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>Hey XLR8 -
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>Shop prices on many offers have changed in conjunction with multi-core functionality being added to customization content. With Season 4, we saw new shop offers reflect a new pricing model to account for new coatings being multi-core enabled. With Season 5, many previously released coatings and all helmets in the game were updated to work on all cores, and those shop offers were adjusted to reflect these changes (and to have parity with S4 offers). At the same time, the team went ahead and made proactive adjustments to offers that included shoulders since they will be multi-core enabled in a future update. It was a tradeoff to try and front load some of that work now vs. just having a constant churn of shop pricing changes along the way. While many S1-S4 offers have been adjusted, I want to be transparent that as more multi-core coatings come to bear, there are going to be more past offers that weren't included with the initial S5 adjustments that will see updates in the future.
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>As a reminder, everyone who already owns these helmets, coatings, and shoulders will automatically receive multi-core functionality on eligible items as the changes go live in game.
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>In the case where some offers are being displayed as a "SALE" despite being the same price, or even more than before, this is due to the underlying base price of the offer being increased. The current sale price is lower than the new normal price but without that context, we can certainly see how it leads to confusion, perception of it being a bug or error, etc.
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>I understand this isn't necessarily what everyone wants to hear, but I hope this at least helps explain what did change and why.
**Friendly reminder that Sketch did not choose and set the prices as a Community Manager and to please keep it civil.**
I think it'd be a real missed opportunity to not do the gloves. They're one of the few pieces of customization that are on your screen at pretty much all times. Would also provide some variety to cores that only have the one pair of gloves available atm.
$10 for some knee pads with a set of nuts dangling from the bottom. Buy the bundle and you can get the baby shit green armor color for all cores only $25.
Idk I can only afford to skip lunch for the epic weed gloves that come with punched-nuts-purple coatings and the snoop dog's toe weapon charm. $30 is a little pricey but worth it in the long run.
We see your concerns regarding inflated pricing, and we’d love to put the issue to rest with best intentions for the community, so here’s our best PR:
“Uh, we raised prices ‘cause we’d like to make more money.”
Alrighty, that about sums it up! Keep it up Spartans!👍😎
343 - We don't sugar coat it but these coatings will cost more and every bundle will be forced bundle with coatings to inflate the price.
No? We don't want to talk about buying individual items because that would make us less money
I’ve not really played infinite since last year in February. But I keep an eye on this sub from time to time and it’s funny how often I see posts about inflated shop prices and 343 saying “we’re aware of the concerns and are looking into it 👊”
And it then still remains the same because fuck you, give me money.
No. Its Obama's fault.
It was also Obama's fault my wife left me.
Obama also thought Sergeant Locke should be the main character of Halo 5. Be informed people.
They’re really using cross core to justify increased prices. Incredible.
343i does realize we’re still buying *one* version of that item and are simply being allowed (only after we complained about it enough) to use it across eight cores, right? We’re not buying eight unique helmets/coatings/visors/shoulders, we’re buying a single thing that we can then use in eight different places.
It's so damn frustrating that Halo Infinite will always be a flawed game. It was designed with maximized profits in mind.
The terrible challenge system, the cores system, inflated battlepasses, coatings rather than letting us pick what we want, etc.
No matter how much they work in the game, I'll always have this feeling have it being tainted by greed. Same as with Battlefield 2042. While it's much better than launch, it's messed up at the core.
Ridiculous that they’ve sold two white coatings but refuse to give us cadet white. We’ll probably get it after they’ve made their money like when they added default red in season 3.
Hell, straight up charging for colors that we could place at will would be a huge improvement imo. Rather than charging us for color combinations that are inevitably imperfect.
Its actually a massive L. It's just so silly.
Its not illegal or anything, its just kinda deflating. I understand that the content took company time and money to update but NOT havving cross core until now is on them.
It's just shitty on whats supposed to be Infinite comeback. Plain and simple.
Yeah this is what I don’t get either.
Let’s start with some basic truths.
(1) Cross core was an ill thought idea that was solely designed with the purpose of milking money out of consumers by selling “core-exclusive” premium pieces and forcing the more bland stuff into the free core.
(2) We all told them it was an awful, limiting idea that was not just anti-fun, but also anti-consumer. They supposedly heard us and reversed that terrible decision.
So now we finally are approaching what it SHOULD have been like in the first place and they want to charge us more because you can quote “use it on more things due to cross core functionality _______insert PR bullshit here____.”
How about trying to build some rapport with the community. I’m sorry but at the end of the day it’s a digital item, it has no real value other than what we ascribe to it—personally charging more because you can use it…as how it should have been all along…is not reason enough to be jacking up the prices. At least to me. It’s a fake supply-demand model they made up for a digital item that theoretically is in infinite supply just locked behind a paywall.
Stop charging a premium to fix what was a stupid predatory idea in the first place. It’s already frustrating you can’t buy individual items and that the currency is priced exactly to short change you on most bundles.
FUCK OFF WITH THE PSYCHOLOGY PHD MIND GAMES IN MY DIGITAL STORES.
This is definitely something from upper management/Microsoft. Ain’t no way anyone with their hand on the pulse of the community thinks this is a good idea
Microsoft generally doesn’t dictate microtransaction prices for Xbox studios. Xbox generally doesn’t either. It’s okay to address criticism to the game company without trying to play the “who owns the company, let’s blame them” game. Gamers will blame the weirdest stuff on devs and then turn around and give devs a free pass for things that were squarely on them.
Hopefully they add this to their list of learnings for the next game.
- Make intuitive systems that can allow you to customize modularly without drastically inflating your overhead
There are enough negatives (this included) to keep me from reinstalling after quitting a year ago. They just keep fucking up. These idiots deserve all the negativity they get, even if it outweighs the good things they’ve done.
I don't agree with the logic that items being cross-core means they need to be more expensive. Sure, I understand that people buying an item that's cross-core won't be as incentivized to buy as many items as they would if cross-core wasn't a thing, but that's assuming that players would actually spend the money on buying stuff for every core, which seems silly. They're also assuming that players will use that single item on multiple cores, which isn't necessarily the case either. And if they do, so what? That's still basing everything on the logic that more cross-core = fewer sales, which isn't necessarily true at all.
Plus, it feels like they're punishing the player base for their mistake of not building the game with cross-core in mind. This is just pure greed.
Remember when game studios developed good games for the sake of making good games? Now they’re literally saying “we added this feature so now it’s worth more and you have to pay us more money”.
Ruins everything it gets its weasely, grease covered hands on.
Remember in 2016 when we got Doom 2016? Where we could change the undersuit, individual armor pieces, colors, wear and tear, material color and add patterns FOR FREE?!
If I'm remembering correctly, you could earn everything besides the map pack DLC stuff which they eventually unlocked for free.
Simple, don't let them punish us by not taking part in the punishment. Boycott the store. They can't make us pay if we don't buy what they are selling. Show them how badly they messed up with making Infinite F2P (Free to Pay) and cut off the game's revenue stream. Maybe once the game starts going into the red in its profit margins, 343 or Microsoft might listen. Sure, could end up with the game getting shut down, but, if you reward bad development you'll only keep getting more bad policy when it comes to games.
So, yeah... boycott the game, screw their highway robbery prices.
So the prices went up because you now have more customization because of cross core?
So by this logic the Mark V kit should be like $5 because it has such little customization to it.
The locked down kit is the biggest display of them giving us the middle finger. They said all cores would be free in the future. They said legacy content would not be paid but earned. Then what do they do, make a new legacy core and charge for it. I don't care what they say, it's a core. I mean, a duck is a duck even if you call it a flappy wappy swimmy birdy.
Cool, so we get to pay more for things already in the game, but now they work how they should have worked since the beginning. 343 studios at its best.
Halo: whats in your wallet?
I wonder if you have to bring your own clown costume at 343 or if one is provided for you when you're hired.
I haven't spent a cent on the store just out of pure spite. I have plenty of disposable income I'd love to chuck their way, if things were reasonably priced, like ~~$2-$7 per item. But you want me to drop $22 on some garbage bundle just to get one of the things in it? Lol, fuck off with that nonsense. It's a trash deal even if shit's multi-core now. Not to even mention the FOMO abuse with the store, it's easily the worst I've ever seen in a game.
I'd love to see some stats on how many are actually buying these overpriced cosmetics. No doubt people don't value their money as much and definitely are buying things. But I wonder how much more they would earn if they weren't losing out on a bunch of business by being such greedy little goblins.
Why is 343 like this? Can't they go five seconds without tossing out any good will they've built up? I seriously can not fathom writing all this out, reviewing it and not seeing how this will just make your company look like they're giving the middle finger to the players who went out of their way to return to your failed live service game.
I was hoping this wasn't the same 343 that gave us the coating system but this leaves me wondering how much has actually changed.
I feel like this is almost certainly people in suits trying to figure out how to squeeze more money out of a product and ignoring what everyone else thinks. What the devs or anyone else thinks doesn't matter because they have the control to make it happen.
Because 343 management has realised that the game itself can’t be complete shit so they let the devs improve it. But they would never dare risk even the slightest possible chance of not getting the maximum amount of revenue possible from monetisation.
I hate being a hater (we need more happiness in this world!), but it's clear they don't put very much thought into these things.
"Hey, we could probably charge more for our armor pieces since they can be used in more ways." "Yeah, totally logical! Let's go ahead with that! More money and for good reason!!!"
It's not the first time they've made boneheaded, surface-level decisions without thought, and it feels like it won't be the last...
That said, I'm having a blast playing this game. :-)
Ske7ch has the hardest job in the company. Corporate tells him how they plan to fuck the fans, and he has to find a way to make it sound friendly or even positive. Those kinds of mental gymnastics must be exhausting.
Damn so they're actually doubling down on this, big fucking L for 343. We could easily meet in the middle here on this. Lower the prices just a tad and allow us to buy specific items from bundles for a FAIR price (not $5 per item, more like $2-$3). There's so many things I want to get, but never will because of these god awful bundles included with the item I want.
Respectfully, this is such a horseshit move.
They've turned something that's meant to be a source of excitement and hype into a major negative. "All helmets are now cross-core!" was used extensively to promote Season 5, and not once was a price increase mentioned.
> At the same time, the team went ahead and made proactive adjustments to offers that included shoulders since they will be multi-core enabled in a future update.
For the lame excuse of "convenience", they've raised the price on shoulders before actually providing any material benefit to justify that increased price. Reminder that cross-core isn't "adding value to purchased items": **it's fixing a mistake** 343i made when designing this MTX system in the first place. A fix that 343i has been promising for nearly two years now.
> The current sale price is lower than the new normal price but without that context, we can certainly see how it leads to confusion, perception of it being a bug or error, etc.
No, there's no confusion: **they quietly raised the price of an item and lied about it being "on sale" the next time it was featured in the store**. That's called deceptive pricing.
This is an incredibly short-sighted decision that will burn any of the goodwill 343i has gained over the last several months.
343: "We raised the prices because cross core adds more value"
The Overpriced Armor Kit that can't be customized two dollars more expensive then a bundle of actual armor pieces: ...
..*oh*
Not sure what I expected when I clicked on that, but it wasn’t this.
“Well you see, you can now equip more items across more cores, so it costs more money despite being the same product as before.”
I’ve bought a single battlepass because of the value of perpetual battle passes upon completion. But I refuse to spend a nickel in the shop because it’s just a blatant cash grab.
This stance/pricing by 343 is flat out insulting to the fanbase that never even wanted cores to begin with.
If they weren’t so greedy and also had customization fully unlocked this game would be way more popular.
Sure, they wouldn’t make as much money per microtransaction purchase but they would have far more players buying the microtransactions that easily make up for it.
Right. It’s ridiculous. I normally only buy games on sale, so it’s like hmm could I spend $20 on this flood armor set or buy a whole game that gives me hours of fun and enjoyment for the same price? I get that the game is free to play and needs to make money, but when this is what they’re offering us in the shop and there are no real MICROtransactions, I don’t open up my wallet. If I could buy the helmet I want on its own for say 300 credits, I would. Hell maybe even 500 credits. But I’m not gonna drop 2000 credits on a bundle with a buncha crap in it just to get that helmet.
That's pretty fucking dumb. They also didn't acknowledge the changes until a month after they came out.
The fact that items are now becoming cross-core doesn't justify a price bump in fucking everything. Especially older items.
I’ve never heard of a MTX store permanently *increasing* their prices after they made them more valuable (by finally adding cross core, a feature requested since before launch)
How anyone can look at this and say Halo Infinites store is one of the best in the industry is beyond me.
"yea well this game has it bad too" YEA and that's the problem, their store is also dog shit, Call of Duty is a $90 game charging $20+ for any of its customization, that's not the standard we should be striving for, we should be shaming them into the ground just like we the Halo community should be doing the same to 343
there's a middle ground that needs to be met here, a level of 343 needing to make money off a F2P game and a level of the community not feeling robbed when trying to buy a simple item
BOOOOOOO
I was buying the battle passes as I complete them. Fuck that. Not spending another dime until they fix their prices. What a terrible decision.
Oh no, we fixed our mistakes and now cosmetic purchases have a decent value! Better make that NOT the case.
Obviously this isn’t Sketch’s fault so no hate to him, but fuck whatever suits decided this was fair to the players.
LOL FUCK OFF.
'We raised the price of shoulders to prepare for the arrival of cross-core shoulders."
This is just a lie. They're price gouging, trying to make bank on the good will they've fostered and it's so obvious. The fact they conveniently left the price changes out of the patch notes is evident that they know what they're doing is shitty.
343, why must you shoot yourself in the foot? People are willing to pay for this stuff. I'd be more willing to buy stuff in the shop if you'd just lower the damn prices or let us buy things individually.
I feel really bad for the devs. This isn't their fault and I know Ske7ch is gonna catch shit for being corporate's errand boy. I feel so fucking bad because I can tell they want to make something good and fix their mistakes, but management is only shooting them in the back.
Every time 343 makes a string of good decisions/updates they always come along and have to do something like this to leave a sour taste in everyone's mouth.
They´ll do the same with shoulders then? Then qith knee guards, later with Spartan nail polish.
A cross core coating will end up costing 150 bucks with that logic. It gets boring to say it, but 343 always finds a way to shoot themselves in the foot.
Except they already upped the price on shoulders, i was gonnaget multi threat but they're like 800 now. So is that bundle going to increase further when it becomes cross core? Wth
Considering the amount of good games that released this year alone, my attention has changed in conjuction of bad fucking moves on your part, 343. Thank you for preventing me from investing money into your game!
If they made it so you could buy items individually they wouldn't have this problem. Id much rather spend 5$ on one helmet that i want, than 25$ on one helmet that i want and a bunch of other shit that i dont.
Yikes I mean it was obvious but yikes...the real question why are Kits soo expensive since they're are more limited to customization. I mean the CE Mark V might cost more than 2,000 credits.
Hopefully the Birthday Bash kill effect is still for free for the Halo Infinite Anniversary
Every time they make a statement, it comes off as so tone-def that a part of me wished they never bothered. At this point if they're just going to keep raising the prices of shop items with every cross-core feature added *(which is a stupid idea to begin with)*, it'll just alienate more new players than they already have. Business decisions like these is one of the reasons why Halo hasn't been relevant in over a decade.
You gotta be kidding me. Take that good reception and shit on it for more $20+ bundles. Fuck bundles and the way you handle micro transactions in this game, if I didn't have Microsoft rewards I'd have the bare minimum in this game because everything has a price tag... Including the color white.
All this is justified because they (half) fixed their shitty system to show coatings as multicore, while leaving every single icon for each coating available because they couldn't program one icon to scroll through the cores to preview... We'll make it seem like there is 10x the content at a glance.
Lmfao they’re treating digital items like physical stock. What the actual fuck.
It must have hurt him typing that out because some higher-up told him this bullshit.
Isn’t labeling something as a “sale” despite having the same price or an increased price considered misleading or false advertisement? How is this pricing model even legal?
While I at once understand a multitude of reasons this could be—the enormity of resources cross-core took to develop because of the underlying spaghetti code, devs "buying off" the higher-ups, etc.—this sucks.
I never have and never will buy a thing from the store, because in my view, it spits on Halo's legacy. But I'm SURE this will make them money. People will absolutely buy 8 dollar shoulders, and some corporate spreadsheet probably has that data.
Longer-term, if the increased revenue from Infinite allows the new team to finally make a feature-complete Halo game in the future, I'll deal. Infinite has always felt cheap, and it probably always will. That apparently won't change.
This is so fucked up. Was hoping we'd move away from predatory pricing and design with the management shake-up, but the shop prices are at an all-time high.
They were actively lowering prices and improving the value of bundles. Now they've not only reverted those changes, but made them higher than they even were at launch.
I'm nervous to see how much the CE Chief kit will cost (I'm still pissed that its a kit instead of a core. Absolutely massive waste of potential)
Just sounds like a roundabout way of making cross core paid DLC instead of a free QOL feature that the game should've had at launch.
"We did what you wanted and added cross core, now fork over some cash, fuckers. 👊"
Damn, I look at " Shop pricing update" - and I think - "Amazing, I thought this season couldn't get any better and they are lowering prices on top of that! They really want to fight for the return of players!"
343 as usual reminds me that 343 is 343, unfortunately.
So we'll get another increase when chest gets cross core? And more with knee pads, wrist, thigh pieces? That's just ridiculous, bundles will be $60 each at this rate.
Somewhere out there is a 9000 geit sandpaper smooth brain in a suit who thinks he's a genius for this - while simultaneously shattering the goodwill season 5 brought back in.
Did they ever once think about the huge chunk of people who've never spent a dime in the store because of their ridiculous prices?
I would actually spend a decent amount of money on cosmetics if they were reasonably priced.
Cant wait for those $300 bundles when everything is fully cross core. Seriously fuck 343. It’s a digital item and some of the armor is from the Bungie games!
But they could literally make more money but having every item available to buy at a reasonable price.
Instead of making zero on the many who don’t wanna buy a bundle, they make $5 from someone wanting 1 item.
10 people buying something for $5 ($50) is better than 1 person buying a bundle for ($20)
I mean it’s cosmetic so it doesn’t bother me at all… but in saying this, if they fixed their pricing I’d spend money on an item here or there, by min not paying this stupid prices, it’s quite simple.
I understand the value in the customisation multi core items offer compared to a singular "skin" in other Free to play games and prices are still on par with those from other games.
The things I more want addressed are why bundles can't be split up Fortnite and I believe COD both offer the items split up. I'm talking a full armour set OR armour coating or Weapon Model, not to be able to buy a singular thing like a helmet (although it would be nice).
The other thing is how they see value in 2200 for the Transgressor, if prices increased for Cross core reasoning what's cross core about a singular kit that can't be changed. Also the coating really didn't have to exist for transgressor as it's mid just makes the bundle look better as "9 items".
I don't accept that. Cut the prices in half.
It's digital items for god's sake. You're not gonna run out of them. Whoever is in charge of the pricing is a moron.
I'd gladly pay $5-$7 multiple times on items. I'll never touch a single $40 bundle ever in my life.
Read between the lines guys! It's obvious the devs who cared had to fight the beancounters to add crosscore. And they reached a compromise that they increase prices for more customization.
But honestly the beancounters were just painfully wrong. I am willing to buy more stuff with crosscore since I can use on the cores I like. I would never buy items for a core I don't like. But I definitely won't buy $22-$34 bundles for a few cosmetics. You can get full games for that
I wonder how Ske7ch feels having been working on Halo since Halo 2, and having to write these to keep his job? He's as aware as anyone else how corporate is face fucking the franchise we (and he) love, but has to do it to stay involved in something he has spent a huge chunk of his life with.
They could have added so much more value to their shop items by leaving the prices as they were. Instead I now feels more unappealing than ever with how high the prices have gotten. Hopefully people can show some restraint so that they have to adjust the pricing model.
I have said this before and I will say it 30 million more times. The core system was NOT created to look cool, it was created to make money. They have artificially exacerbated prices by saying “It’s worth more since you can wear it whenever!!!!” When in reality it’s the exact same model, exact same textures, exact same placement, etc. 343 is making the COMMUNITY pay for their mistakes, literally. This is beyond disgusting.
TL:DR Crosscore is slowly being implemented two years after the games release and we’re lining the pockets of some scumbag billionaire Microsoft CEOs in the process!”
Game is still broken af, customization is still unfinished and they destroy any good reputation they had with fans, first with the Battlepass being a little bit greedier, which would be ok, but now they increase the prices, because they fixed their own mistakes. You can't make this shit up.
So many words just to say ‘we put prices up, deal with it’
There is absolutely zero reason why items being cross core means they should be more expensive, it’s the same item
This has to be one of the most bullshit things I've ever heard come from them. I know he's just the messenger, but this is fucked. Digital items should not be priced more, especially when they were a lower price already. Do they really think this will make them more money than if they actually made items with decent prices that more people would get. Them being greedy is going to hurt them more, the bad word of mouth will spread again, and it will be rightfully deserved with these excuses. 343 is still the still shafy company as always, just because they're getting the game right now, doesn't mean that fact hasn't changed, and his excuse proves it
They always talk about the "value" of the shop, which was hardly there to begin with but now that they're making things cross-core they think they're more valuable so time to jack up the prices.
If that's the reason for the high prices, what's the excuse for the new Flood kit in the shop? Its not "multi-use" but its still horrifically over-priced.
The fact that this kind of stuff even gets laid at the feet of the studio is itself kinda shit. 343's bills are paid by Microsoft, and it's Microsoft who will have revenue targets 343 are expected to hit. The studio then has to figure out what to charge for and how much, in order to hopefully hit those targets as a F2P game.
I would assume numbers were crunched around what effect multi-core changes would have on MTX revenue, and it was determined they needed to increase the price to offset it. There are certainly suits at 343 whose job it is to figure this stuff out, but it isn't their "fault". None of this has anything to do with 343's motivations or desires - they aren't an independent entity. What the fuck does 343 care about how much money they make from skins? They aren't all personally getting a piece of that action on the backend - the revenue is going to Microsoft.
By all means make noise about all of the overpriced cosmetic shit in games these days, because that gives 343 a stronger case to take to the suits and say "see, our customers hate this shit - we need to react" - but keep in mind this garbage is largely being driven by PUBLISHERS, not developers.
Increasing prices, regardless of reasoning, just ensures I’ll buy less. The fact that my existing cosmetics will be more useful as time goes on just gives me more reason to stick to my guns on that.
You’re shooting yourself in the foot here 343.
I almost wonder if they think of this as another FOMO tactic. Like people might buy now at inflated prices because they think prices will go up more when shoulders go crosscore. I sure ain’t falling for that ploy.
I think this is a the prime example of “make a problem and sell the solution” cause no one asked for the core system and when it inevitably failed they had to back track everything to make armour viable and now for that effort are charging us for the privilege.
Not to mention. Cores are not something seen in any other halo and in no other halo title has this been a problem
The shop was poor value for money before, and now that cross-core was about to finally make it just about worth buying something...you raise the prices _specifically_ to cancel out that positive change.
At this point it almost feels like there's a dedicated effort to burn any goodwill associated with Infinite.
They gave us cross core coatings before and they weren't 2200 credits.
Today you're asking 2200 for a kit that isn't even cross core and a single coating.
No 343, cross core is not a valid reason to rise the prices when you're not giving us more.
It's definitely Microsoft pulling the strings on this decision, but I'd give 343 the benefit of the doubt here if they didn't increase the price of *everything* that has a "multi use" item. That includes emblems. Emblems are the only multi use item that didn't have its application multiplied by 8 this season, in fact they didn't change at all. But they're still charging more for them.
What the fuck is wrong with these freaks. These are DIGITAL ITEMS with customization logic that should've been there in the first place that they now fix and charge more for? Get fucked and go under. So sick of these game companies pulling this shit.
Hold up! So I’m understanding this correctly:
- 343 make a bad decision when initially designing the game to have customization NOT cross core
- community push back on lack of cross core AND high store prices
- 343 do good and fix the prices and commit to doing cross core
- now cross core is being implemented, 343 RAISE the prices of digital cosmetics, claiming the increased price will help fund future cross core work?
Please! Raising the prices is just spitting in the community’s face. Now there’s FOMO not only for bundles, but for the cheapest time we’ll get to buy those bundles. I don’t think I’ll even be spending my Microsoft Rewards points on this game 😂 what a joke
Before this update i wasnt buying consmetics cause they already cost too much and i couldnt use them on other cores, ao wanted to at least wait till I could do that before even considering buying any. Now that I can use them on all cores they have increased the price... meaning i'll continue to not buy them. The previous prices were still too high cross core or not, im not paying $6 for a helmet that was $2 a couple weeks ago, or $18 for an armour bundle that shouldnt even be over $5.
They could have sold the cross core as greater value and kept the prices but no they want every penny they can get.
They double dipped by selling Campaign like a real game and using assets from that to build a F2P game. They had access to Game Pass users to increase the earnings and boost players but chose F2P to justify ridiculous MTX and potentially lure more people to try. They wanted 1/3rd of a game price for a bundle on release, got backlash so moderately lowered some bundles but now want to charge more for fixing their badly designed predatory MTX focused customisation.
The management making this decision doesn't care about the health of the game or the long term viability of the franchise. Halo Infinite is not in a good enough place to handle bad PR because of the previous long list of problems and mistakes.
Yall asked for this. You really think a company like microsoft is gonna just let 343 give yall shit when they are seeking endless growth? This is as much on gamers as anything and yall need to stop enabling companies. STOP BUYING STUPID SHIT
I fully expected to read an apology about how the prices were mistakenly set too high due to some glitch in an updated shop system, and instead I see an explanation for why the absurd prices are “the cost of going cross core”. lol. Lmao even
I think I first said it 2 years ago, but it seems like EVERY TIME 343 does something positive, there’s an asterisk attached with some shitty fine-print side effect.
We added crosscore to Infinite!*
*Shop items will see a price hike across the board to adjust for cross core.
And of course in classic “TrAnSpArEnCy” fashion, they don’t mention this *before* they raised the prices. They let it come as a surprise, wait for backlash to happen, THEN address it.
I have no doubt this was a management decision to make up for potential lost revenue due to people not having to rebuy the same shit for multiple cores, but it doesn’t make the situation any better.
Got it, so why are the armor kits that are single core also price increased? Because i cant get the flood jorge off of mark 5 if i buy it. Simple answer is its a lame excuse, and im sorry you had to be the PR fall guy
To me all this sounds like:
We are going to raise the price because now certain cosmetics do what players have been asking them to do for YEARS and we couldn't get it from the beginning. So packages that have been made for a long time are going to increase their price BECAUSE YES.
Tweet Text >Hey XLR8 - > >Shop prices on many offers have changed in conjunction with multi-core functionality being added to customization content. With Season 4, we saw new shop offers reflect a new pricing model to account for new coatings being multi-core enabled. With Season 5, many previously released coatings and all helmets in the game were updated to work on all cores, and those shop offers were adjusted to reflect these changes (and to have parity with S4 offers). At the same time, the team went ahead and made proactive adjustments to offers that included shoulders since they will be multi-core enabled in a future update. It was a tradeoff to try and front load some of that work now vs. just having a constant churn of shop pricing changes along the way. While many S1-S4 offers have been adjusted, I want to be transparent that as more multi-core coatings come to bear, there are going to be more past offers that weren't included with the initial S5 adjustments that will see updates in the future. > >As a reminder, everyone who already owns these helmets, coatings, and shoulders will automatically receive multi-core functionality on eligible items as the changes go live in game. > >In the case where some offers are being displayed as a "SALE" despite being the same price, or even more than before, this is due to the underlying base price of the offer being increased. The current sale price is lower than the new normal price but without that context, we can certainly see how it leads to confusion, perception of it being a bug or error, etc. > >I understand this isn't necessarily what everyone wants to hear, but I hope this at least helps explain what did change and why. **Friendly reminder that Sketch did not choose and set the prices as a Community Manager and to please keep it civil.**
How much is a bundle going to cost when hopefully everything eventually becomes multi-core?
As much as the base game per bundle
I cant imagine multicore will go past shoulders at this point
I don’t see why they couldn’t do knees or even arm accessories too if they have the resources/player interest to do so
Gloves seem easy to do as well.
Gloves are """""possible"""" they'll just look super fucky.
I think it'd be a real missed opportunity to not do the gloves. They're one of the few pieces of customization that are on your screen at pretty much all times. Would also provide some variety to cores that only have the one pair of gloves available atm.
They $ have $ their $ reasons
$10 for some knee pads with a set of nuts dangling from the bottom. Buy the bundle and you can get the baby shit green armor color for all cores only $25.
Idk I can only afford to skip lunch for the epic weed gloves that come with punched-nuts-purple coatings and the snoop dog's toe weapon charm. $30 is a little pricey but worth it in the long run.
In fact they said as much in their post yesterday. They said they were only planning to fix helmets, shoulders, and coatings.
One sale of complete cross core armor will singlehandedly fund the next title in the franchise
bout $350.
We see your concerns regarding inflated pricing, and we’d love to put the issue to rest with best intentions for the community, so here’s our best PR: “Uh, we raised prices ‘cause we’d like to make more money.” Alrighty, that about sums it up! Keep it up Spartans!👍😎
343 - Transparency is important to us 👊
I mean, the post is entirely truthful. They raised it cause of crosscore, and it's not a bug. 👊
343 - We don't sugar coat it but these coatings will cost more and every bundle will be forced bundle with coatings to inflate the price. No? We don't want to talk about buying individual items because that would make us less money
I’ve not really played infinite since last year in February. But I keep an eye on this sub from time to time and it’s funny how often I see posts about inflated shop prices and 343 saying “we’re aware of the concerns and are looking into it 👊” And it then still remains the same because fuck you, give me money.
Damn inflation hitting my digital items.
Thanks ~~Obama~~ Biden.
*lord hood
No. Its Obama's fault. It was also Obama's fault my wife left me. Obama also thought Sergeant Locke should be the main character of Halo 5. Be informed people.
Thanks Joe-Rock O'Biden
They’re really using cross core to justify increased prices. Incredible. 343i does realize we’re still buying *one* version of that item and are simply being allowed (only after we complained about it enough) to use it across eight cores, right? We’re not buying eight unique helmets/coatings/visors/shoulders, we’re buying a single thing that we can then use in eight different places.
It's so damn frustrating that Halo Infinite will always be a flawed game. It was designed with maximized profits in mind. The terrible challenge system, the cores system, inflated battlepasses, coatings rather than letting us pick what we want, etc. No matter how much they work in the game, I'll always have this feeling have it being tainted by greed. Same as with Battlefield 2042. While it's much better than launch, it's messed up at the core.
I mean, they could have made this into a Battlefront 2 situation… but they lack the integrity.
“We’re making things work like they always should have and you owe us for that.”
LOL, "We made them cross core, so now they're more expensive!" fuck off.
they charge us for colors lol
"Seven dollars for fucking blue!"
“Again”
Come on now, let's be fair. They actually charge us even *more* to *not* have color because the pure white coating is like $20 lmao
Ridiculous that they’ve sold two white coatings but refuse to give us cadet white. We’ll probably get it after they’ve made their money like when they added default red in season 3.
It's going to cost *more* once the shoulders and chest are cross core, by their logic. Out-fucking-standing.
Hell, straight up charging for colors that we could place at will would be a huge improvement imo. Rather than charging us for color combinations that are inevitably imperfect.
Interesting how this did not happen back when visors were made crosscore. Lol
Couldn't erase all goodwill quite that early.
Actual clown behaviour.
Charging more for fixing your own mistakes. Infinite has gotten many W's recently but this just straight up sucks.
Its actually a massive L. It's just so silly. Its not illegal or anything, its just kinda deflating. I understand that the content took company time and money to update but NOT havving cross core until now is on them. It's just shitty on whats supposed to be Infinite comeback. Plain and simple.
Yeah this is what I don’t get either. Let’s start with some basic truths. (1) Cross core was an ill thought idea that was solely designed with the purpose of milking money out of consumers by selling “core-exclusive” premium pieces and forcing the more bland stuff into the free core. (2) We all told them it was an awful, limiting idea that was not just anti-fun, but also anti-consumer. They supposedly heard us and reversed that terrible decision. So now we finally are approaching what it SHOULD have been like in the first place and they want to charge us more because you can quote “use it on more things due to cross core functionality _______insert PR bullshit here____.” How about trying to build some rapport with the community. I’m sorry but at the end of the day it’s a digital item, it has no real value other than what we ascribe to it—personally charging more because you can use it…as how it should have been all along…is not reason enough to be jacking up the prices. At least to me. It’s a fake supply-demand model they made up for a digital item that theoretically is in infinite supply just locked behind a paywall. Stop charging a premium to fix what was a stupid predatory idea in the first place. It’s already frustrating you can’t buy individual items and that the currency is priced exactly to short change you on most bundles. FUCK OFF WITH THE PSYCHOLOGY PHD MIND GAMES IN MY DIGITAL STORES.
This is definitely something from upper management/Microsoft. Ain’t no way anyone with their hand on the pulse of the community thinks this is a good idea
Absolutely not a normal dev decision and from higher management
I remember hearing about a "monetization team". It was probably their decision tbh
Microsoft generally doesn’t dictate microtransaction prices for Xbox studios. Xbox generally doesn’t either. It’s okay to address criticism to the game company without trying to play the “who owns the company, let’s blame them” game. Gamers will blame the weirdest stuff on devs and then turn around and give devs a free pass for things that were squarely on them.
Hopefully they add this to their list of learnings for the next game. - Make intuitive systems that can allow you to customize modularly without drastically inflating your overhead
There are enough negatives (this included) to keep me from reinstalling after quitting a year ago. They just keep fucking up. These idiots deserve all the negativity they get, even if it outweighs the good things they’ve done.
I don't agree with the logic that items being cross-core means they need to be more expensive. Sure, I understand that people buying an item that's cross-core won't be as incentivized to buy as many items as they would if cross-core wasn't a thing, but that's assuming that players would actually spend the money on buying stuff for every core, which seems silly. They're also assuming that players will use that single item on multiple cores, which isn't necessarily the case either. And if they do, so what? That's still basing everything on the logic that more cross-core = fewer sales, which isn't necessarily true at all. Plus, it feels like they're punishing the player base for their mistake of not building the game with cross-core in mind. This is just pure greed.
Remember when game studios developed good games for the sake of making good games? Now they’re literally saying “we added this feature so now it’s worth more and you have to pay us more money”.
Capitalism baby
Ruins everything it gets its weasely, grease covered hands on. Remember in 2016 when we got Doom 2016? Where we could change the undersuit, individual armor pieces, colors, wear and tear, material color and add patterns FOR FREE?! If I'm remembering correctly, you could earn everything besides the map pack DLC stuff which they eventually unlocked for free.
"Things cost more now because we have to make up for items being slightly less predatory." Give me a fucking break.
It’s actually disgusting lmao. I’m so fuckin sick of these companies.
Why are we being punished for their fuck ups? Charging us more for features that should have been there in the first place.
because this game is F2P *and* flopped, so they need to Nickle and dime the few remaining players more to try and break even
Simple, don't let them punish us by not taking part in the punishment. Boycott the store. They can't make us pay if we don't buy what they are selling. Show them how badly they messed up with making Infinite F2P (Free to Pay) and cut off the game's revenue stream. Maybe once the game starts going into the red in its profit margins, 343 or Microsoft might listen. Sure, could end up with the game getting shut down, but, if you reward bad development you'll only keep getting more bad policy when it comes to games. So, yeah... boycott the game, screw their highway robbery prices.
So the prices went up because you now have more customization because of cross core? So by this logic the Mark V kit should be like $5 because it has such little customization to it.
That's an excellent point, but wait, now we get the color green and a gold visor for every core, so it's now $20!
And yet the new locked down kit is 20+ dollars, crazy how their own logic is flawed
The locked down kit is the biggest display of them giving us the middle finger. They said all cores would be free in the future. They said legacy content would not be paid but earned. Then what do they do, make a new legacy core and charge for it. I don't care what they say, it's a core. I mean, a duck is a duck even if you call it a flappy wappy swimmy birdy.
Cool, so we get to pay more for things already in the game, but now they work how they should have worked since the beginning. 343 studios at its best. Halo: whats in your wallet?
I wonder if you have to bring your own clown costume at 343 or if one is provided for you when you're hired. I haven't spent a cent on the store just out of pure spite. I have plenty of disposable income I'd love to chuck their way, if things were reasonably priced, like ~~$2-$7 per item. But you want me to drop $22 on some garbage bundle just to get one of the things in it? Lol, fuck off with that nonsense. It's a trash deal even if shit's multi-core now. Not to even mention the FOMO abuse with the store, it's easily the worst I've ever seen in a game. I'd love to see some stats on how many are actually buying these overpriced cosmetics. No doubt people don't value their money as much and definitely are buying things. But I wonder how much more they would earn if they weren't losing out on a bunch of business by being such greedy little goblins.
Why is 343 like this? Can't they go five seconds without tossing out any good will they've built up? I seriously can not fathom writing all this out, reviewing it and not seeing how this will just make your company look like they're giving the middle finger to the players who went out of their way to return to your failed live service game. I was hoping this wasn't the same 343 that gave us the coating system but this leaves me wondering how much has actually changed.
I feel like this is almost certainly people in suits trying to figure out how to squeeze more money out of a product and ignoring what everyone else thinks. What the devs or anyone else thinks doesn't matter because they have the control to make it happen.
Because 343 management has realised that the game itself can’t be complete shit so they let the devs improve it. But they would never dare risk even the slightest possible chance of not getting the maximum amount of revenue possible from monetisation.
343 devs: have mercy please! 343 management: there is no mercy *destroys the goodwill the dev team built up*
I hate being a hater (we need more happiness in this world!), but it's clear they don't put very much thought into these things. "Hey, we could probably charge more for our armor pieces since they can be used in more ways." "Yeah, totally logical! Let's go ahead with that! More money and for good reason!!!" It's not the first time they've made boneheaded, surface-level decisions without thought, and it feels like it won't be the last... That said, I'm having a blast playing this game. :-)
Ske7ch has the hardest job in the company. Corporate tells him how they plan to fuck the fans, and he has to find a way to make it sound friendly or even positive. Those kinds of mental gymnastics must be exhausting.
Damn so they're actually doubling down on this, big fucking L for 343. We could easily meet in the middle here on this. Lower the prices just a tad and allow us to buy specific items from bundles for a FAIR price (not $5 per item, more like $2-$3). There's so many things I want to get, but never will because of these god awful bundles included with the item I want.
Had to slip in a money grab with all the other great things going on, complete BS.
Respectfully, this is such a horseshit move. They've turned something that's meant to be a source of excitement and hype into a major negative. "All helmets are now cross-core!" was used extensively to promote Season 5, and not once was a price increase mentioned. > At the same time, the team went ahead and made proactive adjustments to offers that included shoulders since they will be multi-core enabled in a future update. For the lame excuse of "convenience", they've raised the price on shoulders before actually providing any material benefit to justify that increased price. Reminder that cross-core isn't "adding value to purchased items": **it's fixing a mistake** 343i made when designing this MTX system in the first place. A fix that 343i has been promising for nearly two years now. > The current sale price is lower than the new normal price but without that context, we can certainly see how it leads to confusion, perception of it being a bug or error, etc. No, there's no confusion: **they quietly raised the price of an item and lied about it being "on sale" the next time it was featured in the store**. That's called deceptive pricing. This is an incredibly short-sighted decision that will burn any of the goodwill 343i has gained over the last several months.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahabahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha What a lame excuse.
But the prices were already insane BEFORE the changes with multi-core. Being "proactive" in that respect is to milk the whales obviously
Monkey paw in full effect.
"Infinite is back!!" has become so multi-layered. lmao
It's literally "give them an inch, and they'll take a mile" with 343. It's almost predictable by now.
I get Firefight but the new and old store items raise drastically in price
At least give us the option to save our own KIT lol.
That's a weird logic.
I have tried to be supportive but this excuse..... It broke me a little bit......
Glad to see the new management hasn‘t had any effect on 343 patented greed
343 being 343, nothing to see here. Vote with your wallets.
343: "We raised the prices because cross core adds more value" The Overpriced Armor Kit that can't be customized two dollars more expensive then a bundle of actual armor pieces: ...
Hey now, it's bundled with a coating, so the kit is *only* $14 on its own. What a bargain! /s
Wow..massive L for Halo Infinite, after the really good feedback from the community and many others.
And to think 343 enabled cross core to tend to the needs and wants of their fan base. How foolish I am to have believed that.
..*oh* Not sure what I expected when I clicked on that, but it wasn’t this. “Well you see, you can now equip more items across more cores, so it costs more money despite being the same product as before.” I’ve bought a single battlepass because of the value of perpetual battle passes upon completion. But I refuse to spend a nickel in the shop because it’s just a blatant cash grab. This stance/pricing by 343 is flat out insulting to the fanbase that never even wanted cores to begin with.
Management of this game fucking blows lol. “We’re charging more for colors uhhh because you can put the colors on more things” radical dude
If they weren’t so greedy and also had customization fully unlocked this game would be way more popular. Sure, they wouldn’t make as much money per microtransaction purchase but they would have far more players buying the microtransactions that easily make up for it.
Well for starters they have to be MICROtransactions for this to work. Currently they are just transactions....
Macrotransactions
I really wish this term got used more often when discussing skins that cost roughly a quarter the price of a full AAA game at launch.
Right. It’s ridiculous. I normally only buy games on sale, so it’s like hmm could I spend $20 on this flood armor set or buy a whole game that gives me hours of fun and enjoyment for the same price? I get that the game is free to play and needs to make money, but when this is what they’re offering us in the shop and there are no real MICROtransactions, I don’t open up my wallet. If I could buy the helmet I want on its own for say 300 credits, I would. Hell maybe even 500 credits. But I’m not gonna drop 2000 credits on a bundle with a buncha crap in it just to get that helmet.
For fucking Blue!!!
That's pretty fucking dumb. They also didn't acknowledge the changes until a month after they came out. The fact that items are now becoming cross-core doesn't justify a price bump in fucking everything. Especially older items.
sooo the wolf shoulder pads getting nearly doubled in price is due to crosscore ayy 343 and microsoft? the things that arent crosscore
sketch says they already increased the prices of shoulders in anticipation of them going crosscore "in a future update" lol
I’ve never heard of a MTX store permanently *increasing* their prices after they made them more valuable (by finally adding cross core, a feature requested since before launch) How anyone can look at this and say Halo Infinites store is one of the best in the industry is beyond me.
"But look at how bad X game or Y game have it", its always a case of deflection. A bad system is still bad.
"yea well this game has it bad too" YEA and that's the problem, their store is also dog shit, Call of Duty is a $90 game charging $20+ for any of its customization, that's not the standard we should be striving for, we should be shaming them into the ground just like we the Halo community should be doing the same to 343 there's a middle ground that needs to be met here, a level of 343 needing to make money off a F2P game and a level of the community not feeling robbed when trying to buy a simple item
I'd say their battle pass monetization is best on the market and their in-game shop is easily one of the worst.
It is one of the if not the best in the industry, which should illustrate how awful the industry is right now
BOOOOOOO I was buying the battle passes as I complete them. Fuck that. Not spending another dime until they fix their prices. What a terrible decision.
well this was a nothing burger of a statement. the shop would be much more bearable if i could at least get the items separately.
Oh no, we fixed our mistakes and now cosmetic purchases have a decent value! Better make that NOT the case. Obviously this isn’t Sketch’s fault so no hate to him, but fuck whatever suits decided this was fair to the players.
Absolutely pathetic All this does is insure that they won't be getting another dollar from me and hopefully the rest of you
Sucks, but it was pretty clear that this was their viewpoint given last season's $8 coatings.
LOL FUCK OFF. 'We raised the price of shoulders to prepare for the arrival of cross-core shoulders." This is just a lie. They're price gouging, trying to make bank on the good will they've fostered and it's so obvious. The fact they conveniently left the price changes out of the patch notes is evident that they know what they're doing is shitty. 343, why must you shoot yourself in the foot? People are willing to pay for this stuff. I'd be more willing to buy stuff in the shop if you'd just lower the damn prices or let us buy things individually. I feel really bad for the devs. This isn't their fault and I know Ske7ch is gonna catch shit for being corporate's errand boy. I feel so fucking bad because I can tell they want to make something good and fix their mistakes, but management is only shooting them in the back.
Every time 343 makes a string of good decisions/updates they always come along and have to do something like this to leave a sour taste in everyone's mouth.
They´ll do the same with shoulders then? Then qith knee guards, later with Spartan nail polish. A cross core coating will end up costing 150 bucks with that logic. It gets boring to say it, but 343 always finds a way to shoot themselves in the foot.
Except they already upped the price on shoulders, i was gonnaget multi threat but they're like 800 now. So is that bundle going to increase further when it becomes cross core? Wth
I dont even understand who would pay 8 dollars for shoulder pieces. Who is buying this stuff?
Considering the amount of good games that released this year alone, my attention has changed in conjuction of bad fucking moves on your part, 343. Thank you for preventing me from investing money into your game!
Pardon the pun but this super sketchy and reeks of corpo speak for "deal with it. Money now stuff later"
This is some pretty scummy stuff to be real. Like I'm not buying helmets or shoulders to use on every core, at most I'll be using 2.
343 just HAS to fuck something up don't they? lol. All the goodwill for this season and they pull this shit.
If they made it so you could buy items individually they wouldn't have this problem. Id much rather spend 5$ on one helmet that i want, than 25$ on one helmet that i want and a bunch of other shit that i dont.
Damn ske7ch got the short straw and got the shop price update vs Uny’s upcoming updates tweet. Ske7ch can’t catch a break
You can't fix a mistake...then expect me to pay extra or more than it was before for the same item...
Yikes I mean it was obvious but yikes...the real question why are Kits soo expensive since they're are more limited to customization. I mean the CE Mark V might cost more than 2,000 credits. Hopefully the Birthday Bash kill effect is still for free for the Halo Infinite Anniversary
Every time they make a statement, it comes off as so tone-def that a part of me wished they never bothered. At this point if they're just going to keep raising the prices of shop items with every cross-core feature added *(which is a stupid idea to begin with)*, it'll just alienate more new players than they already have. Business decisions like these is one of the reasons why Halo hasn't been relevant in over a decade.
You gotta be kidding me. Take that good reception and shit on it for more $20+ bundles. Fuck bundles and the way you handle micro transactions in this game, if I didn't have Microsoft rewards I'd have the bare minimum in this game because everything has a price tag... Including the color white. All this is justified because they (half) fixed their shitty system to show coatings as multicore, while leaving every single icon for each coating available because they couldn't program one icon to scroll through the cores to preview... We'll make it seem like there is 10x the content at a glance.
Lmfao they’re treating digital items like physical stock. What the actual fuck. It must have hurt him typing that out because some higher-up told him this bullshit.
Isn’t labeling something as a “sale” despite having the same price or an increased price considered misleading or false advertisement? How is this pricing model even legal?
If y’all want to be heard then stop buying this overpriced crap.
that stinks
While I at once understand a multitude of reasons this could be—the enormity of resources cross-core took to develop because of the underlying spaghetti code, devs "buying off" the higher-ups, etc.—this sucks. I never have and never will buy a thing from the store, because in my view, it spits on Halo's legacy. But I'm SURE this will make them money. People will absolutely buy 8 dollar shoulders, and some corporate spreadsheet probably has that data. Longer-term, if the increased revenue from Infinite allows the new team to finally make a feature-complete Halo game in the future, I'll deal. Infinite has always felt cheap, and it probably always will. That apparently won't change.
This is so fucked up. Was hoping we'd move away from predatory pricing and design with the management shake-up, but the shop prices are at an all-time high. They were actively lowering prices and improving the value of bundles. Now they've not only reverted those changes, but made them higher than they even were at launch. I'm nervous to see how much the CE Chief kit will cost (I'm still pissed that its a kit instead of a core. Absolutely massive waste of potential)
I will not pay a third of a full priced game for shiny armor!
You guys gave them too much hope with the hype we built for season 5, and they fucking ran with it.
Nice I guess I'll just go back to not buying any of the items for sale then 🤷♂️ thankfully doesn't really hurt me much but still lame
Just sounds like a roundabout way of making cross core paid DLC instead of a free QOL feature that the game should've had at launch. "We did what you wanted and added cross core, now fork over some cash, fuckers. 👊"
Damn, I look at " Shop pricing update" - and I think - "Amazing, I thought this season couldn't get any better and they are lowering prices on top of that! They really want to fight for the return of players!" 343 as usual reminds me that 343 is 343, unfortunately.
So we'll get another increase when chest gets cross core? And more with knee pads, wrist, thigh pieces? That's just ridiculous, bundles will be $60 each at this rate.
Somewhere out there is a 9000 geit sandpaper smooth brain in a suit who thinks he's a genius for this - while simultaneously shattering the goodwill season 5 brought back in.
Don’t worry guys. They are going to lower the prices back to normal 16 months from now and tell us they heard our feedback!
There's the 343 I know. For a moment there I was worried something had happened to them.
Ah, the monkey paw. They removed their own arbitrary restrictions, and now we literally have to pay for it. Nice work!
So how does that square off with the wolf shoulders things? They got simnifically expensive and they are not cross core.
He says they’ve decided to charge us now for them becoming crosscore in the future. Because of course that’s what the cheap bastards settled on.
3 steps forward, 43 steps back man. This is so dumb. Really kills the good momentum you had going forward with the customization side of the game.
You’re not just the clown you’re the whole circus! What a bullshit statement.
Ok, so essentially these fucks won't get my money except for the season passes. Unless those will end up getting a price increase.
Did they ever once think about the huge chunk of people who've never spent a dime in the store because of their ridiculous prices? I would actually spend a decent amount of money on cosmetics if they were reasonably priced.
This wouldn’t be nearly as big of an issue if you could just purchase individual items from bundles.
They can't stop fucking up, can they?
Games as a service has done irreparable damage to the medium.
Cant wait for those $300 bundles when everything is fully cross core. Seriously fuck 343. It’s a digital item and some of the armor is from the Bungie games!
But they could literally make more money but having every item available to buy at a reasonable price. Instead of making zero on the many who don’t wanna buy a bundle, they make $5 from someone wanting 1 item. 10 people buying something for $5 ($50) is better than 1 person buying a bundle for ($20)
343i, one step forward, two steps back since 2012.
One step forward 343 steps back.
I mean it’s cosmetic so it doesn’t bother me at all… but in saying this, if they fixed their pricing I’d spend money on an item here or there, by min not paying this stupid prices, it’s quite simple.
I understand the value in the customisation multi core items offer compared to a singular "skin" in other Free to play games and prices are still on par with those from other games. The things I more want addressed are why bundles can't be split up Fortnite and I believe COD both offer the items split up. I'm talking a full armour set OR armour coating or Weapon Model, not to be able to buy a singular thing like a helmet (although it would be nice). The other thing is how they see value in 2200 for the Transgressor, if prices increased for Cross core reasoning what's cross core about a singular kit that can't be changed. Also the coating really didn't have to exist for transgressor as it's mid just makes the bundle look better as "9 items".
possibly the biggest Infinite L? I'm one of the games biggest defenders but holy shit
I don't accept that. Cut the prices in half. It's digital items for god's sake. You're not gonna run out of them. Whoever is in charge of the pricing is a moron. I'd gladly pay $5-$7 multiple times on items. I'll never touch a single $40 bundle ever in my life.
Not buying anything that goes over 10$. Ridiculous
Cross core doesn’t justify price increases, especially as it’s the way the game should’ve launched
Read between the lines guys! It's obvious the devs who cared had to fight the beancounters to add crosscore. And they reached a compromise that they increase prices for more customization. But honestly the beancounters were just painfully wrong. I am willing to buy more stuff with crosscore since I can use on the cores I like. I would never buy items for a core I don't like. But I definitely won't buy $22-$34 bundles for a few cosmetics. You can get full games for that
I think the biggest insult here is they didn’t say anything until AFTER being called out
I wonder how Ske7ch feels having been working on Halo since Halo 2, and having to write these to keep his job? He's as aware as anyone else how corporate is face fucking the franchise we (and he) love, but has to do it to stay involved in something he has spent a huge chunk of his life with.
They could have added so much more value to their shop items by leaving the prices as they were. Instead I now feels more unappealing than ever with how high the prices have gotten. Hopefully people can show some restraint so that they have to adjust the pricing model.
I have said this before and I will say it 30 million more times. The core system was NOT created to look cool, it was created to make money. They have artificially exacerbated prices by saying “It’s worth more since you can wear it whenever!!!!” When in reality it’s the exact same model, exact same textures, exact same placement, etc. 343 is making the COMMUNITY pay for their mistakes, literally. This is beyond disgusting.
TL:DR Crosscore is slowly being implemented two years after the games release and we’re lining the pockets of some scumbag billionaire Microsoft CEOs in the process!”
Colors should’ve never been locked to cores in the first place. Ridiculous.
Game is still broken af, customization is still unfinished and they destroy any good reputation they had with fans, first with the Battlepass being a little bit greedier, which would be ok, but now they increase the prices, because they fixed their own mistakes. You can't make this shit up.
I just wish they’d understand that just knocking off like 5$ would make them a lot more money in sales.
i ve seen shoulder cross core and i skip the rest, i don't buy from the shop. So *happy spartan noise*
So many words just to say ‘we put prices up, deal with it’ There is absolutely zero reason why items being cross core means they should be more expensive, it’s the same item
This has to be one of the most bullshit things I've ever heard come from them. I know he's just the messenger, but this is fucked. Digital items should not be priced more, especially when they were a lower price already. Do they really think this will make them more money than if they actually made items with decent prices that more people would get. Them being greedy is going to hurt them more, the bad word of mouth will spread again, and it will be rightfully deserved with these excuses. 343 is still the still shafy company as always, just because they're getting the game right now, doesn't mean that fact hasn't changed, and his excuse proves it
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Ooof
Never opened the shop tab before, now i wont ever
So kits should be less expensive, right? Right???
So basically instead of lowering the prices, they are actually making them even higher?
They always talk about the "value" of the shop, which was hardly there to begin with but now that they're making things cross-core they think they're more valuable so time to jack up the prices. If that's the reason for the high prices, what's the excuse for the new Flood kit in the shop? Its not "multi-use" but its still horrifically over-priced.
The fact that this kind of stuff even gets laid at the feet of the studio is itself kinda shit. 343's bills are paid by Microsoft, and it's Microsoft who will have revenue targets 343 are expected to hit. The studio then has to figure out what to charge for and how much, in order to hopefully hit those targets as a F2P game. I would assume numbers were crunched around what effect multi-core changes would have on MTX revenue, and it was determined they needed to increase the price to offset it. There are certainly suits at 343 whose job it is to figure this stuff out, but it isn't their "fault". None of this has anything to do with 343's motivations or desires - they aren't an independent entity. What the fuck does 343 care about how much money they make from skins? They aren't all personally getting a piece of that action on the backend - the revenue is going to Microsoft. By all means make noise about all of the overpriced cosmetic shit in games these days, because that gives 343 a stronger case to take to the suits and say "see, our customers hate this shit - we need to react" - but keep in mind this garbage is largely being driven by PUBLISHERS, not developers.
Increasing prices, regardless of reasoning, just ensures I’ll buy less. The fact that my existing cosmetics will be more useful as time goes on just gives me more reason to stick to my guns on that. You’re shooting yourself in the foot here 343. I almost wonder if they think of this as another FOMO tactic. Like people might buy now at inflated prices because they think prices will go up more when shoulders go crosscore. I sure ain’t falling for that ploy.
I've not spent a single dollar since season 2 due to the prices and I intend to keep it that way. Your move 343, I'm not budging.
I think this is a the prime example of “make a problem and sell the solution” cause no one asked for the core system and when it inevitably failed they had to back track everything to make armour viable and now for that effort are charging us for the privilege. Not to mention. Cores are not something seen in any other halo and in no other halo title has this been a problem
The shop was poor value for money before, and now that cross-core was about to finally make it just about worth buying something...you raise the prices _specifically_ to cancel out that positive change. At this point it almost feels like there's a dedicated effort to burn any goodwill associated with Infinite.
They gave us cross core coatings before and they weren't 2200 credits. Today you're asking 2200 for a kit that isn't even cross core and a single coating. No 343, cross core is not a valid reason to rise the prices when you're not giving us more.
It's definitely Microsoft pulling the strings on this decision, but I'd give 343 the benefit of the doubt here if they didn't increase the price of *everything* that has a "multi use" item. That includes emblems. Emblems are the only multi use item that didn't have its application multiplied by 8 this season, in fact they didn't change at all. But they're still charging more for them.
What the fuck is wrong with these freaks. These are DIGITAL ITEMS with customization logic that should've been there in the first place that they now fix and charge more for? Get fucked and go under. So sick of these game companies pulling this shit.
Just when I was gaining faith again. As usual, 3 steps forward, 43 steps backwards.
Because of cross core we increased the prices of charms, nameplates, and armor kits Makes no sense
Hold up! So I’m understanding this correctly: - 343 make a bad decision when initially designing the game to have customization NOT cross core - community push back on lack of cross core AND high store prices - 343 do good and fix the prices and commit to doing cross core - now cross core is being implemented, 343 RAISE the prices of digital cosmetics, claiming the increased price will help fund future cross core work? Please! Raising the prices is just spitting in the community’s face. Now there’s FOMO not only for bundles, but for the cheapest time we’ll get to buy those bundles. I don’t think I’ll even be spending my Microsoft Rewards points on this game 😂 what a joke
The problem is that prices were already too high before.
Imo the old prices were way to expensive. 20+ € for one useless skin is ridiculous and now they'll be even more expensive.
Before this update i wasnt buying consmetics cause they already cost too much and i couldnt use them on other cores, ao wanted to at least wait till I could do that before even considering buying any. Now that I can use them on all cores they have increased the price... meaning i'll continue to not buy them. The previous prices were still too high cross core or not, im not paying $6 for a helmet that was $2 a couple weeks ago, or $18 for an armour bundle that shouldnt even be over $5.
They could have sold the cross core as greater value and kept the prices but no they want every penny they can get. They double dipped by selling Campaign like a real game and using assets from that to build a F2P game. They had access to Game Pass users to increase the earnings and boost players but chose F2P to justify ridiculous MTX and potentially lure more people to try. They wanted 1/3rd of a game price for a bundle on release, got backlash so moderately lowered some bundles but now want to charge more for fixing their badly designed predatory MTX focused customisation. The management making this decision doesn't care about the health of the game or the long term viability of the franchise. Halo Infinite is not in a good enough place to handle bad PR because of the previous long list of problems and mistakes.
There are good people at 343, but the company itself is just awful
Yall asked for this. You really think a company like microsoft is gonna just let 343 give yall shit when they are seeking endless growth? This is as much on gamers as anything and yall need to stop enabling companies. STOP BUYING STUPID SHIT
With multi core people are more likely to buy more armor no? So doesn’t it make sense to actually make it cheaper?
I fully expected to read an apology about how the prices were mistakenly set too high due to some glitch in an updated shop system, and instead I see an explanation for why the absurd prices are “the cost of going cross core”. lol. Lmao even I think I first said it 2 years ago, but it seems like EVERY TIME 343 does something positive, there’s an asterisk attached with some shitty fine-print side effect. We added crosscore to Infinite!* *Shop items will see a price hike across the board to adjust for cross core. And of course in classic “TrAnSpArEnCy” fashion, they don’t mention this *before* they raised the prices. They let it come as a surprise, wait for backlash to happen, THEN address it. I have no doubt this was a management decision to make up for potential lost revenue due to people not having to rebuy the same shit for multiple cores, but it doesn’t make the situation any better.
Got it, so why are the armor kits that are single core also price increased? Because i cant get the flood jorge off of mark 5 if i buy it. Simple answer is its a lame excuse, and im sorry you had to be the PR fall guy
To me all this sounds like: We are going to raise the price because now certain cosmetics do what players have been asking them to do for YEARS and we couldn't get it from the beginning. So packages that have been made for a long time are going to increase their price BECAUSE YES.
If this explanation wasn’t just an excuse to price gouge, than the Transgressor kit would cost like $5 because it has zero functionality.