Everything in the crates outside a couple costumes and barely noticeable accessories, is ugly to the max. The caps are ugly, all the body markings this round are mediocre at best, the emotes are emotes, and Blue tier motif rewards cost almost double every other blue item. The gauntlets don’t have an effects and there’s a hoard of edgy bugs in the legendary rank for some reason

I got my nocturnal statue with gems from last season, so I think I’m just gonna pass on buying any crates this time around. There’s not in them I want enough to put up with all the junk markings they’re gonna spit out

@Acrolas

Actually, I have a degree in business and marketing from USC, and I run a digital design and marketing firm where a number of our clients have video game products, including one major MMORPG, and so I do things like vertical research and focus groups. I’m basing my professional opinion on that experience, and the overall pricing models within the ESO ecosystem. But my information will always be incomplete, granted, because Bethesda/Zos is a private company, and is very secretive about all of their sales figures, definitely including minutia like the average customer expenditure on crates in one game. But Blizzard reports extensively.

The reason a generalization is safe in this specific case is because we have enough information to guesstimate how much it costs to win an Apex Mount. And it’s helpful that the cost puts it up at the high end in the “luxury goods” category. It’d be harder to make projections on like $5 items because consumer behaviors fluctuate a lot the lower a price is, but when you’re talking an item that on average costs more than the game itself, some pretty predictable rules of economic behaviors set in.

Micro transactions are a new frontier, and have driven excellent growth (MTs themselves are up about 65% year to year recently). But right now our research is showing high “buyers remorse” statistics on high-end micro-transaction purchases...well over 50%. Analysts really want that figure to be under 2%, so we are waaaaaay off target. We also see that about 50% of game micro transactions are made by 0.2% of the player base. So the industry concern is that consumer acceptance of micro transactions could be a fad. That’s a small number of customers driving a lot of revenue. In ESO we see tons of players with multiple high-end mounts. If we get to ESO 2 and customers still buy mounts, that’d be good. But maybe they all decide that overall having a lot of mounts isn’t that important, so they buy one instead of twenty. It doesn’t take a lot of consumers changing their behavior to have big effects on profits.

There’s also a case that game companies working to ensure their loot box MTs specifically have broad support is that this reduces the chance of government regulation. I think game companies have a decent case that these should not be treated like gambling, but tell it to the California State legislature. If they want to ban loot boxes they might not care about the merits of the arguments. Anything ZOS or other devs can do to show they’re acting in good faith would help. (Far better than an Apex token would be posting odds. They’re going to regret it when this gets caught up by lawmakers and they have no excuse for failing to do this).

So my suggestion speaks to something the analysts are really pushing game developers on - they have got to figure out a way to make consumers happier with those purchases, so that micro transaction culture can grow and not collapse, particularly loot box MT culture.

Hopefully this sets to rest your concerns that I was speaking from an uninformed place. Of course, sales recommendations are just that...there’s no sure bet in marketing. Like I said, Zos is secretive, so perhaps there is reasoning behind their decisions. Industry experts don’t really think so, and I’m just siding with the experts.

I'll start by saying I'm not a big fan of the crown store. It's completely overpriced nonsense and the gambling crates are just vile trash at best. These threads have been popping up everywhere though and I had to see what the fuss was about so I went shopping!

Yeah, more off-gassing ghost mounts and fancy lord trinkets that I would never use to customize any of my characters. What gets me is it's ALL locked behind the special gambling currency that has no definable conversion rate to real money. Surprise, surprise.

I didn't check the entire store but is there even anything new that's purchasable with crowns?