Epic Games announced that it would begin next month to introduce “accurate purchase function” in the hot game Fort Night, the Rocket Alliance and the Sugarman, which meant that players would be able to “how much to buy” later on, without having to overvalue the purchase of specific commodities.
Currently, most of the purchases in the games on the market are based on a virtual currency sales model, and players are often forced to purchase coins that exceed actual demand. From 14 October, the Epic games will be on line with PC, Nintendo, Xbox host, Android equipment, iPhone/iPad and the Fort Night web store for the self-defined purchase of money. Notably, PlayStation does not support this function at this time, and Epic does not state the specific reasons, although it indicates that it is working to achieve “platform-wide coverage”.
According to the information published by the Fort Night network, the new system will allow the player to make up 400 V-Bucks when he has a balance of 600 V-Bucks but wants to buy 1,000 V-Bucks. Compared to the previous need to purchase an additional 1,000 V-Bucks (the remaining 600 V-Bucks after the transaction was wasted), the new scheme was implemented on an on-demand basis.
However, the original batch quota model still has a price advantage. While the V-Bucks replenishment programme uses the benchmark exchange rate of US$ 1 to 100 V-Bucks, the higher the level of preference, the purchase of 1,000 V-Bucks packages takes only US$ 9. Fort Night and Rocket Alliance supported 50 units of incremental purchase, while Sugarman supported 100 units of increment. On 10 October, all fort night V-Bucks and the Rocket Alliance Credits balances will be taken up to the nearest 50 units and the Sugarman balance to 100 units.
The advantage of a developer’s imposition on a player to purchase more than one currency is that it can increase the amount of a single transaction and may encourage the player to put the remaining balance into other consumption and create a revolving consumption mechanism. It is worth mentioning that Randy Pitchford, the head of Landless Land 4, suggested at the beginning of the week that pre-sale packages containing free Fortress Night’s skin could become an investment in excess of value — the price of trading in eBay was `over $2,000′ (the act violated the service terms and could lead to a seal).
Many of the current games, including Fort Night, use a fixed-level money-marketing mechanism, which leads to overconsumption. While Epic did not specify the specific motivation for the introduction of the function, the initiative undoubtedly set a new bar for the industry, and other manufacturers may emulate it in the future on the basis of market feedback.