Does anybody actually want the promos to be available only to players who beat dozens of Adventure levels?
The promos are promotional (hence the name). For the physical English versions, Jay thinks it's important that everyone be able to get them (as do I); they may be available at whatever con, but eventually you can buy them at BGG. For non-English versions, Jay has left it up to the individual companies. For example I know the Japanese Stash came with a strategy guide (four people rated all the cards released to that point and capsule-reviewed them; Navigator came in last); they were trying to sell strategy guides.
For online Dominion the initial idea - from Ted or someone else who is no longer working there due to the whole company concept crashing and burning, so - was that you could get the promos from the adventures, or from winning tournaments, or from some third way, I'm not sure what it was (winning weekly challenges?). Obv. the beauty of getting promos from adventures isn't making you play adventures, it's making you buy expansions. You can't play the campaigns without the expansions and uh well this seems clear and isn't so unreasonable. The campaigns ideally are fun and keep you interested and you want to play more of them and there's this prize for beating them. So you buy all the expansions, profit.
Obv. selling promos directly makes a profit, although uh it's hard to see how that works out as well without them just being crazy expensive relative to cards from expansions. But the point to the promos isn't to make money directly, it's to promote; selling them goes against that, though that doesn't mean we'd complain if Making Fun did it. Selling them turns them into bonus tracks; they are fan-gougers at that point. I think it's much better to be able to get them from winning tournaments or doing the adventures; one way for serious players, one for casual players, maybe a good third way. The promos would like to feel special.
I mentioned bonus tracks so here is that speech.
Bonus tracks are a way to screw over consumers. There's a certain amount of utility in the transaction, both sides want as much as they can get; the seller gets more by selling the same product for different prices to different people but can't directly do that; the real product isn't the physical CD or cardboard or whatever, it's the work that went into it; so, bonus tracks. You sell multiple versions of the album with different bonus tracks to gouge fans. You sell a best-of to get something from the people who the albums weren't worth it to; you put a new song on the best-of to gouge fans. In this day and age it all falls apart because I can go on youtube and just record the bonus track, sry I do not wish to order the Japanese import version.
So anyway the promos are similar in that you can gouge fans by charging way more for these few extra cards. People it's not worth it to don't buy them and that's fine, you are trying to extract all the utility and you already have there. For the people who would pay twice as much for Dominion, you get some of that extra utility via selling the promos. We don't do this though; in fact I personally get paid nothing for the promos (well except when they get used elsewhere, as in the Japanese rethemes, and hey I presumably make out from the promotion). To us they aren't a product. They promote.
In January I would have said, give these guys some time. It's May; unless they have been programming a new version from scratch, I am not so optimistic. Will there ever be a second way to get the promos? Man. GL.
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Topic: Skip the Adventures code (Read 19334 times)