Your argument was that inflation substantially justifies the new cosmetics prices. I'm pointing out that inflation has nothing do do with their costs because they have almost no costs for these items. Surely there is overhead elsewhere that has increased in cost (or maybe not, if they've been firing people and buying cheaper AWS packages), but the perceived value of the final product is neither here nor there.
I'm not justifying anything. Just pointing out the facts of the matter. What you say in response is still irrelevant, and incorrect even if it was. Inflation causes wages to rise as employees try to keep up with it, this puts pressure on the price points a company charges to counter that. The price point of an artistic piece is arbitrarily set, but that doesn't mean it isn't calculated to bring in x amount of profit per sale. As inflation goes up, profit goes down, therefore the calculation needs to be adjusted.
If your argument is that the skins are expensive due to your assertion of the minimal effort required to make them, then that applies at every point in time they have been on sale.
Frontier trying to increase revenue on assets that have near zero marginal cost would ultimately follow the same pattern irrespective of inflation...
It's not near zero marginal cost though, it's not they're some guy in a bedroom knocking these up in their spare time. And whether someone in their bedroom could knock them up in their spare time or not is also irrelevant. The overhead of being a company is a factor that you are neglecting to apply to the equation.
increase prices until total revenue starts to taper off. This is what's happening now. As long as prices increase faster than the number of people willing to pays them drops off, it's a sound decision (at least in the short term, which might be the only term). Even if the majority think the prices are absurd, a minority willing to pay any price can justify setting a price that will alienate most customers.
That is an equation formula that none of us are privy to, so any assertion about whether it is working for Frontier or not is entirely baseless.
If you can afford to neglect a million GBP high-risk investment while it loses 90% of it's value (e.g. can't even be bothered to setup a stop-loss order), that loss probably isn't going to bother you anywhere near as much as having a worse gaming experience is going to bother someone who spends any meaningful portion of their free time time playing said game.
You know you're doing the equivalent of saying 'ackshually' here, right? I don't believe any of this negates my point at all but rather serves to counter because you don't want to concede the point. A stop-loss order is a way to minimize losses, but a one percent loss on a million dollar investment still works out to be $10,000. Still far less than anything an Elite player has to reckon with. Though tragically not so if we're talking about Star Citizen players, unfortunately.
As an aside, try having an honest conversation about this in relation to Star Citizen over on Spectrum, where paint jobs are $10 and ships can be priced in the hundreds of dollars, and see how far it goes before it gets nuked.
If Frontier implodes, it's not Tencent, WCP, IB, or even Braben who are going to feel it most.
It would be a blip for Tencent IMO, but even so, I don't see how suggesting that having a company valued at $1bn being reduced to a value of $100m is somehow nothing is based in any sort of reality. I mean, in a general sense, at some point once you pass a certain amount of wealth, say $1bn, adding another one or two billion on top isn't going to drastically alter one's personal day to day life, but that doesn't equate it to a being of meaningless value. It's still an extra billion dollars (or two). Though it might be rationalized to be meaningless by an envious person, I guess.
), or one for a friend etc..
