I just wanted to take a few minutes to have a little rant about the prices for skins and ship kits and try and put forward an argument for reducing the cost. Having played elite for a number of years on and off and having had a number of friends on line play elite I think the general consensus is that both the skins and the ship kits are excessively priced. I think the evidence for this is in the extreme rarity of seeing anybody with a ship kit. Obviously there's the interactive issues as there were in the thargoid sites where ship kits caused problems But for the most part I think it seems to be a reasonable statement that very few people buy them due to their excessive cost.
I contend that less than 1% of players buy a ship kit or by multiple ship kits perhaps it's more than that I don't know what the figures are but I very rarely see any ships with any alterations. I understand that it's a balance between under pricing and over pricing but given that most players in elite have upwards of 20 ships the concept of putting kits on all those ships just makes the whole process untenable financially. I think making them too expensive means that not only are they not used in the most part making the game less interesting and the aesthetics of the game less pleasing as most ships are Flying around with just a default kit I think it also makes a mockery of any time spent creating them. What's the point in creating a kit that only a very small percentage of people will buy? Why not make the kits easily affordable for everybody and watch how often you see a ship kit on a ship. I don't know how much time and effort it takes to create the ship kits but it can't be massively expensive to create them I'm familiar with game design and asset creation and I don't think it would be too primitively expensive to create more kits once everybody heard indulge themselves in buying the current kits at a reasonable price.
Given the current model and the fact that Elite probably isn't bringing in a huge amount of money I think it would be massively beneficial to the income stream of the game to make the kits very cheap and allow everybody to buy them. If they were let's say what 25 P or 50P per kit I would want to put kits on most of if not all my 40 plus ships I'd want to buy lots of different kits maybe even a pounder kit as long as the kit was applicable to all sorts of ships. I'm sure you'd have a big income from lots of different players if the ship kits were more affordable and the same goes for the paints which are also I think prohibitively expensive. I'm not sure your model of having a number of arcs per week works in terms of getting people to continue playing the game or spend money perhaps it does perhaps it encourages people to spend a few arcs here and a few arcs there but I think ultimately it's probably a less effective approach than simply making them affordable. Just a thought. It would be interesting to find a reply on here explaining how much revenue you get from ship kits and ship skins effect respectively And what percentage of players buy ship kits and skins I'm betting it's a very small percentage that spend the majority of the money I think that distribution would improve and the income would improve with the reduction in cost.
I contend that less than 1% of players buy a ship kit or by multiple ship kits perhaps it's more than that I don't know what the figures are but I very rarely see any ships with any alterations. I understand that it's a balance between under pricing and over pricing but given that most players in elite have upwards of 20 ships the concept of putting kits on all those ships just makes the whole process untenable financially. I think making them too expensive means that not only are they not used in the most part making the game less interesting and the aesthetics of the game less pleasing as most ships are Flying around with just a default kit I think it also makes a mockery of any time spent creating them. What's the point in creating a kit that only a very small percentage of people will buy? Why not make the kits easily affordable for everybody and watch how often you see a ship kit on a ship. I don't know how much time and effort it takes to create the ship kits but it can't be massively expensive to create them I'm familiar with game design and asset creation and I don't think it would be too primitively expensive to create more kits once everybody heard indulge themselves in buying the current kits at a reasonable price.
Given the current model and the fact that Elite probably isn't bringing in a huge amount of money I think it would be massively beneficial to the income stream of the game to make the kits very cheap and allow everybody to buy them. If they were let's say what 25 P or 50P per kit I would want to put kits on most of if not all my 40 plus ships I'd want to buy lots of different kits maybe even a pounder kit as long as the kit was applicable to all sorts of ships. I'm sure you'd have a big income from lots of different players if the ship kits were more affordable and the same goes for the paints which are also I think prohibitively expensive. I'm not sure your model of having a number of arcs per week works in terms of getting people to continue playing the game or spend money perhaps it does perhaps it encourages people to spend a few arcs here and a few arcs there but I think ultimately it's probably a less effective approach than simply making them affordable. Just a thought. It would be interesting to find a reply on here explaining how much revenue you get from ship kits and ship skins effect respectively And what percentage of players buy ship kits and skins I'm betting it's a very small percentage that spend the majority of the money I think that distribution would improve and the income would improve with the reduction in cost.