First time I've seen a question about 3rd party top-ups on an official survey.
This is from an official Hoyoverse survey to apply for a long term Customer Experience study.
I'm not sure I've ever even seen them talk about 3rd party sites before, so I'm curious what they're going to do with this information.
I'm not sure I've ever even seen them talk about 3rd party sites before, so I'm curious what they're going to do with this information.
Commentaires
If it happens, I guess I'll just have to get a VPN or something.
Hoyoverse has a lot of tolerance for things that drive sales. They allow their partnered CCs to discuss leaks, as long as they call it "speculation" and don't show images. If they also allow them to partner with Lootbar and LDshop, it's likely a similar situation. They won't "officially" support it, but they know is brings in dollars.
Maybe I'm just being optimistic.
Besides, they don't actually 'lose money'. Those websites purchase using Japanese Yen currency. Biggest pack for JP is 76 dollars, afaik.
You could do that by yourself, granted you have a Japanese Google Play store and a good VPN. A lot of people do it this way because it's simply cheaper.
Fairly certain play store locks you to your region for a month when you switch. Also if they receive 76 dollars when I could have paid 99 for the same amount of pulls then they have lost 23 dollars.
They get their money, they couldn't care less. It's really that simple to understand. How it was done doesn't matter.
This is the logic some excel guy will use, but it completely ignores that someone might have 80 dollars to use and if there's nothing available for 80 dollars then they won't magically spawn 19 more dollars and spend 99 instead. People have limited funds.
So instead of receiving 76 dollars they might receive 60, because the person opts for a lower value package, or they might receive 0 if they opt for another hobby that they feel gives more value for the money since the lower cost packages are lower value per dollar.
The question becomes is the amount of money we lose by raising/enforcing higher prices higher or lower than the amount of money we gain by doing it, and with the current economic issues the younger generations are facing in most of the western world I would wager on the side of there being more people who will simply disengage instead of people who will up their spending by 25% to 40%.
They've let people do it this way for 5 years now while always being aware of it, so I would assume that people much smarter than us with much more information than us have determined that this is likely the most profitable course of action.
And having a cheap option means that more people are willing to buy from them. People that don't usually buy gems might consider buying because of the cheaper Price.
I am not an expert but i just wanted to say that, even if they lose on money it will be a very small amount
Codashop and Razergold are good, but more expensive.
LDshop is also good, but only if you're basically spending exactly $80 to get a free Welkin from them. After that, Lootbar is slightly cheaper.
But seeing the total expenditure on the accounts of people who admit the use of third-party, they may estimate if it’s worth it to hire lawyers at all (I guess)
The only 3rd party sellers that operate in a shady area are those who ask for your login and password in order to physically log into your account and buy stuff as if you were doing it. But that's the option for fools, more often than not it is done with stolen credit cards and you'll eventually get a negative primogem balance because CC's owner will make a chargeback.
They dont have to be working with hoyo directly, they could be leveraging exposed api endpoints for hoyo uses for themselves i.e used for qa tools/vendors.
To put it in the context you shared, hoyo built a door they use for themselves but didn't install a lock on it.
Hoyo asking this on their survey is them trying to get a guauge on the level of inconvenience they will cause by putting a lock on it.
Hell, you have countless partnered content makers promoting these top up websites. Not once was any such CC reprimanded and not one of such stores has ever been taken down. Hoyo doesn't care.
For the endpoints we are talking about in genshin, it's very likely following pci compliance (considering they can store paymemt data) which means all of their services will need to be separated out. All this means is that the only request you can make from that endpoint being leveraged by unofficial 3rd parties would be to purchase primos. At this point exposed isn't even the right word since this is a public facing endpoint used by their official website and your game client to make purchases.
The more I think about the more its similar to reddit's situation where their end points were publicly available and people used to create 3rd party apps for them.
Now if the worst thing you can do is pay hoyo money I dont think it would be a priority to lock it down.
Companies not caring about security of their customers is a given and should be assumed. But it's very much different when it comes to their own wallets. And the worst thing here isn't that people might give Hoyo money, but that they're giving money to someone else, less than Hoyo asks for in the official store (Hence why people are using those websites in the first place). So if it wasn't done with Hoyo's endorsement, this whole thing would've been eliminated as soon as it got noticed, which would've happened immediately. If random players are aware of such websites, it's foolish to think that Hoyo isn't.
Hoyo doesn’t care. Otherwise they would have stopped it a while back. They could always change their mind but I would wager that the amount of people using these sites are a tiny insignificant percentage of overall spenders.
At the end of the day, they aren’t losing anything. They lose more on purchases made through App Stores (Apple/Android take 30% cut) than they do on purchases from 3rd party.
The only real solution for NA is to lower the price and kill the reseller market. 3rd party sites giving an $18-27 dollar discount per 6480+1600 adds up fast. People are going to use 3rd party or a VPN.
The euro-to-primo rate is so shit that I only buy them rarely and only with 2x bonuses. A 5% off coupon won't change anything, but JP pricing? I'd end up spending much more than normally because it's so worth it in comparison...
Paying at the Konbini was crazy tho
Even if they were to block the resellers, people could still VPN to JP. Giving an average of 20%+ discount to most stronger currencies.
Let's be real. They will send cease and desist letters to these top up sites and keep the pricing the same.
They changed the TOS a few patches ago that give them the right to ban people for using 3rd party apps and websites.
There are normally promos to get the most expensive package as low as $73. I wonder how long Hoyo will tolerate it.
If they lowered their prices to compete with 3rd party they’d just be getting the same money from direct sales as they already do with people using 3rd party and they’d make less money from those who currently buy directly in-game
It would be different if the 3rd party was actually getting the sale money (like in the case of 3rd party merchandise), but they only take a small percentage as a transaction fee
Thats the issue, these sites dont make that much money off of the transaction to justify the amount they spend on advertising.
These sites dont make sense if your aim is to make a profitable business.
The only way they make sense is if 1 of 2 things is going on:
1. They plan to make a profit outside of the transaction i.e they start selling user data.
Or
2. They aren't trying to be a profitable business and the site/business has some other goal like money laundering. They could be using their illegal funds to purchase primo's for people and have them charge their cards to their new legimate business.
They almost certainly sell data to other advertisers. Especially for a site dedicated to people spending heavily on gacha games, it’s prime leads to sell
Also, I think their marketing is a pretty wide net but not all that deep:
- Firstly, there’s like 4 sites that all advertise so we might think each one is more prevalent since the ads are all so similar
- Secondly, most of the channels sponsored by these sites are very small and they likely are not paying a lot of money per video for the vast majority of their sponsored creators. The leak coverage channels with like 20k subscribers are not getting good ad deals I can promise you that
- Last of all, even if they charge ~5% as a transaction fee that adds up quite a bit as soon as you get whales using the site. It’s not uncommon for whales to spend $1000+ every banner. There’s a reason Hoyo games make tens of millions of income every month. Imagine if 5% of players use 3rd party with a 5% transaction fee. Thats only 0.025% of the income, but if that’s a portion of 100 million then that’s $250,000 each month in revenue for these sites and all they need to do is keep the website running secure and advertise
My original response was replying saying the suggestion of Hoyo lowering their higher regional prices to compete makes no sense
endfields deffo refunding that money plus extreme apologems, i assume?
For those that don't know, these shops generally use exchange rate arbitrage to buy primogems in a currency where the exchange rate is more favorable and send them to your account. Hoyo still needs to bring that money home, so they are of course bringing home less money if you buy using a deflated currency, meaning some internal metric shows that their price charged per primogem is going down and they want to "fix that."
They're trying to test their own shop with 5% discount codes, which I'm sure is completely failing because these shops offer more on the order of 15% discounts (at least in my country).
What they ignore is that people like me only feel like I can buy primos on occasion *because* they are discounted, and only if the pack still has the first-time bonus. They're not missing out on revenue from me because of these shops, they're getting 85% of *something* rather than 100% of *nothing*.
Hoyoverse has set a price they are willing to accept and services like Lootbar simply help buyers get that price.
Hoyoverse *absolutely* wins here.
So the 5% discount codes are more to combat the Apple/Android buyers. Not the 3rd party shops.
The best thing one can do. Is get a VPN. And do the transaction yourself. Get the same “discount” those shops give you and take advantage of the additional 5% Hoyo is giving away.
Also, having a VPN is not terribly common and can cost more than the arbitrage savings.
I was just pointing out that the 5% discount wasn’t aimed towards the 3rd party shops. As the shops don’t interfere or do anything differently than anyone else could.
do you happen to know which county/countries have the best primogem exchange rates?
Others VPN to Singapore, India, Russia, Turkey.
Those are the “popular” ones. From what I’ve seen being used. Harder to find free VPNs for those but I’ve seen some still available. But a quick Google search could probably help as plenty of players tend to post about what they use.
I personally use VPN to Japan. And use a paid VPN (NordVPN). Only because I already have the VPN for work. So nothing extra was used towards the top up.
No point in lying about it
They buy from the official store, but in a different region where the prices are cheaper. It's an official transaction, just with good exchange rates on currency.