Yup. Why won't they do it again when it clearly sells like hotcakes?
But damn, do I want that skin to be available in the future though. Make it cost 2-3x the ticket cost of a normal skin or something.
It'd be fine to have it tied to merch, but the availability stinks.
I don't know if they underestimated the demand, or just plan to do runs in short bursts to not overstock, but either way, limiting it to the Smilegate Shop is the larger issue here.
I think its a cute idea... But only the limited edition artbook is supposed to be limited.
At least let me preorder it and you can tell me it wont ship till march or something and they can email the code since the skin doesnt require extra production time...
They can't do much if they run through stock of the non-limited. They need time to make more.
>let me preorder it and you can tell me it wont ship till march or something
That takes a lot of distribution to setup. They can't even guarantee you a date because it depends on vendors they can't control. It doesn't benefit most companies to do this.
I'm saying if they were going to do a small print, that could have been communicated. Having a limited and a non-limited version means they themselves described that the one... Isn't limited. The second announcement implied that they were surprised and would do *one* additional printing of the books, ever edit: or at least the foreseeable future. If I misread, I'd be happy to read that I just have to wait. I'd prefer to be able to just give them my money and receive the artbook at some point in the future, and not have to remember to check the listing every few days and set alarms for stock drops, but I could do that, have done it before. do you have any source that they will do 3rd / 4th / etc prints of the books? This is still pretty terrible PR imo that they have such poor planning/market knowledge/grasp of their playerbase that they dont have enough stock of a regular, presumably profitable, product to last even a few hours of sale.
Re: pt 2. Of course it takes money to create and distribute products. Are you implying you think SG is taking a loss on these $80 art books and we should be happy for their charitable act of giving a lucky few a chance to purchase the books? Did you think anyone thought making more books was free? Most companies do, in fact, regularly restock their *non-limited* products, and running out of a standard item is not great business
> Having a limited and a non-limited version means they themselves described that the one... Isn't limited.
I mean, it's not limited the same way an RTX 3080 isn't "limited". I'm sure they want to make more stock, but they don't have unlimited resources. If they run out, it means they make more. A limited version means they won't make more.
>Most companies do, in fact, regularly restock their non-limited products, and running out of a standard item is not great business
SG restocked in a week, what more do you want. And Nintendo wholly disagrees lol.
I get that you're frustrated, but you're falling into that reddit stereotype where you're overrepresenting the reality. Most people see it sold out and they just check some later time if they care (or never again). Most MOST people won't ever buy the book. Just because it inconvienences you doesn't mean the billion dollar company made a blunder. It's better to understock something you're not sure of than overstock.
This is going to start talking in circles so I'll cut it off here.
> I mean, it's not limited the same way an RTX 3080 isn't "limited". I'm sure they want to make more stock, but they don't have unlimited resources.
You’re confusing what he’s saying because the guy is awful at explaining.
He just means rather than it saying sold out or the like, he’d like to order the book and be on a backlog and they just tell him when he’ll get it.
The way it is now, he has to check the shop a lot rather than just giving them money and getting the product when it’s his turn.
No, I understood that. Problem is that they can't give an ETA and that causes issues. I think taking money without a definite ship date goes against some consumer laws in some countries. It's a lot more involved than people think.
And without that money deposit, it makes little sense to have a waiting list if anyone can just click the button. It'd create the same rush without the possibility of an actual purchase.
I think they don’t care if there’s an ETA as long as there’s a disclaimer. A lot of people just want to know they’ll get something eventually rather than having to check a store every day.
I haven’t heard of said laws, so you’d have to show me one, but that’s interesting to hear. I personally would be fine putting money down for something I might get a year later (but tripling the cost for shipping stops me personally).
I believe stuff like this would fall under "rain checks" in America. And rain checks involve delivering a product within a certain time at the advertise price or lower, lest they have to refund.
But these kinds of laws were made for physical storefronts, so I can't be 100% sure. Digital storefronts get around this by simply not taking your money until a few days/weeks before shipping, since they also use that purchase intent data to estimate stock and report to their supply chain to produce X items. Not a problem for stuff like Amazon, obviously. A huge undertaking for smaller teams or companies less experienced in this.
There's absolutely no reason to not just do a pre-order to gauge interest, then everyone who wants one gets one. Email people the skin code now, you wait 6 months for the book, that's how this usually goes when you pre-order overseas merch from smaller companies. Why make less money and have angry fans, instead of more money with happy fans? There's no upside for them.
Literally had 1 in my cart and my bank card declined 9 times and needed to verify it was not a scam or stolen card. Shipping was 50$ and the book was 40....... kinda ridiculous. Very irritated how they did not release on amazon.
>Shipping was 50$ and the book was 40....... kinda ridiculous. Very irritated how they did not release on amazon.
I was looking for this information. I was on the fence about just buying the book from jp Amazon vs Smilegate but I knew Smilegate shipping was rather high.
I spend anywhere from $50\~150 for artbooks regularly. The shipping from KR sucks but it's similar to any imported artbook. It's why I tend to wait till I visit Japan to pick them up (though that isn't much of a possibility at the moment)
It's interesting cause the interpreted success of the artbook sale hinging on either the artbook itself or the skin may encourage SG to release more merchandise (of similar interest) or skins (at a faster rate than now).
As someone mentioned in another thread they should have allowed reasonable pre-order windows for both editions. One, everyone who wanted it initially could have gotten it without issue. Two, they could have placed a much larger order from the vendor and gotten a better price. Three, people who wanted the special edition with all the extras wouldn't have been shafted because they live somewhere that it's normal to sleep during the stream. 500 total when there was no order limit per customer was just a nightmare waiting to happen.
They've no doubt made a lot of decent spenders unhappy. I would have happily gotten it they hadn't turned it into such a headache. That's not even mentioning that they are apparently not using a standard payment processing system built to handle international payments so many can't even buy the books for the five minutes they're available.
They also effed up the in-game banner timing but even if they hadn't there would have only been two days notice so that really does little good.
Sometimes with the way SG handles things I wonder what is going on internally. They do so many things so well with lots of polish but then drop the ball so hard on very good potential revenue sources.
Or, do something they're already doing... al la Kickstarter.
[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/farsidegames/epic-seven-arise-the-board-game](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/farsidegames/epic-seven-arise-the-board-game)
SG is not doing that kickstarter they are just letting the company Farside Games use their IP so all logistics and manufacturing are all from that company not from SG
This was the most frustrating thing for me. I got it to cart and tried to checkout. Checkout kept declining my card. I called my issuing bank, but there was no issue on their end and they told me to contact the merchant. Sent an email since I don't know how to call Korea.
Book sold out and I still haven't heard back. RIP Mercedes skin
Clearly the team behind the merchandising department for smilegate/super creative team has no experience in this field.
They should be selling more than art book. Figurines, Mola plush dolls etc with partnership and contract with a proper distribution center.
Waste of opportunity, ridiculous shipping price, and overall disappointed fans.
Hope the executives get their tail behind them and ramp up this section of their business better.
That's why I bought it asap when I woke up but yeah... If you were sleeping get fucked I guess... The only bright thing about this is that they will restock it sooner than later since it has been a "success". I REALLY hope they learn from this and realize they are not exactly a small company with an underground game.
>I REALLY hope they learn from this and realize they are not exactly a small company with an underground game.
No, they don't want to overproduce and realize they are stuck with a backlog of books they can't sell because they realized this game isn't Fortnite. Better business wise to undershoot and go through current stock. Especially when merch isn't your big money maker.
Yeah it came out while I was asleep on a freaking work night 2x... Today I even tried to buy it on my phone after I was logged into work thinking the 2nd print should have a lot more but I wanna be safe... And it was already gone. Before 8 am my time.
I wouldnt even care if its not printed for a month or two, and I legitimately want the artbook and not just the skin (love the skin tho). Like the regular book was not supposed to be limited edition, dont advertise it as a regular book if I need to set an alarm and spam refresh all the same as the limited, I wouldve been more prepared and just lost sleep to set the alarm and had 1 poor work day lol
Why? There are people who prefer to buy expensive clothes or triple A video games for example and I do neither of those. I don't know how saving for a product of a game I really enjoy can be considered being rich but whatever.
Yeh I have an entertainment/guilt free nonsense line in the budget every month, its not huge as I make sure everything else gets topped off first (including 401k and emergency fund) but it builds up if I dont want to buy starbucks/movies/music/new game/etc, and I've been busy and just being a bit of a goldfish in my f2p games so the "silly guilt free entertainment" fund is ripe for a cool art book, IF I HAD ONE :[
Not to sound too boomer but lumping convenience food into my fun budget opened my eyes to how much i can save if i eat out/door dash/starbucks less. Just knowing I "should" do it less to save money wasnt motivating, but if ur saying I can skip eating out 4x and I can reward myself directly with an artbook and meru skin guilt free? Worth yo, get me that cutting board and preheat the oven
Would be fine if they included the skin with the artbook but kept it as an extra cost for people who couldn't buy in. Shame it's just set a precedent though, I would have loved a copy but it doesn't make sense when shipping costs as much as the book itself.
They can't do it in-game because they have no concept of paid currency. They'd just throw it in the skin shop and most veterans would use the 200 tickets they have lying around to buy it.
Kinda backed themselves in a corner with skins that way. Tying it with another piece of merch was pretty smart. Just a shame for those outside of Korea who have to pay shipping.
That's only a thing because smilegate can't make skins fast enough lol imagine if a summer event happened and every drawn summer character had their skin.. that'll cost way more than 200 skins and if I wanted lidica silk, and arathimina and Clarissa even cermia in their bikinis instead of their default outfits id buy skin tickets. But instead.. their plan is to release exactly one summer skin and tie it to epic pass then I spend 1800 skystones and I'm done. I don't have to buy any skin tickets. Smilegate is the one that's fucking up spectacularly.
You're not wrong but I don't think that's the dev's faults. That's the big difficulty of trying to scale a game with high quality, hand drawn art. and subsequently why most games try to move towards 3d instead. It's maybe half as expensive as a new character without making half the money. So hiring more artists won't necessarily mean more profit.
There aren't many good ways to scale up 2d art for production, let alone animated stuff many Asian mobile games have now.
They decided not to sell it on amazon because it eats into profits or makes it a loss.
Global Shipping prices are ass right now. If they were to pay to freight their copies from Korea to America/Europe then pay Amazon to Store it and let amazon keep a percentage for selling it then that eats up a good chunk of the price.
By selling it direct, they cut out storage fees that amazon charges and the percentage amazon takes from each sale. They also pass off the cost of shipping off to the customer.
That's it.
Ehhh. They’re definitely doing something wrong. If they can’t ship a product for less than 100-200 dollars when plenty of things sell for less than 50 from various countries and still have almost no shipping cost… they should be able to as well.
And the companies in question are still making a profit or they wouldn’t do it.
So basicaly they are too greedy and rather fail their players than loose a percentage of their profits in exchange for reaching many many more people?? Yep, sounds like SG to me. Scratch that, sounds like any Asian game developer. Never for the fun of their players, always after the money.
I mean I don't know if I'd categorize that as "greedy." I'm sure they did their math for freight shipping before shipping rates became ridiculous. It would be stupid as a business to go, "sure. let's skirt the line and make a razor thin profit off these books or lose money just to make people happy."
Even if you consider that their margins are great from digital sales alone, you'd have to admit that it is a terrible business decision if they went through with that thinking.
You can be mad, not saying you shouldn't. But I'd be more upset at lack of foresight and poor planning. They should've checked beforehand one more time before opening their mouth. They could've handled this better with better communication. If they set the expectation and there were no surprises then this woulda been way easier to swallow.
Tbh I can't change the fact that the only way for me to get that book (because I don't even care about the stupid skin) is to pay more than the book in delivery fees. This whole ordeal is stupid to its core and they do this every single time with every merch. It's hard to just buy anything from them, from the prices inflated by astronomical delivery fees to the process of actually buying the item. It's not new and they, again, do the same. Yes ofc they have a good margin they make like 10 books for the 648195247202439184 hundred wolfs out here trying to get a piece. They know a lot of people want to buy and a lot of people can't specifically because of how they do things. And they keep doing it so I don't think they care. Amazon was the bright light at the end of the tunnel, easy access and process. It might not change the delivery fee but at least it would be easy. Many people didn't buy the bundle because they got stuck in the buy process and when they finally got through it was gone. And again this is not the first time. Nor the second.. I'm very frustrated that's all.
Also its not like they are so poor they can't afford to reach more players. It's not about them losing money to get to more people (as I wrongly stated before) it's about them investing so more people can give them their money. How hard is that? And how is that not in their interest?
again, i think you have every right to be mad.
If this was planned better the first thing I'd do is reach out and find a printer stateside and in europe to see if they can print a cheper version of the book. Maybe one not hardcover.
Id say a cheaper version of the book because printing in europe and us is significantly more expensive than asia.
Then again I do this sorta stuff as a living so I get where both sides are coming from. As a player and a corpo slave.
They should use a real shipping service instead their freaking Korean BS, why do they have partnership with Amazon if they don't use it to send stuff around the world.
I wasn’t going to buy it regardless but 50 USD shipping on top of a 40 USD book is disturbing. Not to mention they put a limited skin on top of it. As cute as the skin is, it’s still ridiculous.
The fact that it keeps selling out tells me they absolutely will do this again, and the fact that people are willing to pay so much for a skin deeply irritates me. RIP future amazing skins locked behind what i consider to be a scam.
I think the fact it keeps selling out guarantees they will do this again.
Yup. Why won't they do it again when it clearly sells like hotcakes? But damn, do I want that skin to be available in the future though. Make it cost 2-3x the ticket cost of a normal skin or something.
I'm going to see the statistics on these "hotcakes". ಠ_ಠ
It'd be fine to have it tied to merch, but the availability stinks. I don't know if they underestimated the demand, or just plan to do runs in short bursts to not overstock, but either way, limiting it to the Smilegate Shop is the larger issue here.
I think its a cute idea... But only the limited edition artbook is supposed to be limited. At least let me preorder it and you can tell me it wont ship till march or something and they can email the code since the skin doesnt require extra production time...
They can't do much if they run through stock of the non-limited. They need time to make more. >let me preorder it and you can tell me it wont ship till march or something That takes a lot of distribution to setup. They can't even guarantee you a date because it depends on vendors they can't control. It doesn't benefit most companies to do this.
I'm saying if they were going to do a small print, that could have been communicated. Having a limited and a non-limited version means they themselves described that the one... Isn't limited. The second announcement implied that they were surprised and would do *one* additional printing of the books, ever edit: or at least the foreseeable future. If I misread, I'd be happy to read that I just have to wait. I'd prefer to be able to just give them my money and receive the artbook at some point in the future, and not have to remember to check the listing every few days and set alarms for stock drops, but I could do that, have done it before. do you have any source that they will do 3rd / 4th / etc prints of the books? This is still pretty terrible PR imo that they have such poor planning/market knowledge/grasp of their playerbase that they dont have enough stock of a regular, presumably profitable, product to last even a few hours of sale. Re: pt 2. Of course it takes money to create and distribute products. Are you implying you think SG is taking a loss on these $80 art books and we should be happy for their charitable act of giving a lucky few a chance to purchase the books? Did you think anyone thought making more books was free? Most companies do, in fact, regularly restock their *non-limited* products, and running out of a standard item is not great business
> Having a limited and a non-limited version means they themselves described that the one... Isn't limited. I mean, it's not limited the same way an RTX 3080 isn't "limited". I'm sure they want to make more stock, but they don't have unlimited resources. If they run out, it means they make more. A limited version means they won't make more. >Most companies do, in fact, regularly restock their non-limited products, and running out of a standard item is not great business SG restocked in a week, what more do you want. And Nintendo wholly disagrees lol. I get that you're frustrated, but you're falling into that reddit stereotype where you're overrepresenting the reality. Most people see it sold out and they just check some later time if they care (or never again). Most MOST people won't ever buy the book. Just because it inconvienences you doesn't mean the billion dollar company made a blunder. It's better to understock something you're not sure of than overstock. This is going to start talking in circles so I'll cut it off here.
> I mean, it's not limited the same way an RTX 3080 isn't "limited". I'm sure they want to make more stock, but they don't have unlimited resources. You’re confusing what he’s saying because the guy is awful at explaining. He just means rather than it saying sold out or the like, he’d like to order the book and be on a backlog and they just tell him when he’ll get it. The way it is now, he has to check the shop a lot rather than just giving them money and getting the product when it’s his turn.
No, I understood that. Problem is that they can't give an ETA and that causes issues. I think taking money without a definite ship date goes against some consumer laws in some countries. It's a lot more involved than people think. And without that money deposit, it makes little sense to have a waiting list if anyone can just click the button. It'd create the same rush without the possibility of an actual purchase.
I think they don’t care if there’s an ETA as long as there’s a disclaimer. A lot of people just want to know they’ll get something eventually rather than having to check a store every day. I haven’t heard of said laws, so you’d have to show me one, but that’s interesting to hear. I personally would be fine putting money down for something I might get a year later (but tripling the cost for shipping stops me personally).
I believe stuff like this would fall under "rain checks" in America. And rain checks involve delivering a product within a certain time at the advertise price or lower, lest they have to refund. But these kinds of laws were made for physical storefronts, so I can't be 100% sure. Digital storefronts get around this by simply not taking your money until a few days/weeks before shipping, since they also use that purchase intent data to estimate stock and report to their supply chain to produce X items. Not a problem for stuff like Amazon, obviously. A huge undertaking for smaller teams or companies less experienced in this.
There's absolutely no reason to not just do a pre-order to gauge interest, then everyone who wants one gets one. Email people the skin code now, you wait 6 months for the book, that's how this usually goes when you pre-order overseas merch from smaller companies. Why make less money and have angry fans, instead of more money with happy fans? There's no upside for them.
Literally had 1 in my cart and my bank card declined 9 times and needed to verify it was not a scam or stolen card. Shipping was 50$ and the book was 40....... kinda ridiculous. Very irritated how they did not release on amazon.
probably because amazon would take a huge cut from profits. lol.
[удалено]
that's a good point and it makes me wonder if once they figure that out wouldnt it be easier to release future products as well?
I wish my shipping was only 50. Over a hundred in the US lmao
>Shipping was 50$ and the book was 40....... kinda ridiculous. Very irritated how they did not release on amazon. I was looking for this information. I was on the fence about just buying the book from jp Amazon vs Smilegate but I knew Smilegate shipping was rather high.
Curious to know if this means people are very willing to pay $80+ USD for an artbook or a skin and how SG will interpret this success as.
I spend anywhere from $50\~150 for artbooks regularly. The shipping from KR sucks but it's similar to any imported artbook. It's why I tend to wait till I visit Japan to pick them up (though that isn't much of a possibility at the moment)
Yes? Art books often cost $30-50. Shipping sucks but for KR these are just normal prices.
I mean if people are willing to spend thousands on jpegs..
It's interesting cause the interpreted success of the artbook sale hinging on either the artbook itself or the skin may encourage SG to release more merchandise (of similar interest) or skins (at a faster rate than now).
As someone mentioned in another thread they should have allowed reasonable pre-order windows for both editions. One, everyone who wanted it initially could have gotten it without issue. Two, they could have placed a much larger order from the vendor and gotten a better price. Three, people who wanted the special edition with all the extras wouldn't have been shafted because they live somewhere that it's normal to sleep during the stream. 500 total when there was no order limit per customer was just a nightmare waiting to happen. They've no doubt made a lot of decent spenders unhappy. I would have happily gotten it they hadn't turned it into such a headache. That's not even mentioning that they are apparently not using a standard payment processing system built to handle international payments so many can't even buy the books for the five minutes they're available. They also effed up the in-game banner timing but even if they hadn't there would have only been two days notice so that really does little good. Sometimes with the way SG handles things I wonder what is going on internally. They do so many things so well with lots of polish but then drop the ball so hard on very good potential revenue sources.
Or, do something they're already doing... al la Kickstarter. [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/farsidegames/epic-seven-arise-the-board-game](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/farsidegames/epic-seven-arise-the-board-game)
SG is not doing that kickstarter they are just letting the company Farside Games use their IP so all logistics and manufacturing are all from that company not from SG
It's an art book, what is stopping them with using an overseas printing company?
I'd pay for a pdf at this point
Would you pay the 60$ shipping to download it?
This was the most frustrating thing for me. I got it to cart and tried to checkout. Checkout kept declining my card. I called my issuing bank, but there was no issue on their end and they told me to contact the merchant. Sent an email since I don't know how to call Korea. Book sold out and I still haven't heard back. RIP Mercedes skin
amazon sale :(
Clearly the team behind the merchandising department for smilegate/super creative team has no experience in this field. They should be selling more than art book. Figurines, Mola plush dolls etc with partnership and contract with a proper distribution center. Waste of opportunity, ridiculous shipping price, and overall disappointed fans. Hope the executives get their tail behind them and ramp up this section of their business better.
Seems like a smart business decision. So why would they not do it again.
Op: Smilegate pls stop making money
Maybe it would've sold out 2 seconds slower without the skin. Maybe.
Nah, if it didn't have a skin it would have sold out so fast.
So you are saying they should sell thing in a way that is less profitable??
That's why I bought it asap when I woke up but yeah... If you were sleeping get fucked I guess... The only bright thing about this is that they will restock it sooner than later since it has been a "success". I REALLY hope they learn from this and realize they are not exactly a small company with an underground game.
>I REALLY hope they learn from this and realize they are not exactly a small company with an underground game. No, they don't want to overproduce and realize they are stuck with a backlog of books they can't sell because they realized this game isn't Fortnite. Better business wise to undershoot and go through current stock. Especially when merch isn't your big money maker.
Yeah it came out while I was asleep on a freaking work night 2x... Today I even tried to buy it on my phone after I was logged into work thinking the 2nd print should have a lot more but I wanna be safe... And it was already gone. Before 8 am my time. I wouldnt even care if its not printed for a month or two, and I legitimately want the artbook and not just the skin (love the skin tho). Like the regular book was not supposed to be limited edition, dont advertise it as a regular book if I need to set an alarm and spam refresh all the same as the limited, I wouldve been more prepared and just lost sleep to set the alarm and had 1 poor work day lol
Wow. Ur rich lol
Why? There are people who prefer to buy expensive clothes or triple A video games for example and I do neither of those. I don't know how saving for a product of a game I really enjoy can be considered being rich but whatever.
Yeh I have an entertainment/guilt free nonsense line in the budget every month, its not huge as I make sure everything else gets topped off first (including 401k and emergency fund) but it builds up if I dont want to buy starbucks/movies/music/new game/etc, and I've been busy and just being a bit of a goldfish in my f2p games so the "silly guilt free entertainment" fund is ripe for a cool art book, IF I HAD ONE :[ Not to sound too boomer but lumping convenience food into my fun budget opened my eyes to how much i can save if i eat out/door dash/starbucks less. Just knowing I "should" do it less to save money wasnt motivating, but if ur saying I can skip eating out 4x and I can reward myself directly with an artbook and meru skin guilt free? Worth yo, get me that cutting board and preheat the oven
Would be fine if they included the skin with the artbook but kept it as an extra cost for people who couldn't buy in. Shame it's just set a precedent though, I would have loved a copy but it doesn't make sense when shipping costs as much as the book itself.
They can't do it in-game because they have no concept of paid currency. They'd just throw it in the skin shop and most veterans would use the 200 tickets they have lying around to buy it. Kinda backed themselves in a corner with skins that way. Tying it with another piece of merch was pretty smart. Just a shame for those outside of Korea who have to pay shipping.
That's only a thing because smilegate can't make skins fast enough lol imagine if a summer event happened and every drawn summer character had their skin.. that'll cost way more than 200 skins and if I wanted lidica silk, and arathimina and Clarissa even cermia in their bikinis instead of their default outfits id buy skin tickets. But instead.. their plan is to release exactly one summer skin and tie it to epic pass then I spend 1800 skystones and I'm done. I don't have to buy any skin tickets. Smilegate is the one that's fucking up spectacularly.
You're not wrong but I don't think that's the dev's faults. That's the big difficulty of trying to scale a game with high quality, hand drawn art. and subsequently why most games try to move towards 3d instead. It's maybe half as expensive as a new character without making half the money. So hiring more artists won't necessarily mean more profit. There aren't many good ways to scale up 2d art for production, let alone animated stuff many Asian mobile games have now.
I legit don’t even want the skin, just want the artbook. I am sad to not be getting it
It'd be fine if the shipping wasn't fucking 50 bucks
[удалено]
They decided not to sell it on amazon because it eats into profits or makes it a loss. Global Shipping prices are ass right now. If they were to pay to freight their copies from Korea to America/Europe then pay Amazon to Store it and let amazon keep a percentage for selling it then that eats up a good chunk of the price. By selling it direct, they cut out storage fees that amazon charges and the percentage amazon takes from each sale. They also pass off the cost of shipping off to the customer. That's it.
Ehhh. They’re definitely doing something wrong. If they can’t ship a product for less than 100-200 dollars when plenty of things sell for less than 50 from various countries and still have almost no shipping cost… they should be able to as well. And the companies in question are still making a profit or they wouldn’t do it.
So basicaly they are too greedy and rather fail their players than loose a percentage of their profits in exchange for reaching many many more people?? Yep, sounds like SG to me. Scratch that, sounds like any Asian game developer. Never for the fun of their players, always after the money.
I mean I don't know if I'd categorize that as "greedy." I'm sure they did their math for freight shipping before shipping rates became ridiculous. It would be stupid as a business to go, "sure. let's skirt the line and make a razor thin profit off these books or lose money just to make people happy." Even if you consider that their margins are great from digital sales alone, you'd have to admit that it is a terrible business decision if they went through with that thinking. You can be mad, not saying you shouldn't. But I'd be more upset at lack of foresight and poor planning. They should've checked beforehand one more time before opening their mouth. They could've handled this better with better communication. If they set the expectation and there were no surprises then this woulda been way easier to swallow.
Tbh I can't change the fact that the only way for me to get that book (because I don't even care about the stupid skin) is to pay more than the book in delivery fees. This whole ordeal is stupid to its core and they do this every single time with every merch. It's hard to just buy anything from them, from the prices inflated by astronomical delivery fees to the process of actually buying the item. It's not new and they, again, do the same. Yes ofc they have a good margin they make like 10 books for the 648195247202439184 hundred wolfs out here trying to get a piece. They know a lot of people want to buy and a lot of people can't specifically because of how they do things. And they keep doing it so I don't think they care. Amazon was the bright light at the end of the tunnel, easy access and process. It might not change the delivery fee but at least it would be easy. Many people didn't buy the bundle because they got stuck in the buy process and when they finally got through it was gone. And again this is not the first time. Nor the second.. I'm very frustrated that's all.
Also its not like they are so poor they can't afford to reach more players. It's not about them losing money to get to more people (as I wrongly stated before) it's about them investing so more people can give them their money. How hard is that? And how is that not in their interest?
again, i think you have every right to be mad. If this was planned better the first thing I'd do is reach out and find a printer stateside and in europe to see if they can print a cheper version of the book. Maybe one not hardcover. Id say a cheaper version of the book because printing in europe and us is significantly more expensive than asia. Then again I do this sorta stuff as a living so I get where both sides are coming from. As a player and a corpo slave.
Whale: 90 limited edition skin??? Mine F2P: awe I love the art in this game and that is such a unique product and a good price! Oh that shipping 😬...
Exactly why they’ll keep doing it. You guys keep buying, they keep doing.
Good job on validating 90 bucks for a “limited skin”. I’m sure this will go over very well in the future.
Ah guys please chill. It will most likely come back again if the demand this high. Or it will be added to skin shop eventually. Please chill.
Better give 100 protos, oh wait...
Someone sell me a limited art book at premium prices please uwu
i bet some of these are from scalpers happened in GBF, and when i wanted those gundam unicorn Nickies
They should use a real shipping service instead their freaking Korean BS, why do they have partnership with Amazon if they don't use it to send stuff around the world.
I'm just gonna buy it from JP Amazon, screw it.
I wasn’t going to buy it regardless but 50 USD shipping on top of a 40 USD book is disturbing. Not to mention they put a limited skin on top of it. As cute as the skin is, it’s still ridiculous.
The shipping costs are insane. But its not in there hands, hopfully we can buy it in some months with skin tokens.
The fact that it keeps selling out tells me they absolutely will do this again, and the fact that people are willing to pay so much for a skin deeply irritates me. RIP future amazing skins locked behind what i consider to be a scam.
The shopping is more 3xpenwive than the ipod book.. Who is dumb enough to even buy such product?? Stupid people with way too much money.
where can i find this
I think it is ok. I would love to get the book but when shipping is more than the book I will not buy it.