Reasoning Behind Item Pricing Changes

[SDGNelson]

I’ve recently answered some support/email questions about why the item prices were increased and had been thinking it would be good to post about it here, too.

I should note I don’t know much about business or analyzing sales. I feel guilty when working on the monetization-related features, as I’ve always tried to make the game as free-to-play as possible, and don’t want to be a monetization-focused developer.

As a kid, I wanted items in TF2, but they were generally more expensive than I could afford. I believe that was my main thought behind the initial ~$1 per item pricing. Unfortunately, as with most games, the sales/revenue of Unturned has gradually decreased over time, and I wanted to experiment for the sake of the game and developers’ longer-term financial stability.

Steam clearly knows a lot about selling games, and they heavily promote their sale events. I see a lot of sentiments online from people thinking fondly of “the good ol’ days” when Steam sales had deeper discounts. As a customer it does feel nice to purchase something on sale - it seemed to me like it’s beneficial on both sides and we should learn something from this.

For a long time I’ve wanted to steer away from selling random items, especially considering the controversy around them. There is, admittedly, still a lot of interest in them, hence the Combo Crate event. My hope was the new ~50% discounts on bundles would help increase interest towards bundles instead of boxes, as previously they’d been relatively unpopular. You can get the complete set of items in the box for half the price! This does seem to have been the case during sale events.

Considering there were a lot more players during the covid era and we implemented this change along with the in-game stockpile during that period it’s hard to say for sure, but I think it’s been a net positive when comparing with e.g. 2018-2019.

I’m not sure whether I would do it again. It seems like pandora’s box to me, and once it was started it’d spark equal controversy to revert it - especially after two years now.

One criticism of the original change was lack of communication ahead of time, which is why I mentioned the price equalization a few weeks ahead in the update post.

[SDGNelson]

Of course, immediately after I posted, I remembered YouTube recommended this video to me recently. I love Factorio, and listening to the video I think there’s something honorable about the idea of never going on sale - being completely upfront about “this is always the price” instead of “the real price is the discounted price.” (The increasing price over time aspect N/A here.) I think the equivalent would be if Unturned’s item price were consistent $1/item with no sales. Just was on my mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TP5-pfBmZss

[Dug]

I was going to write a longer response but I’m gonna try to keep it short.

You need to seek education when it comes to business and working with sales data if you are going to make sweeping financial choices that not only effect your games virtual marketplace, but the income of multiple people that work on your game, especially when these come with almost zero warning, the increased prices are anti consumer and short sighted, you have been told this multiple times by your community, I have not seen a single person say something positive about the price increase.

The drop in sales isn’t going to be remedied by increasing the prices of items while the quality remains roughly the same, it is a reflection of the games performance due to a multitude of factors, and I believe things like better advertising, collaborating with more games and having a more robust curated system wouldn’t hurt, currently when you look up “Unturned Trailer” on YouTube the first result is the console trailer

[Whupps]

I understand the logic behind both increased prices to counter decreased sales and fixed pricing as to be more transparent with the consumer, but I’m not confident that these changes are sustainable given the drastic increase in prices. There is also quite a bit of merit to what Dug stated about the quality of stockpile items; no disrespect to any stockpile contributors, but many of the items on the stockpile simply do not appeal to the average unturned player, who is likely searching for cosmetics that are cheap and provide an in-game advantage, which, frankly, are two factors that are absent from many stockpile bundles (esepcially with the recent price changes).

If you happen to be looking for community insight, I would personally consider accepting more militaristic/“hardcore” styled bundles into the stockpile; other members of the community are much more qualified to discuss and offer reccomendations in regard to pricing changes, but, as a player myself, I can at the very least attest to the fact that, while often repetitive and not necessarily what you may be looking to accept into the stockpile, military bundles are reliably popular. Even bundles that don’t necessarily have “sought after” cosmetics but do have weapon skins that intrigue players (bundles like the RULA set and California sets) do quite well.

[CPL]

I fully agree with what Dug’s saying here.

The drop in sales is not because of anything that could be fixed purely by changing the price. It’s because the new player count has stagnated. The last trailer for the actual game was made like 7 years ago and the only advertising people do for curated maps is aimed towards people who already play. We are continually losing players without a solid source of newbies.

Something needs to change before it gets past the point of no return. Whether it be more advertising, more curated maps, or whatever you want. We just need more people to see the game

[danaby2]

Just thought i’d share some rough numbers to put these changes into perspective, as someone who has a variety of items in the game. The following numbers take into account a variety of items that used ‘old’ pricing beforehand, and were recently updated to use ‘new’ pricing.

Revenue decrease:

-Daily average revenue decrease from October 2024 to November 2024: -51%
-Daily average revenue decrease from October 2024 to December 2024: -60%

Further observations:

-This change seems to be disfavorable to worse performing items, as their relative decrease in sales has been greater than that of items that performed well before the change.
-Both boxes and bundles have suffered a similar decrease in sales.

Note:

-These changes happened part-way into november (Nov 5th), so the data for that month is slightly more favorable.
-While we do only have ~40 days of data to work with at this point, there is a clear trend visible.

Thoughts:

I’ve voiced my criticism of this change ever since the A6 Polaris box 2 years ago & it’s a shame this was ever applied retroactively. I have no hope for any positive change at this point so I’ll keep it brief:

-This change does not seem to benefit players (no increase in bundle quality)
-This change comes amidst a global recesssion, hurting both creators and players
-Even before being applied retroactively, ‘new’ pricing already seemed disfavorable to less desirable item/bundle themes. This is compounded, with the reluctance to accept widely appealing cosmetics (e.g. military theme).
-Unturned items are just, not worth $1.50. Looking at the dango, elver, elver 2, arid, escalation, easter island and buak cosmetic items: only 3 cosmetic items are currently worth over $1.50, those being the Heavy Impact Vest, Combat Medic Rig and Tribal Markings. Notice a trend with these items, perhaps related to the above point? Furthermore: in my experience trading, bundle items (especially shirts/pants) seem to be valued way less than other items.
-This change does not seem to benefit any creators (revenue decrease mentioned above, why did nobody get a say in this?)
-The increase during covid would’ve happened regardless of price changes, naturally brought about by a higher player count
-This change does not take into account Unturned’s main playerbase, a lot of players come from countries that don’t have western salaries:
->According to battlemetrics: even at midnight local time on a weekday, there are more Russian players on servers vs any other country
->When discussing this change with players, one person brought up to me how, with new pricing, a bundle is 1/9th of their monthly salary.

Conclusion:

This change seems to have done the exact opposite of what was intended. Items are more inaccessible to players than ever, revenue has gone down, and the interest in boxes compared to bundles has stayed roughly the same.

Data:

All data here is sufficiently anonymised as to not break steam ToS by revealing any specific sales figures.

The aforementioned data does not disclose number of units sold, contributor splits, nor anything that can be used to calculate those values.

[Avalanche_A]

Tl;dr for anyone who has a short attention span: Nelson shoots at his own foot and he should stop this

[SDGNelson]

Due to popular demand: If this form receives more than 1,000 responses with at least a 95% “YES” vote, I will release the new items at the old prices and discount all items (including boxes) to the old prices for the winter sale.

If you know anyone in the Unturned trading community who might want to weigh in, sharing this form would be greatly appreciated!

Unturned Winter 2024 Discount?

[TSB]

I guess this is the best poll I’ve ever seen in 2024

[kvc.6]

@danaby2

-This change does not take into account Unturned’s main playerbase, a lot of players come from countries that don’t have western salaries:
->According to battlemetrics: even at midnight local time on a weekday, there are more Russian players on servers vs any other country
->When discussing this change with players, one person brought up to me how, with new pricing, a bundle is 1/9th of their monthly salary.

This is a really good point. I don’t know what tools steam gives devs for stuff like the stockpile, but I do know that regional pricing for game sales does exist. Maybe for bundles specifically, regional pricing may be worth thinking about.

[Gioni_Drip]

Just look at how much these things cost… Some indie games cost this much…

[DerEnte]

@SDGNelson

If this form receives more than 1,000 responses with at least a 95% “YES” vote

Nelson I love you and all but come on, these are somewhat unrealistic expectations.

[TSB]

I think to get 1000 responses is hard… especially for nowadays activity.

[FlodotelitoKifo]

logging back on my forums account for the first time in ages to vouch for regional pricing in items:

as a Brazilian, the Brazilian Real (BRL) has been getting devalued a lot these past few years, for example as of writing the USD to BRL conversion rate is around 1 USD → 6,30 BRL. It makes paying for any product being charged in USD a lot more expensive in general, sometimes prohibitively so.

For example, this is what some items are priced at right now in BRL:

Paying 121 reais on a bundle nowadays is simply outrageous… Can you imagine asking your mom for 121 dollars for like 20 items in a game?

And like the other guy said, you can buy other indie games cheaper than some bundles:

why would you wanna buy a map’s curated bundle when you can buy a whole game for the same price, if not cheaper? And this is disregarding sales. I bought A Hat in Time for 50 reais iirc, but I would not spend that much on a single Unturned bundle (no offense).

There’s a short from Heartbound’s developer about this:

Piracy

And this is because I only talked about my case as a brazilian, I can see people in i.e. Russia, Poland, and the rest of LATAM going through this too. I think it’d be a win-win situation for everyone if prices were lowered for these countries since it’d get more people to spend money in Unturned, and in turn hopefully generate more revenue for Nelson and the devs who made the items.

tl;dr: I think it’s a really good idea to consider regional pricing, no one wants to buy a game cosmetic that sometimes costs as much as groceries.

[danaby2]

good news guys

it’ll be interesting to do another analysis on this sale after it finishes.

[Michael1]

I’m sorry, 400 materials for a chance at a cosmetic (that aren’t even that good btw)
this is insane.

[MoltonMontro]

@Michael1

400 materials for a chance at a cosmetic

This is for all items. There is no RNG involved with the 400 Material option.

[Michael1]

i see now, after posting it reading “complete set”, disregard my post

[SDGNelson]

Following up for anyone interested, I was pleasantly surprised - I didn’t receive any complaints about the price decrease, so the price has been lowered across the board. Total sales jumped particularly for the past few mystery boxes, but I think we’ll have to wait and see what the new normal is.

I was particularly curious to see whether the timing of releasing the bundle with a 25% launch discount would help encourage getting the bundle instead, but the portion of bundle purchases was actually lower.

[Desmond]

Step towards a good direction.