Helldivers 2 Dev Arrowhead Takes Blame for Killzone Pricing Blunder

I mean giving items for free will just make it worst. They've already pandered and shifted the power dynamics so far in the favor of the player base that every minute issue will have over-reactions because AH have shown how easily they can be bullied.

Also, AH really need to start plugging leaks. It is kind of insane how much gets found out in advance.

@breakneck Yeah how dare they listen and give to the people who bought the game.

Off topic do you guys think Sony will eventually buy arrowhead.

@DennisReynolds the problem isn't listening to the players. The problem is the vast majority of people who complain about Helldivers are insulting the team constantly and what's the result? They get what they want.
Few times AH has addressed the playerbase behavior and every time they have lowered the head and say "sorry you are right" to then give away something so people "forgive them".
Insulting developers will NEVER be right. Ok you fd up just change it, just make it good but don't say their behavior is correct, that's the problem. That's why that subreddit is so entitled, because they know this is an abusive relationship and they are in control.

@Jay767 as a long time Helldivers fan I actually don't want to lol. And the reason is exactly this problem, AH is too indulgent. It already is colliding with business (giving away something for free when they could just reduce the price), sooner or later it will mess with creativity. Sony owns the IP, if AH can't make a stand and actually demand for respect ... others can do it.

A lot of people may not like Drukmann but at least when TLOU2 came out he said this is what we wanted to do, if you were expecting different sorry not sorry LOL.

Hard to believe that these guys are the same that put "A game for everyone is a game for no one" as their studio slogan.
And that subreddit is still as repulsive as the day I left lol.

@get2sammyb They're also more expensive then any other cosmetic in the game. If they priced them the same as everything else i don't think there would be backlash.

@GymratAmarillo If people stop playing and Steam reviews start to dip then yeah they kinda have to "give in". Fact is Arrowhead until recently were just making poor choice after poor choice and then Sony nuked a ton of the playerbase with its dumb choices, its no wonder they lost so many players after launch.

"We changed it from a Warbond because there were concerns that having a higher priced Warbond would carry a negative sentiment... We want to create great experiences that are sustainable for years to come. As part of that, we need to figure out how to make HD2 financially sustainable in the long term."

There's no way they actually said this. So instead of raising the price by like 200 maybe 300 super credits for the killzone warbond they decide to put it in the superstore and nearly double the price for it. This is also including the second wave of items that was given out for free which would have been around $40. This was supposed to make players NOT have negative sentiment over a higher priced warbond? Am I misunderstanding this?

@DennisReynolds
Maybe we see thing differently but balancing weapons that were broken by design, lowering the difficulty of enemies who were supposed to be hard, lowering prices. That is giving in.

Say that the playerbase is right to insult your people so they can send the message is way more than that and I'm not kidding, I was there to see it and it made me angry and then sad because and IP that I love is basically hostage of haters who thanks to AH they actually believe they are the good guys.

Well, you reap what you sow. If Arrowhead's idea was to give the community a voice, now the community finds itself in charge of running the game (and rightly so as they were encouraged to do so)

Meanwhile Activision is laughing at selling COD for $70 every year with each skin pack costing $20.

@DennisReynolds most of the community agrees that if this Killzone collab was a warbond/battlepass, which it was originally planned to be but changed at the last minute to test out this new monetization scheme, and was double the price of the usual warbonds at $20 people would have been fine with it. In fact with AH giving away the second wave for free it brings the total price of everything to just that and way more people are likely to buy the stuff now than they were before just to complete the set. The issue was that AH was charging $40 for less content than in the regular warbonds and only for a limited time.

This bout of outrage isn’t like last time where people got mad their over powered weapons were no longer over powered and weren’t happy the devs wanted to make the game how they envisioned. This time it is calling out bad monetization practices which as consumers we should speak out against otherwise more games are going to be like call of duty and have $80 dlc weapons.

@get2sammyb They’re not just cosmetics, it’s weapons and armor with a unique affect. The Killzone collection very much introduces gameplay changes and is not a cosmetic collection.

Surprised there was outrage in the first place.

I barely play the game, but love KZ so I immediately hopped on and bought the stuff for 10$ which is a very reasonable for crossover cosmetics in comparable games.

So why does the warbond need to be priced higher? There should be no licensing fees because Sony owns Killzone and published Helldivers. Just release it as another warbond.
For finances maybe decrease super credit spawn rates on trivial missions? That’s how people farm. For some reason there seems to be more super credits there than playing on normal fun difficulties, which doesn’t even make sense. That’s be a good way of doing it.
The fact is other live service games are designed to bleed your wallet, HD isn’t and people like that.

@PloverNutter It’s not that the weapons weren’t over-powered, it’s that they nerfed them into the ground, even if for a bug, and had no plans to revert after the bug.
They buffed the flamethrower a few times, boasted about certain things it could do, then made it useless when they released the flame warbond. It stopped me from buying some supercredits until the game got patched.
Some nerfs are fine, how they liked to burn the down the house in order to get rid of a few spiders instead of just removing perhaps not all at once.

I can see why some people said Helldivers 2 community is toxic and far different compare to Helldivers 1 community.

Sadly, Arrowhead thinks because Helldivers 2 sold 15 million copies means they must keep bowing their head to every complaint and demands from the community.

This is the problem when you offer content for free or at a low price, its just not sustainable and funds are needed to keep a game like this going. Hop over to path of exile 2 tho and it costs something like £14.99 for 400 coins with one of the (completely cosmetic) armour sets costing 800 coins. £30 for a cosmetic armour set!!!
I dont really see what the deal is when all credits in HD can be unlocked ingame just by playing.

@GymratAmarillo Dude it was constant nerf after nerf, Warbounds that offered far worse weapons and lack of any real new content. I dunno maybe its because i've played far too many live services and knowing that keeping the playerbase happy is super important because if the playerbase is happy then the playerbase is more likely to spend and keep playing. Arrowhead don't deserve threats and personal insults but they deserved the backlash and the game is in a much better state now because of it.

First of all, the game costs less than most other games, and provides a co-op/singleplayer experience where hundreds of hours entertainment is available.

Second of all, games like GTA V have shark cards higher than the price of Helldivers 2 for only 10 mil of their stupid in-game currency.

Third of all, is there nothing their community WON'T cry about?

Helldivers 2 deserves a better community.

@EfYI the majority of the HD2 community are really good and a right laugh to play with. There is an element that are really horrible but I just airstrike those cretins and move on. I've always enjoyed playing with randoms and I just can't buy into the whole HD2 community is awful bollocks. It's the same with any online game in that there will always be the idiots trying to ruin the experience for everybody else. I'll never play gta online because that's the single worst experience I've ever had in an online game and call of duty is probably the 2nd most toxic environment I've subjected myself to. HD2 has an excellent community and I hope new comers realise this too.

I didn't know how to side either way with this discussion - exploitative monetary practices need to be called out, but also games do need to make profits. Is this pandering or legitimate? So I looked up the price.

And this is all over £16? In an overwatch collab to get the equivalent for a single character you're starting at £20. And to get everything in the collab it's £50 to £60. And that's not close to as exploitative as pricing can get in some games

Sure if the devs feels they can push that down to £14 and still turn enough profit to keep themselves employed, kudos on them, but handing out the second one for free as an apology is seriously over the top.

The HD community man, seems very entitled.
I mean don’t they release FREE updates?

It’s like walking on egg shells every announcement.

From the time they cried at the thought of signing up to a free psn account in order to play the game (guaranteed they have made accounts before), and the devs caved.
I was thinking these devs are in for a rough ride with this lot.

And I was right unfortunately, good luck AH I hope you are making enough to keep your staff.

@Nalodart The vast majority of the ingame community contribute to genuinely one of the best, relaxed and good-natured social experiences that I've found in a game.

Meanwhile the vocal minority that consider themselves to be the "community" on social media, Reddit, etc - and are broadly referred to as such - have been utterly intolerable ever since they "beat Sony" by shouting down the PSN login requirement.

@Nalodart They are you wouldn't believe what Reddit is like it's a toxic hellhole full of people who think they are entitled to everything. That arrowhead shouldn't do things without their say so when the nerf thing happened omg it was toxic as they even were threatening Devs because of it.

They've made a massive mistake releasing it for free because of backlash, the issue was pricing it was twice the price of a Warbond 1000 Super credits which you can grind for in game. Playing level 1 to 3 difficulty missions takes about 3hrs or 4 to get without using real money, but now they've set themselves up for future cross over and expect it to be free again

They've made a massive mistake given it away for free with the privileged cretins who think that they run the game and AH should do what they think. The nerf patch was a stupid idea but the toxicity in Reddit and Steam forums and Discord was unbelievable

don't care. splashed all my super creds on the thing as soon as it appeared and then bought a bit more in the super credits in the store because a game which manages to keep me playing for 10 months and still feels fun... yeah, I want to send some money their way rather than buying some templated copy paste over the shoulder good story driven but cr%* gameplay sony game.

@get2sammyb Even if other games charge the same amount (or more) for cosmetics/dlc, that doesn’t make it right. This is just one of the problems of live service games: the need to keep enough players happy or lose the revenue that keeps the whole thing going. Fortunately, Arrowhead have been more than generous in their community engagement and can bank some good will, no matter how irate parts of the fan base acts.

@breakneck the game costs $40 and is a live-service game. The issue isn't over needing to pay for in-game content(weapons, cosmetics, equipment). The problem is that they're charging 2x the cost for only 4-5 items when for the same price of real money or in-game currency, you can get literally 10x that for the same price.

Is it just me or is there this sort of weird hate going on towards sony for no reason right now. I miss the more open communication days of PS4 but this is getting ridiculous. Everything they do or don't do seems to get hated. The whole helldivers psn thing, when literally so many others do it without much backlash, freaking Astro winning goty, the intergalactic reveal, etc. where is this coming from?

@Bingoboyop Nah, that's just from companies not understanding their fan base. How they get it so wrong, I really don't know. I have some ideas but I'll stay away from the topic