It shouldn't be more expensive than the price of a cup of coffee.
While DLC sharing strategically offsets the need to purchase weapon DLC for some players, the stochasticity of the system and high price-of-entry ($10 is 2~4 cups of coffee) lowers the diffusion rate of new weapons into the community. As such, one can speculate that it lowers the effectiveness/impact of weapon DLCs going forward since the community have low accessibility to newer weapons (and thus cannot enjoy new updates to its fullest extent).
A balance between pricing and accessibility is needed, more so now that the merchandise store is just launching. Physical goods should take precedence over digital goods (since it is a real world item that one can use), one cannot have their cake and eat it too-- The safe assumption is that your average player can only spend so much on either digital goods or merchandise, not both.
As it stands, out of the 10 MP games I played recently, none of them had any new paid-DLC weapons enabled through sharing. 10 games is a small sample size, but it shows that out of 5*10 = 50 or so random players (lower bound estimate since players come and go when they die mid-game, assuming no duplicate players), none of them had the weapon DLC, which in some capacity demonstrates the low accessibility of the current pricing scheme (a diffusion rate of <1% in 10 games).
Why design and release a weapon that nobody can use? In as much as it is understandable that development costs time and money (I have no problem with paid weapon DLCs), the pricing strategy is counter-intuitive in relying on a small population of big-spenders to diffuse DLCs into the community. Specifically, it places very little faith in the community to spare change to support development with weapon-sharing enabled: the reasoning that "since only one player needs the DLC for all other 5 to reap the benefits, therefore it should be priced higher to optimize the price-to-diffusion ratio" is inherently unsustainable to future paid-DLC updates. If a player likes a weapon enough, they will buy it if it is priced reasonably (for perspective, 15$/hr is the current gold standard for minimum wage, but I suspect your average player is earning less per hour).
Two possible compromises between high-end and low-end pricing is (1) dynamic pricing -- wherein weapon DLC prices decay at a certain rate over time (which WILL cause controversy among early adopters), or (2) sales events -- wherein a limited time sales are made on old weapon DLCs to improve the diffusion rate of said weapon DLCs among the community. However, I am still personally a fan of a flat rate low-pricing, a rule-of-thumb would be "if it is more expensive than the price of coffee, it is too expensive for the average player"-- The coffee houses worldwide already done their research.
While DLC sharing strategically offsets the need to purchase weapon DLC for some players, the stochasticity of the system and high price-of-entry ($10 is 2~4 cups of coffee) lowers the diffusion rate of new weapons into the community. As such, one can speculate that it lowers the effectiveness/impact of weapon DLCs going forward since the community have low accessibility to newer weapons (and thus cannot enjoy new updates to its fullest extent).
A balance between pricing and accessibility is needed, more so now that the merchandise store is just launching. Physical goods should take precedence over digital goods (since it is a real world item that one can use), one cannot have their cake and eat it too-- The safe assumption is that your average player can only spend so much on either digital goods or merchandise, not both.
As it stands, out of the 10 MP games I played recently, none of them had any new paid-DLC weapons enabled through sharing. 10 games is a small sample size, but it shows that out of 5*10 = 50 or so random players (lower bound estimate since players come and go when they die mid-game, assuming no duplicate players), none of them had the weapon DLC, which in some capacity demonstrates the low accessibility of the current pricing scheme (a diffusion rate of <1% in 10 games).
Why design and release a weapon that nobody can use? In as much as it is understandable that development costs time and money (I have no problem with paid weapon DLCs), the pricing strategy is counter-intuitive in relying on a small population of big-spenders to diffuse DLCs into the community. Specifically, it places very little faith in the community to spare change to support development with weapon-sharing enabled: the reasoning that "since only one player needs the DLC for all other 5 to reap the benefits, therefore it should be priced higher to optimize the price-to-diffusion ratio" is inherently unsustainable to future paid-DLC updates. If a player likes a weapon enough, they will buy it if it is priced reasonably (for perspective, 15$/hr is the current gold standard for minimum wage, but I suspect your average player is earning less per hour).
Two possible compromises between high-end and low-end pricing is (1) dynamic pricing -- wherein weapon DLC prices decay at a certain rate over time (which WILL cause controversy among early adopters), or (2) sales events -- wherein a limited time sales are made on old weapon DLCs to improve the diffusion rate of said weapon DLCs among the community. However, I am still personally a fan of a flat rate low-pricing, a rule-of-thumb would be "if it is more expensive than the price of coffee, it is too expensive for the average player"-- The coffee houses worldwide already done their research.
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