Danacscott: Over the years, they did do that.
- Yes over the years they did raise the costs but eventually stopped rather than continue. Also we’re talking about a way to have handled this last sale not how they should have been handling things all along.
Danacscott: Why? That they did this at all, and offered nice quality titles is very generous indeed. They could have simply closed and gave us the June 29th redemption time.
- They certainly could have just closed. But if the plan is to retain people then it’s in their best interest to keep people happy at this time, not to leave them with a bitter taste in their mouth. How a business chooses to handle these types of things tends to reflect how they will act as a business in the future. If they just dropped it without notice, what sort of precedent would that be setting for people to trust them as a store?
Danacscott: The Coin Shop has never worked like that. Part of the intrigue was in seeing what was new next - sort of how Humble Monthly worked before it became Choice, except of course, you give Humble real dollars.
- That argument isn’t valid. We’re talking about how this send off could have been tweaked. The M.O. of this store was to only release 2 free games every 2 weeks - not 5. If they were willing to change things for the last month to offer 5 why couldn’t they have changed the formula of informing people in advance?
Danacscott: Been suggested before but the games were a limited time offer that you either got lucky enough to snag or you didn’t. For instance, the last Moons of Madness giveaway that I missed because I didn’t do the task the same night. Wishlist item and I missed it. Sad, but happens.
- This was always a debate for the platform and was ultimately one of the reasons I’m sure they decided to shut it down. Because they weren’t able to satisfy enough people. Again, not something that should have been implemented all along but during this last sale it should have been considered that they acquire a larger number of licenses knowing full well how many additional people would be taking advantage just to use their coins.
Danacscott: That’d either giving the staff more on their work load or a might interesting algorithm. Either way, that’s a lot of implementation for what is specifically a last hurrah and act of generosity by the site.
- Debatable that staggering licenses or refilling them would not be a larger workload for staff. Unless the system was created very poorly. They had done refilling licenses before and it didn’t seem to be an impossible task. Again with this one-time send off the extra work would have been warranted considering the work-load for this portion of the site goes to exactly zero once it is shut down.
Danacscott: On the surface, that’s not a bad idea. It’d be a way to reward customers for loyally logging into the site. However, spinning the coin daily wasn’t exactly a show of loyalty. ( See all the post above with people saying they’ll leave now that the Coin Shop is closing). So how exactly, does Chrono as a store, a business seeking to make profit like any other, benefit from putting additional discounts on top of deals that are usually either a historical low, or equal the last historically low price elsewhere?
- How to grow the Chrono business is the secret sauce that separates the truly skilled in business from the wannabes trying to play with the big boys lol There are several solutions to this that I won’t go into detail here since I have no skin in the game. But as one simple marketing strategy - why not reduce the discount for their daily deal a bit and only allow people to access the maximum discount by using coins?
Danacscott: Who knows? Maybe you’ll find one. I’m staying because I love the community here and the staff is considerate and try to be quick with queries and concerns from us as customers.
- I’m not saying I’m going to leave forever and not come back. I like being able to discover games on this site that I might not have known about before. The free games was a nice perk to get initial viral traffic but now they need to pivot if they want to stand a chance in this highly competitive market. It will be interesting to see if they manage to pull it off, or if they fade into the background.
Thanks for the response.