Arma developers don’t want to monetize skins in the game. They stimulate the purchase of additional content and DLC with push buttons and watermarks.
At White Nights Prague 2017, the head of the Arma 3 project, Petr Kolar (pictured) from Bohemia Interactive, shared his experience in releasing DLC for MMO projects.
As a rule, access to new content in DLC divides the audience. Some find themselves in new locations on separate servers. Others continue to play the old game. Bohemia doesn’t want to isolate its players from each other. At the same time, they want to make money on new content.
In their desire to stimulate purchases, they went to unexpected experiments. For example, in one of the paid add-ons for Arma 2, they introduced a new ammunition. Players without DLC also saw it, only for them it was displayed with bad textures.
Bohemia hoped that in this way they would be able to stimulate sales. But the effect was different. Users thought they were watching a bug.
The experiment with DLC in Arma 3 also turned out to be far from standard. In the game, new content from the DLC can also be used by those who did not buy them. Only in the latter case, developers use push buttons to remind the user that they should purchase DLC. If the push does not have an effect, then when using the content from the DLC, the “non-paying” player will see a screen covered with numerous watermarks.
According to the Bohemia survey, 65% of users support such a developer policy.
Developers do not want to monetize skins. They are interested in users continuing to make similar content for the game.