the optics any with his answers. There were a lot of questions that got answered with ‘wait for Fanfest, it will be that cool’ where that response was simply not appropriate. Answering with ‘I hear you, and I’ll try to get answers for that over the weekend and on Monday, and get back to you’ would have been worlds better.
When someone says ‘my budget doesn’t let me afford this with the number of accounts I have’, telling them that Fanfest will be so cool that it will literally change their financial situation (because that’s what you’re doing when you say ‘I hear you, but wait for Fanfest, I swear’) is just… tone-deaf, at best.
I don’t understand why they announced this now. The question was asked why they didn’t announce this at FF along with the new content that is supposed to justify the increase, and the response was that it would be cowardly. Consider that. Dropping the announcement at 4:40pm local time, right before everyone leaves for the weekend, that’s fine… but telling customers to their faces is cowardly?
Is that kind of answer supposed to just make people madder? And why would you want to make your customers mad right before FF? Why would you want them walking in already pissed off?
