I’m no stranger to spending money on silly video game cosmetics. I mean, did you see that new FFXIV Fan Fest emote? Think of all the cool joke macros I could make with that! But this?

This is, quite frankly, embarrassing.

I’ve been following the development of Palia for… about two years now? Since I never got into the alpha, I can’t say I’m an expert but I’ve been relatively diligent in keeping up to date with information, both publicly shared and privately leaked from playtests under NDA.

Now, I won’t go into a detailed history of the devs’ strange behaviour in the Discord server over the last couple years but what I am here to talk about today is why Singularity 6’s chosen way to monetise their game (at least as of the time of the beta) doesn’t really make any sense.

S6’s Beliefs

Way back in February 2022, the team posted a blog post titled ‘On Palia’s Business Model’ and held a ‘Monetization Q&A’ as a Discord Stage to address questions around their announcement that the game would be Free-to-Play. I don’t have a good enough memory to remember every single little thing in the Q&A (there’s probably some talk about it online if you look hard enough) but I thought I’d highlight some quotes from the blog post.

“We believe that above all else, good F2P monetization is all about respect.”

“We don’t want to monetize through tricks. Our products should be able to stand on their own as valuable purchases. In general, our store will have items that are directly purchasable and available all the time.” 

(Note: paragraph styling is my own in order to highlight what I consider to be the most pertinent phrases)

You can accuse me of taking these statements out of context but that’s exactly why I recommend you read the blog post yourself if you haven’t already (archived link so you can see the exact version of the post I’m referencing).

Great, so no shady tricks, no ‘loot boxes’, no rotating store and respectful pricing despite being Free-to-Play. Sounds too good to be true, if I’m honest…

Palia’s Cash Shop

As promised, Palia  (at least in its current beta iteration) doesn’t have any core gameplay elements monetised. That’s a win, right?

Well, not quite.

Technically speaking, there aren’t even any cosmetics you can buy for real money. The reason for this is that the ‘premium’ cosmetics must be bought with ‘Palia Coins’ an in-game currency that can only be bought with real world money and must be bought in bundles.

So let’s say I wanted to buy one of the premium outfits. First I’d need to check how much it is, which is fair enough. Let’s say it costs 1700 Palia Coins. Now I need to go and buy those coins. I can’t buy exactly 1700, though. I can buy either 1850 (via the 1000 coin and two of the 425 coin packs) for US$19.97 or 2050 coins for US$19.99.

(Note: I’m using USD prices so that more people can better have a feel for the value but I live in the UK so all my screenshots show GBP prices)

Wait, what? How come buying 200 fewer coins only costs 2 cents less?

Dark Patterns

For those of us familiar with mobile game monetization, it’s easy to tell what’s going on:

The prices are set such that the more coins you buy in a single transaction, the better ‘value’ for money it is. Let’s compare the smallest and largest coin bundles:

 425 Palia Coins for US$4.99 => 85 coins per dollar
11,000 Palia Coins for US$99.99 => 110 coins per dollar

As you can see, the difference is quite large. This is a classic trick in microtransaction pricing to upsell the player to larger sized currency bundles. This isn’t really something that should exist in a game striving to respect their players.

Not including gacha or loot boxes doesn’t immediately mean the game is respectful to its players. It just means that it doesn’t contain gacha.

By the way, it’s not just my personal opinion that this counts as ‘trickery’. This is a well documented dark pattern both within and without the games industry. If you’re curious about reading further into dark patterns you can check out this article from Deceptive Patterns for a more general example or this one from Dark Pattern Games for something more specific to video games.

Sure, games like Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail do this kind of thing but I don’t think S6 would appreciate being compared to mobile gacha games that undoubtedly prey on their player base to make their millions. Let’s shift focus.

A Comparison to FFXIV

Final Fantasy XIV (you know, the critically acclaimed MMO with a free trial soon to be expanded all the way up to level 70 and an upcoming Xbox launch) has an optional cash shop in addition to the box price and monthly subscription. Despite my own feelings about game monetization in general, there are two things FFXIV has done to respect the player that Palia has not:

1. Keep the cash shop separate from the game.

You literally cannot find a link to the Mogstation Store within FFXIV’s game and this is something the producer has said is deliberate. The best you can do is go to an inn room and try premium outfits on your character (before you go and open your web browser) and even that is a relatively recent feature players had to beg for.

In comparison, you can bring up Palia’s cash shop menu from anywhere you can pull up the map. It’s far too easy.

2. List prices for items in real-world currency.

There are ‘gems’ called Crysta on FFXIV’s cash shop but they simply exist as an alternative method to pay (they’re something of a relic from FFXI’s payment system back in the ‘00s and some players still like to use them).

Outfits, emotes, level skips, housing items: they’re all listed in the appropriate currency for the player’s region. When you buy an outfit or an emote, you know exactly how much you’re spending and don’t need to do any weird approximate conversions in order to know.

It’s a lot more transparent than the pricing of Palia’s items, I think.

Now, I’m not saying Palia should copy FFXIV’s business model entirely, that would be a bit silly. FFXIV has its own issues and Palia has a different target demographic. With that said, I can’t help but ask:

1. Why did they decide on adding Palia Coins when they would have to be stupid to not know it would obfuscate the true price of their premium items?
2. If they don’t want players to feel pressured into buying things, why is a button for the shop on every menu?
3. Why is there a quest that forces you to open the shop, even?

Some More Gameplay-Related Concerns

One thing that really stuck with me from the Q&A last year was the S6 devs’ confusion at a question about whether there would be an optional subscription.

Most successful F2P games have this: players have the option to pay some relatively modest amount of money each month in exchange for some extra in-game resources or currency. It usually ends up being a really good deal for more hardcore players and at least something worth considering for casuals during their more active periods. For example, Genshin Impact offers nearly US$50-worth of in-game premium currency for only US$4.99 (and the commitment of logging in daily for a month to claim it all).

But the ensuing response (which included questions for the asker/audience IIRC) gave me the impression that it wasn’t something the devs had ever heard of, let alone considered. But surely, if they had spent as much time as they had claimed investigating and researching their business model options, this would have been something they had at least come across? At the time, I thought that they simply must have had a lot of confidence in their game’s systems and character customisation so they didn’t bother considering alternative income streams beyond premium outfits.

Questionable Design Choices

Fast forward to now and…character customisation is not good. The options are extremely limited to the point that there’s a complete lack of pale skin tones, afro-textured hair options other than dreadlocks, skin features like freckles, vitiligo or wrinkles, long skirts (there’s only an awkwardly-fitting dress and a mini-skirt), and beards and the limited colour options aren’t exactly inspiring. Even worse is that outfits are limited to only three items: ‘facemask’ (basically just glasses), ‘top’ and ‘bottom’. There’s no separate option for shoes, gloves or even jewellery. It’s pathetic. I have more options when choosing my sleepwear in real life.

I had thought that clothing dyes would be a gameplay thing of sorts but instead we are stuck with only a few strict colourways (which come at additional costs for premium items btw). I understand that not every game can be Guild Wars 2 but are pastel pink and deep green such rare favourite colours? Then there’s also the fact that the majority of the designs aren’t monochrome. Good luck making a completely white outfit.

A Lack of Value

Some people are quick to complain that the prices are too high but they’re oversimplifying the problem: what’s on offer in the shop isn’t of sufficient quality for the prices being asked. I’m no stranger to dropping $15 on an in-game outfit or $20 on a mount but usually, there’s a reason why it’s that much money. Availability on multiple different characters, unique voice lines and animations, versatility in multiple different outfits, bonus items like effects or hairstyles…the list goes on.

Think of it this way: For (approximately) US$30 I can choose to buy an embarrassingly designed lolita fashion inspired outfit in Palia (a game in beta btw) or I can do one of the following:

• Buy three ‘Overwhelmingly Positive’ games in my Steam wishlist.
• Back a promising Kickstarter game (remember: only back a project because you want to give them the best possible chance of success; not just because you want the end-product).
• Treat a friend to a meal at Nando’s.

$30 may not feel like as much as it used to but there’s still a lot you can do with it.

More importantly, I think I would get more enjoyment from a simple two-hour nap than from doing anything related to Palia.

Gamers Deserve Better

Right now, playing Palia feels like a trashy mobile game where the timers are missing the “Speed Up for 7 Gems” button. Looking at their choice to use a middle-man ‘gem’ style currency for their premium store I can’t help but ask if perhaps once upon a time the game started its life as one such project. If so, when was this concept scrapped in favour of its current ‘cosy MMO’ branding? How difficult would it be to add these types of predatory features back into the game in the near future? Did the developers honestly play their own game and find it fun? Did they ever bother playing the games they were supposedly inspired by? Did they run out of investor money and get rushed to start generating income?

This is all my own baseless speculation, by the way. I just don’t understand how a medium-sized group of supposed ‘industry veterans’ working full time with at least US$46.5 million in funding can willingly release something objectively worse in every regard to a game made by literally one guy with ‘no industry experience’. It’s embarrassing. Sure, Stardew Valley isn’t an MMO but at least it’s a fun game with compelling co-op features and doesn’t try to market itself as something it isn’t.

[Originally published on my old wordpress.com blog in August 2023.]