Fallout 76: The Full Story of the Atom Shop

good afternoon is John I'm John this is Betty a true nerd we'll come back to fallout 76 because we need to have a chance so there's an old adage about frogs it goes that if you put a frog in boiling water it'll jump straight back out again but if you just put it in warm water and then very cautiously raise the temperature the Frog will stay put eva's it becomes less and less comfortable because it's happening slowly the Frog doesn't realize anything's wrong now as biologists have been pointing up since the nineteenth century frogs don't actually do this because this is a very easy thing to test and some scientists apparently just really don't like frogs but it is very useful as a metaphor for how it came to be that despite being a fall out youtuber who is fairly extensively covered fall out 76 over the last year I've never really paid too much attention to the atoms store you see one for not 76 launched the atom store didn't really seem to be that much of a big deal to me even more than that it didn't even really seem relevant to me I accepted that an online game would need some form of ongoing monetization to pay for the service and if they were going to be microtransactions a cosmetic only shop where you could earn currency in game seemed like the best deal he was certainly better than loot boxes in a shop you just pick the item you want and overpay for that if that's what you want to do or earn and using game currency or just ignore it because their cosmetics the water dish seemed fine the temperature was pleasant but a lots happened over the last year and one much has been said about fallout 76 I couldn't really find any attempt to properly tell the full story of the atom store so sit down and buckle up folks because there's a lot of stuff to cover here so let me take you back in time to November 14th 2018 fallout 76 has just come out and so is the first iteration of the atoms shop and it's pretty much entirely what we were told to expect it's a SHOP full of some cosmetic items some clothing some hairstyles some Flair icons are nothing desperately controversial naturally as the games got a giant pile of people playing at launch state immediately afterwards it receive fairly regular update some of the first things that get added into it are things like the starlet sniper the back to nature clothing said nothing desperately dramatic really the biggest of prophecy at the time is the pricing seems a little bit on the high side with fairly mundane clothing costing the equivalent of about five pounds and more like 10 to 12 pounds for power armor sets but the timer there isn't really much backlash against this because the game seems to be showering players with atoms just for completing challenges in game so no one seems to be complaining too loudly not just chat but then something very interesting indeed happens which is November 23rd Black Friday the price of fallout 76 drops to only $40 and before the end of the month some details must have it down to 35 basically almost half the price from what it was at launch which I remind you was only a couple of weeks before naturally this annoys some people who pre-ordered and paid full price and there was a lot of reporting on this at the time but I found that reporting sort of missed one of the most interesting things there was a huge amount of focus on how this was a response to what were presumably weaker than anticipated sales and yet people sort of overlooked the more interesting half of the equation which is what did this mean for Fallout 76 as financial blend going forwards you see back in the day you just made a game and then you sold it the money you made was based on how many copies you sold that was it but things have got a lot more complicated since then with many games now built around recurring revenue making money on an ongoing basis as an example earlier in 2019 2k revealed that they made under half of their income from actually selling games it also led some downright odd accounting when 2k revealed they'd had one of their best financial quarters of all time in the quarter when they hadn't actually launched any video games yeah recurring revenue cambia an odd thing in short the brothel from actually selling a game might matter a lot less than the revenue that follows thereafter is the same logic that means that in many cases games consoles are actually sold to loss on the understanding the wantyou of the console in somebody's home they'll be buying games for it for you Calma same basic principle here on a much smaller scale mate less upfront make more thereafter now weather Bethesda planned ahead of launch for the price to actually drop that quickly or not is something we'll never know for sure along with whether or not it was in response to weaker than anticipated sales what I will say is I doubt it was done a panic there was a calculation here but that calculation most likely means that if the game was gonna make less money per sale therefore each person buying it needed to yield more average ongoing revenue and with that in mind we enter the most magical time of the year the holiday season and the Festa had plans because something new appeared on November the 30th and that was the daredevil outfit brand new piece of apparel costing 1600 atom's quite a lot that's about 12 pounds or thereabouts but there is a new twist it was only available for a limited time if you didn't buy it in the next two days you didn't get it at all and Bethesda were only just getting started very soon after there will be the cowhide outfit 8 and atoms are only available for one day Lightning tattoo only available for one day Mothman frame only available for one day a special fruit at one day blackbird paints one day and by mid-december we would have one day limited access to doors floor tiles and a massive red Rockets owner now this is when the first bit of heat gets put under the water baths and to explain why this was bad let's have a quick look at how items work and where they come from no obviously you could just buy atoms but a big part of Bethesda's pre-launch marketing was you could also earn them in gamer rather than buying them this was done through two mechanisms the first method was challenges related to your personal character basically you just went around playing the game and the game congratulated you by giving you some atoms so the very first time you destroy a robot three stimpacks four you destroy ten you get yourself ten atoms but you may immediately notice as we actually go up to the next 20 atoms for killing robots yeah need to kill a hundred and Warner the thing about this much like leveling up in many online games is it happens very quickly at the beginning of the game and then gets progressively slower as time went on it in fact hang on let's just skip to the top here here we go my character's level 86 I put well over a hundred hours into this game and I still haven't got to the next robot Adam reward so that would be destroying robots with a pistol I was a pistol user I'm only up to eight hundred and twenty three robots destroyed so yeah that slows down a lot this I think is why there wasn't much backlash at the very beginning of fallout 76 is life because even though the prices were a bit on the steep side people were being showered with atoms from the personal challenges as time went by those atoms started drying up leading onto the second more reliable source of atoms and that was the daily and weekly challenges so basically every single day understandably you can log in and there'd be a bunch of challenges if you did all of them you'd be awarded about fifty to sixty atoms a day and the weekly challenges of course would be more difficult but you had longer to complete them and the rewards tends to be a little bit on the higher side so you get maybe 150 items if you completed all of those in a week I should say though some of these could be very very time-consuming indeed tracking down ten different sorts of alcohol that can actually take a while anyway if we add all that together basically from the challenges you've got maybe 600 items a week or so if you log in every day and do literally every challenge and now I think you can see how the mathematics of the situation starts to present a bit of a problem which is a part of the promise that was made by Bethesda was it you could buy things simply by earning atoms in game because if something shows up costing 1,400 atoms that's only available for one day you physically can't earn enough from the challenges in game to be able to afford that now in theory your character might be able to beat enough personal character challenges to get enough atoms together to buy the item without having to actually spend any money but as those get progressively harder and slower to come by that's only a temporary solution and as people's characters got to a higher and higher level it became less and less workable so the number of tunned exclusives was going up but under some 15 for everything got a whole lot worse that was the day the holiday emotes punter was added to the atoms store now the price of that was 2,400 atoms but don't worry it's been reduced to 1200 atoms what a good deal there was just one problem it had never actually been in the store before and that was followed the next day by the coming to town Christmas bundle discounts to 2,000 atoms down from 3,000 which had never actually been her because both of these items arrived in the store pre discounted now that's obviously a bit on the dodgy side and depending on what country you're in there are actually some very strict rules about how items can be Maltese discounted until they've actually been sold at the original price for a certain amount of time err a couple of days later the discounted labeling had just quietly disappeared Bethesda realizing this was not a very good idea but they were joined by another 2000 atom Christmas Panther and there was plenty of Christmas cheer yet digamma 1200 atoms for some Christmas trees time limited to two days a waving Santa 800 atoms two days Christmas light power armor a thousand atoms seven days limited and more beyond that to basically a hell of a lot of time limited Christmas items but time moved on and Christmas came to an end probably somewhere around late December 25th if I had to guess it in New Year there was something new making its first appearance inside the atoms store and that was a sale an actual salamy not the slowly confusing Christmas so that probably wasn't actually a thing the 2076 glasses which have been in the atoms store from the very first day we're now being reduced from their original price 760 atoms down to 380 50% off now we need to talk about this in detail because there's a lot of interesting things to discuss around pricing and discounting when you're selling purely online items effectively selling data in what we amanti would typically call perceived value and this is something I know a bit about because before I was a youtuber as many of you all know I worked for many years in marketing so uh Allah this makes a lot of sense to me so okay value this is a bit complicated so let me give you a really simple example there's a very old truism in restaurants that many people order this second cheapest bottle of wine on a wine list this is because many people don't really understand wine that well so you don't want to spend extra money on expensive wine when they don't see the advantage of it but they also don't want to order the cheapest wine as they assume that's the worst one and they don't want to look cheap in company therefore the second cheapest bottle of wine the points that stories that people come up with an idea of what something is worth based on contextual information such as or other similar things cost because often we don't have enough information or expertise to know whether something actually is good value or not and this is where we get to fallout 76 as time limited sales you see in physical shops sales often used to shift stock to make space for new stuff but in the atom store that doesn't really make sense there's no stop so an online selling this environment is much more likely to be about perceived value because if you compare an item at its full price with the exact same item that's half that price then the latter can often be perceived as good value and in a time limit to that deal and you've got some good old fear of missing out tossed in but does that actually make sense when it comes to online micro transactions when what's being sold er is data physical items have a cost price of course that it takes to manufacture it some items cost more than others because they cost more to produce but wine fallout 76 to power armor skins cost around 1,500 atoms whereas regular clothing costs more in the mid to high hundreds and hats only cost a couple of hundred it's not because they cost more to manufacture these are just numbers that were invented by Bethesda there's no reason whatsoever why 380 atoms for a pair of glasses is better value than 760 atoms but if you like something as being half price and only half price if you buy it today then plenty of people will decide it is better value and potentially grab it and clearly they did because while this was the first sale it most definitely would not be the last these things completely exploded across the atoms store Oh the course of February and into early March there was a massive expansion of flash sales these would start happening pretty much constantly I should clarify by the way the fester didn't invent any of this these are old well-established marketing tricks that just happened to have a particular relevance to gaming microtransactions and if something were worth keeping your might in any gaming marketplace not just this one and then another very major mistake was made the date is January 29th 2019 and a couple of new outfits have just been introduced into the store the unstoppable outfits modeled after a team of superheroes in the Fallout universe they cost 800 atoms each but almost immediately a banner was noticed on the front page of fallout 76 if you and your teammates were dressed up as the UNSTOPABLES all of you would gain bonus health in short there was a clear demonstrable gameplay advantage that was giving some people a competitive advantage over other people the very specific thing the Bethesda said was not going to be allowed to happen obviously this bonus was pulled pretty much straight away but despite those hiccups February in general was actually a pretty good timer for the atom store with a series of updates arriving that didn't really have the large number of time limited items that had characterized Christmas for example we had the playtime update followed by terror in the night and then rest and relaxation and pretty much all of these updates there were basically no time limited items whatsoever there was just new stuff entering the store that people could save up for if that's what they want to do it was probably the best month in the atom's stores history in terms of working as people have anticipated it would ahead of launch even more encouragingly where the Valentine's Day special event rolled around share the love it on earth methods to have loved the lessons of Christmas and realized they might have gone a bit over the top during the holiday period as once again there were no time limits and items everything that was added people could save up for if that's what they wanted so I'd argue that February was probably the best month the atoms store ever had and then and then and then and then February 22nd happened and something very interesting indeed showed up and he got almost no attention at the time because it was so damn insignificant that it would have some very significant consequences on February 22nd the Mothman frame came back no I know that sounds like absolutely nothing in fact you may have forgotten I already mentioned the Mothman frame about 10 minutes ago or thereabout this was a term limits time introduced back in December there was only available for a single day it was very clearly sold as an exclusive buy it this day or it's gone she's only available for one day but on February 22nd it came back having a page as a single day flash item on December 7th it returned for another single day flash sale on February 20 seconds now if touched on this briefly a moment ago with time limited flash sales and the idea of generating a fear of missing out on value and with the Christmas times and items and how they created scenarios where it wasn't feasible to earn enough atoms in the lot of time that an item was available to purchase but in the return of the Mothman frame this was taken to a new level and it clearly highlights the phenomenon of engineered scarcity now as we've mentioned a moment ago there's no stock for data you can't run out of moth man frames but scarcity is a really great driver to encourage people to purchase by now only available while supplies last all that business and so scarcity must be created by taking the item away but the return of the Mothman frame demonstrates how artificial this is items can be flagged as being about to disappear have a small sail attach them to maximize both perceived value and the fear of missing out and then get brought back later and this can keep being done indefinitely with no stock to worry about that data can just keep being removed and later restored effectively forever and this clearly worked because Bethesda pretty soon after this started doing it a lot it's referred to in the store as items being sent to the boat ie they're about to be removed from the store front a process by which a bunch of items have briefly discounted and then removed what other items that have previously been time limited and removed then returned in their place the first major instance of this was on April the 2nd when many items some that have been in the store from the very beginning would briefly put on sale and then removed and as I say this process was very heavily expanded in fact if we go over to the very most recent update to the town recording the December the third update a bunch of free states items which have previously been sent to the Volt have returned sixteen items in fact with two bundles covering some of them but only for one week while at the same time a bunch of items are leaving with a final sale together with seven one-day flash sales as I say this is now hugely widespread but so far with the exception of the Christmas sales that weren't really sales and the UNSTOPABLES issue in January we've really just been discussing the introduction of marketing techniques it's not great sure but it's the same tactics you'd see from pretty much any retailer but then we entered March and the water started to heat up you see on March 26th the survival mode beta began a brand new mode in which people were free to attack each other without any limitations whatsoever up into that point in adventure mode you were able to shoot other characters but unless they actually fired back and thus formally began to joke the damage you were inflicting was significantly reduced but it still existed and you were also able to attack other people's camps again with massively reduced damage but you were able to do so now what many people were focused on survival mode something kind of slipped under the radar a bit which is at the same time as it came out changes were made to adventure mode to remove some of those systems I was just describing a moment ago now non-hostile damage was reduced to zero in short if you tried to shoot another player it would do literally nothing and there's confirmation the same day the same protection would subsequently be extended to camps in short outside of specific PvP events and workshop disputes that would now be zero PvP inside Adventure mode it will be exclusively limited to the new survival mode however within a few months survival mode would be shut down with accompanying messaging indicating that nuclear winter was going to be filling the role of the PvP mode from now on clearly indicating that a venture mode was now effectively seen as a PvE non-competitive mode and that's very important because we need to go into the exact promises that were made by Bethesda about the atoms because one it was generally reported to her to fall out 76s launched that the store was going to be cosmetics only that wasn't actually the message the Bethesda have been broadcasting most of the time instead pre-release interviews were very clear the atom store would confer no competitive advantage which is very clearly distinct from cosmetics only so let's just say as a thought experiment what if you were to remove pretty much all the competitive aspects of the game leaving Adventure mode as pretty much entirely a pv cooperative world well technically at that point giving people items that provide gameplay advantages isn't actually provide you competitive advantage right after all we're all on the same team here there's no competition anymore so if you sort of squint a bit less than a month later the first utility item was released the repair kits now the repair kit was a very simple item basically as you've probably guessed from the title you could use it to instantaneously repair any weapon or any piece of armor and the argument used by Bethesda when this was launched is very simple these items are offering convenience not advantage and thus they're fine however I don't you a very important line was crossed at this moment you see up to this point weapons could only be repaired with scrap and scrap was acquired by looting as I've discussed at length in my own video about what went wrong with fallout 76 and how to fix it the scrap Gathering rate is relatively slow in this game as the component you per item has been reduced from Fallout 4 but thanks to a packet you can now skip component gathering for weapon maintenance in short less grind more player this also means there's suddenly a financial benefit to Bethesda if players get bored of traveling around in gathering strat for maintenance because they can just pay to skip it in effect this is very similar to an XP boost item like Ubisoft has been using recently a paid mechanism that speeds up the game and thereby creates a financial incentive to make the default experience slower so they can sell you a solution to a problem they creator's so that brings us to April 23rd and that's not all that was going on at that point one other thing I do want to draw attention to and just keep your eye on this as we go forward the price of new items entering the shop that would time-limited really started to go up as time went by roughly at this point end of April into the beginning of May there was the fall Rogers the apocalypse event where basically four items of time limits of power armor were introduced one by one into the atom's store each costing 1,400 atoms at the exact same time as the new kishan power armor was introduced into the store also costing 1,400 atoms are also available for a single week in short there were some very expensive time limited items floating around simultaneously not wholly unlike what happened back in December 2018 but there was one of the new idea that had just shown up as well and this one was very very interesting indeed on June the 10th Bethesda launched the e3 bundle basically if you bought a thousand atoms normally you will get a bows of an extra hundred atoms but during e3 if you bought that thousand you get yourself an extra 500 together with six repair kits and an exclusive clothing item the elders battle coat from fallout 4 now this is again a very important line that we need to note was crossed at this point because once again one of the promises made all along was if you want to you can just earn your atoms in-game and spend them in the store and up to this point that did technically remain true sure huge numbers of time limited items were introduced that cost thousands and thousands of atoms that might only be available for a single day or a single week but in theory if you've been saving up your atoms you could buy them at the oldest battle coat was the first item that could not be purchased under any circumstances with in-game currency because the only way to obtain it was by buying this special 1000 @ and bundle in short you paid money or you didn't get it at all regardless it does rather seem to have worked because it was repeated twice almost immediately in July bethesda took the QuakeCon bundle an almost identical deal to go.you the revolutionary generous uniform and then in august the gamescom bundle again pretty much identical but this time handing over the arguably much more desirable and recognizable mechanist outfits but we're getting ahead of ourselves here because we're not actually done with June yes in fact we're not even nearly done with June - very big things happened in the second half of June first nuclear winter began and had a rather interesting twist to it which is the only items you're allowed to wear a nuclear winter with those from the atoms store now part of the reason why the original atoms store never really bugged me in fallout 76 was that there were a huge number of other outfit I could wear anyway there's no shortage of outfits in adventure mode in fact I've got some rather snazzy wants I wouldn't want to trade out with the atom store stuff I'd rather like what I've already gone but in nuclear winter all of that changed either you got it from the atom store or you went it in the default jumpsuits now that might not seem like the worst thing in the world began er we're just talking about cosmetics except maybe we're not because let's just take a look at nuclear winter now on both of nuclear winter mats you may notice something with user there's an awful lot of trees a lot of brush a lot of browns and greens basically a very large amount of rural environments which you'll spend a lot of time crawling through not wanting to be seen because in nuclear winter generally whichever team sees here the first is going to have a very significant advantage now by default and if you'd never go into the atom store you're going into that environment in a bright blue jumpsuit with shiny gold trim on it however there are certain items that have various points you've been able to get from the atom store like for example various forms of camouflage gear which a case could certainly be made might give you a certain advantage going up against people wearing a once again bright blue and gold jumpsuits but on June 25th something very very important happened which is accompanying pads 10.5 Eva a new type of bundle entered the shop which began with the Mothman bond or a bundle which had something very very special about it which is a it was made up of items you could buy individually all except for Warner the best Warner the smoke machine the only smoke machine at the time in fallout 76 and if you wanted to get hold of that smoke machine the only way to do it was to buy the entire bundle 1,500 atoms only available for seven days this was the first time that had ever happened where a single exclusive item was being bundled with items that otherwise you could have bought individually but it most certainly wouldn't be the last suggesting it was in fact quite successful in fact just a few weeks later the green thumb bundle would do precisely the same thing roll forward two more weeks to August 6th 1500 atoms for the invasion from the stars bundle again one exclusive outfit in with a bunch of stuff that otherwise you could have purchased individually yeah these things became so common one has to assume they sold very well still and once again getting out of myself here because I've sort of skipped over July and July once again saw a bit of an escalation in the amount of new exclusive stuff entering the store on July the second two bundles and two outfit entered the store every single one of them time limited to a single week every single one of them costing over a thousand atoms in fact the combined price for all four was five thousand three hundred atoms in a single week if you didn't want to miss out on the time limited exclusives and so time moves forward to August the 20th and patch 12 and a whole bunch of very interesting stuff happens simultaneously you wanna the vault raids began and while these technically didn't have anything to do with the atoms store I would say indirectly they most certainly did because the vault raids involve fighting a very very large number of enemies who will keep throwing themselves at you in waves for a very very long time indeed a reminder guns and fall at 76 have conditioner and even though we played on the easy of all trade difficulty and I went in with the character suspect with decently high intelligence whose weapons therefore degraded Sully more slowly than they might do so otherwise my weapon went from full condition down to broken two or three times in the course of a single rate now the game never explicitly recommends that you might want to boy some repair kits to go into the vault raids but the certainly make life an awful lot easier and an argument could certainly be made the uptick in the sale of repair kids would certainly be a foreseeable result of releasing the Volt rights on top of that once again the introduction of time-limited exclusive items started stepping up and up and up on this occasion six different time limited range items were introduced and combined cost of four thousand atoms and on top of that the future tech bundle was released a thousand atoms for another bundle which was made mostly out of items you could have bought individually aside from one exclusive globe but what that you have to buy everything else to--what though perhaps the most infamous thing that was added during that update was the train station signs starting from August 20th there were little portals inside the train stations dots around Appalachia which if you clicked on them took you directly to the atoms store though bethesda quickly realized that war was going a bit too far and by September the 10th those were done again in patch 13 and speaking of patch 13 on September the 10th yeah I feel like this is the point many people feel like the water was really starting to heat up a bit because this was the day that the fridge of the collection station were added into the game and a utility section was added into the camp tab in the atom store now just in case you missed this the collection station is basically a little robot you can set to automatically gather scrap on your behalf the fridge meanwhile means that food too great a little bit more slowly now the collection station in particular I think people have some issues with because the collection station as I say was basically a way of producing scrap not much scrap mind but you've got to remember scrap is the single most important currency in fallout 76 bar yeah quite some way scrap does everything build your weapons maintains your weapons maintained your armor build your camp everything everything is done by scrap but technically of course as we actually discussed before this isn't actually really giving anybody a competitive advantage because these days adventure mode is pretty much just a PvE mode and these items have no relevance to nuclear winter whatsoever so once again you're not really selling a competitive advantage you're selling convenience which is not cosmetics but sort of it's uncomfortably in the middle that wasn't enough however to stop a quite significant backlash people were not desperately thrilled by the fridge in the collection station because it felt like the most explicit example yet of people just buying themselves a gameplay advantage there was also one of the thing in this update that generally wasn't really confident at the time but I think is worth mentioning during this full history of the atom's store which is a wallpaper wallpaper was introduced and it was a very interesting item indeed because up to this point the Adams Store overwhelmingly sold extra iterations of stuff you could already have in the main game so in the main game there was a bunch of clothing but if you wanted to you could have extra clothing from the store you had a selection of hairstyles available to you you could buy more hairstyles from the store loads of icons available to you but others available in the store wallpaper was different because there is no wallpaper in the base game either you have totally bare walls or you have to go into the store and buy some wallpaper there is no wallpaper whatsoever outside of purchasing it with Adams again this wasn't really commented on the time but its set of precedent we'll be revisiting in a moment whereby it was okay for entirely new type of items to be created inside the store that had no equivalent whatsoever in the base game and of course jebel even need pointing out by now but yes indeed there was a brand new bundle introduced at this point to the down-home dweller bundle a thousand atoms if you wanted the exclusive statue inside there was mixed in with a bunch of items that otherwise you would have been able to buy individually now perhaps in response to the backlash against the collector on the fridge October 17 is where things start getting very very interesting indeed we got our clearest communication yet about the state of the game firstly it was announced that imminently private service would be arriving as a paid service but arguably into my mind more interesting lee an update on the financial blend that underpinned the gamer to quote the update our approach to these items that launch was to keep them purely cosmetic but after looking at all the data it became clear that to consistently deliver content that keeps fallout so six freshen exciting for all we needed to rethink our approach to the atomic shop effective this is a fairly over to mission that a purely cosmetic shop had not been making enough money and that the financial plan behind fallout 76 had changed to include utility items of the shop going forward PJ's will actually provide a tiny bit more detailed the very next day on Twitter when he confirmed that the utility items have been very successful in the shop so far and that the financial plan underpinning fallout 76 had indeed changed to include them this of course led almost immediately into update 14 the update with private servers ought to give them their final name the fallout first service and yeah this is where things get very very interesting indeed fallout first was announcement simultaneously launch but on top of providing private service it was a mod General offering also including special armors and icons they were reserved exclusively for their users which once again just like the three convention bonus outfits were now permanently locked behind a paywall more outfits that could never under any circumstances be purchased with atoms that were earned in-game now fallout versus I'm sure you notice received a lot of mockery but to my mind a lot of it sort of missed the point of fallout first which is I don't think Bethesda ever thought or ever believed that this was a thing they were going to be selling to everybody who was playing game and the key clue for me is the atoms that are included within Fallout first membership as long as you remember a fallout first you receive one thousand six hundred and fifty atoms every month now that's interesting that's very very interesting indeed because that to mine gives you a pretty clear idea who this is actually for it's for a minority of players who are already frequent players and given the atoms probably frequent spenders because the price of the monthly subscription was broadly the same as just buying that many atoms if you were gonna be buying that many atoms regardless it made perfect sense to sign up to fallout first you just got some extra stuff on top of the atoms tone but let's dig into the motivations a bit here from Bethesda side obviously it makes life a lot easier just speaking financially because it makes a revenue more predictable as soon as you've got a certain number of people in these plans and you understand the churn rate the proportion of people who fail to renew and thus dropouts an average every month you can confidently predict revenue going forward which is always going to be welcome but perhaps more importantly it changes the consumer thought process when you're buying atoms if and when you decide you want to shop item the consideration is do I want this enough to justify buying the atoms but as soon as you already have the atoms as part of your subscription then it's just a question of what you're going to spend them on what you like most rather than whether you like anything at all and of course maybe most importantly for for Bethesda it takes the most hardcore player base of which there is clearly a significant number and converts those people into regular subscribers now that could potentially tell us a lot about the new financial model that the first is pursuing it because we already know the plan to monetize the general community through the atoms store isn't working perfectly could the new plan be to more extensively monetize the existing hardcore player base and to use that rather unpleasant dehumanizing term what is about getting more out of the wails whether or not that was explicitly the plan it does seem a likely result a person committed enough to the game to join fallout first will almost certainly be yielding more per month than a non subscriber but that wasn't actually the only thing to happen on October 23rd though obviously everything else did get a bit trampled under the narrative of Fallout first you see the following things are all into the atomic store on October the 23rd Warner a massive one-day sale of previous bundles all of which had 30% of two of the ability to customize your loot bag again just like wallpaper there was no equivalent of this in the base game in the base game you just had your loot bag it looked like what it looked like there was no option to change it whatsoever the only personalization available was exclusively through the atom store and three a brand new Halloween camp bundle which yes indeed had itself an exclusive item in fact it was a second smoke machine just like Mothman bundle that had kicked off the exclusive bundle several months before and that wasn't all because between October 23rd and October 29th a huge number of new items entered the store for Halloween almost every single one of them time limited this was 16 items and two bundles the combined cost of purchasing all of it was 8,000 absolutely all of it time limited you may remember I mentioned earlier keep an eye on the total combined value of new time limited stuff being added into the store because I believe that is the highest amount added in a single week since the madness of Christmas 2018 but there was one of the small thing as well something so small I didn't even realize it till I went to actually go and check which is a so many items were added there were time limited there was in fact only a single new item added to the store that wasn't time limited skip forward a few weeks to the Thanksgiving update of November 26th and basically the same thing happens five new Thanksgiving themed items are added at a fairly modest combined cost of two thousand eight hundred atoms it must be sad but once again only a single non time limited item was introduced at this point the vast majority of items being added into the store are time limited almost nothing's being added in that isn't you see because so many items that are being introduced at time limited and thus drop out of the store after a few days and even items that are returning having previously been taken away are time limited themselves so once again they drop out almost immediately the store is actually weirdly empty the minute in fact it's emptier now than it was at launch so if you just have a quick look through the apparel tap here this was recorded on December the 6th by the way let's see how many items of clothing I'm actually allowed to borrow so we've got the scarecrow here but that will be gone in four days timer dito to the Crypt enthusiast right here göran four days timer vampire that ton of it's only on the sales that will be remaining in a few days time then we've got ourselves the denim suit right here pristine mode mole this doesn't count because this is skins and paint rather than an actual outfit these two bundles are just selling these outfits right here so you've got ourselves survivalist and revolutionary but again both of those have gone in four days and then skipping down to the bottom we've got ourselves the Stars and Stripes up some drama but that's it that's literally everything available in the store everything else showing up here is stuff I've previously are not that's literally it so by my count that's six outfits and one bit of under armour that's literally or I could buy in the store right now because Bethesda have become so obsessed with everything being time-limited but things just sort of disappear and there's nothing actually you know left in fact if I just very quickly go back to that screenshot we had right at the beginning the state of the shop back on day one launch day there are eight outfits right there and you can see I would be able to scroll there were a lot more outfits somehow despite the large number of outfits that have been created over the last year there are now less outfits in the shop now than there were on launch day which just feels insane and that broadly is where we are now a very odd position for the Assam store indeed to my mind stolen if it's just a simple cosmetic store the atom stores changed a lot over the last year and we now know that's in part because the original model just wasn't working for Bethesda and then moving from selling just cosmetics to selling convenient has been successful at least from a purely financial perspective but the games got some really big changes coming up fall out first is still fresh and to date Bethesda hasn't confirmed how well fall out first is performing next their expectations and likely they never will but if the subscription revenue can keep the game going that could change the balance of how much effort goes into new stuff for the general shop versus the subscribers on the other hand the performance of wastelanders will matter a huge amount as well if that turns out to be successful and maybe even close back enough goodwill that a relaunch on steam could reinvigorate the player base somewhat that could change the balance of monetization options to pushing the balance back in favor of a store that very likely will be seeing more utility items in future regardless I'll be watching with great interest what happens over the next year and in particular what gets announced in the e3 showcase because the Proteas that could very easily Informers which part of the player base is actually making money yet it's a fascinating one it's a really really fascinating one and I'll definitely say yeah the waters definitely warmer than it was they might get hotter yet toe thank you very much and goodbye app you've got Gate key here and me of course I made a mistake I've made a mistake I've made a mistake I've made a mistake this is gonna take all of my skill and cunning as a hunter sort of do are you moving faster die die go go away go away nobody likes you that was a good idea till it wasn't

Channel: Many A True Nerd

Views: 415,519

Keywords: Fallout 76, Fallout 76 atom shop, Fallout 76 the atom shop, Fallout 76 atomic shop, Fallout 76 atom store, Fallout 76 atomic store, Fallout 76 the atom store, Fallout 76 atoms, Fallout 76 microtransactions, Fallout 76 fallout first, Fallout 76 fallout 1st

Id: FaoFH-S2FXE

Length: 42min 23sec (2543 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 08 2019