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Explaining claims that he wasn't aware of an unpopular, now-cheaper $80 bundle in his own game, Splitgate 2 director and CEO Ian Proulx says the studio has replaced its head of monetization and updated its practices to clean up the in-game store, which was "way overpriced until 2 months ago."
Proulx held a wide-ranging AMA on Reddit earlier today, and on the heels of the $80 bundle backlash and price adjustment, there were understandably several players asking about it. (This is a rough time for the $80 price point, isn't it?)
"It's hard to imagine something like this slipping through the cracks," argued one Reddit user. "This comes across less like an oversight and more like a calculated move to test the waters."
In response, Proulx said: "I didn't intend for it to come off as shifting blame. As CEO, everything ultimately is my responsibility. The honest truth though is I was unaware of the $80 bundle and would never have allowed it to go live. But that doesn't matter because it did. So we took action immediately within 24 hours and cut the price in half."
Not to dwell on "shifting blame," I will say the studio's previous monetization head, who "happened" to have come from Call of Duty, sure is catching strays in this response.
Proulx tips his hat to 1047 Games' new product manager, "Matt (who is awesome)", and "Darek our lead game designer (also awesome)", who will apparently be joining him in new Monday meetings "to make sure I have visibility of everything going live in the store and playlists that week, so that this doesn't happen again."
Digging further into the causes of this particular $80 bundle, Proulx outright says, "Basically everything in our store was way overpriced until 2 months ago when we parted ways with our previous head of monetization. We quickly audited things and shifted prices to be reasonable, starting with beta."
Additionally, Proulx says he hadn't had much of an eye on monetization during the past few weeks especially because he was prioritizing the launch server situation. And because "everything is in a massive spreadsheet," he says it was hard to see "what the store would look like prior to it going live." That tech has been updated, it seems, as Proulx says 1047 can now proactively test the store internally, which "should help us catch oversights in the spreadsheet."
This is a case where actions will speak louder than words, of course. Splitgate 2 players ought to learn relatively quickly if 1047 has amended its monetization plans and protocols as Proulx says. Today's in-game store is certainly in much better shape than it was even a few days ago, though I'm still the kind of person who recoils at the widely accepted idea that, say, a skin can cost $20 dollars. I bought a $2 mask in Monster Hunter Rise one time and I agonized over that purchase.
"We are taking specific measures to make sure the store fiasco doesn't happen again," Proulx said in response to a separate question asking how this kind of monetization mistake will be prevented.
"Regarding making sure nothing like SGF happens again," he added, referring to the blowback from his Summer Game Fest comments (and attire), "we plan to never touch this kind of stuff again, but also to run things by more people and get more opinions before doing anything that might at all be controversial or have that many eyeballs. Also, we plan to double down on our vision of being community first and listening to our players."
