What Exactly is Zen Trying to Pull Here?

[pinballmonster]

90% of all reports indicate that FX is nothing more than a beta. The UI is a wreck, the game is so poorly optimized even the highest end gaming systems can't keep up, zen hasn't even proofread text within the game? 1th place?!?

At this stage it should be free to download and play for at least a select group of beta testers initially. Players who have a track record of providing quality feedback and have extensive knowledge and experience testing virtual pinball in particular. After closed beta testing, zen could open up the beta testing to more players before finally releasing it into the wild for sale.

Instead, zen is trying to release an early/closed beta test development for a premium unheard of price! $15 for Indy, and $15/mo. for a subscription, the highest in the industry even though they only have 38 games!

How can zen get away with charging the highest prices in the industry when players should be playing for free to help zen's developers get the game into playable shape?!?

What makes this all the more bizarre is that zen has been blessed with a huge influx of revenue from apple, epic and presumably embracer (maybe not the latter), while releasing almost nothing in the past year and a half.

Zen has claimed all along that UE is a superior engine which would free up resources for actual game development instead of engine maintenance yet during their time using unreal they have produced exactly zero titles that work properly with UE.

Ironically, Indy in FX3 and mobile looks and plays beautifully.

Zen is starting to look like the Titanic.

 

[Crawley]

"We're doomed! Doomed I tells ya! YARRRRRGGGGGGGHHHH!" - H. J. Simpson

 

[Zaphod77]

What they are trying to do is have cross buy across all platforms.

before you could pass along the license to the next one, but only on the same platform. you could go from xbox360 to xbox one and/or pc. or go from ps3 to ps4. zen to zen2 and zen3. fx to fx2 and fx3. except when a license fell through.

Going forward, everything has to be bought, but because all platforms run off the same new virtual currency. you buy it once, and you have the table on pc, android, ios, sony, nintendo, microsoft.

The ability to get it on mobile plus another platform at the same time alone is vey useful. and that's how they are priced. for mobile plus another.

 

[spoonman]

I'll stick with Pinball FX3. I'm not about to pay for all 40+ tables again to migrate them to PBFX4, for a slight improvement in gfx. It would have been nice if they did what they've been doing and allow us to import them into the new version. That's what gets me to buy more tables.. I like to have them all in one place. I'll likely stop buying tables when they stop releasing tables for FX3.

 

[Firefox2000]

This is normal for todays gaming industry acorss the board, not just here with Zen, and it's a old trick, call a unfinished game early access, launch it, watch people spend money on it with promises of a better tomorrow just around every corner, then take some of that money and try and finish the game, so basically you get the consumers to pay for the game and you get max rewards for min effort, plus a added cherry on top is if you can grab some exlcusive platform cash to add to your pot, then you are laughing. lol

Of course the gamble here is your unfinished game could chase consumers away, but Zen have played it well here by grabbing that epic store exclusive cash, so even if the game were to go down the tubes, Zen made money from it in its unfinished state. ha

 

[joeblow]

What they are trying to do is have cross buy across all platforms.

before you could pass along the license to the next one, but only on the same platform. you could go from xbox360 to xbox one and/or pc. or go from ps3 to ps4. zen to zen2 and zen3. fx to fx2 and fx3. except when a license fell through.

Going forward, everything has to be bought, but because all platforms run off the same new virtual currency. you buy it once, and you have the table on pc, android, ios, sony, nintendo, microsoft.

The ability to get it on mobile plus another platform at the same time alone is vey useful. and that's how they are priced. for mobile plus another.

If that's the goal, they need to also offer a cheaper option that lets someone pay less in cash to stick to one platform. Then it is on the consumer if they have to re-buy tables on other platforms, but at least they are not over-charged for a feature they may have zero interest in.

 

[Zaphod77]

I'm not sure if that's even technically possible with a shared virtual currency of their own. but as i said i think they are pricing as it was a two platform purchase, not as if it was a six platform purchase.

While i'm sure they would love to have done their usual import stunt, i'm pretty sure it's completely impossible to do that and also have cross company buy.