C.O.R.E. Subscription Price Change [Discussion]
PkmnTrainerJ
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We plan to increase the C.O.R.E. subscription monthly price to $7.99 (USD or equivalent) starting Monday, August 28, 2023 so that we can help to cover our growing costs to run Ingress.
Active subscribers whose renewal dates happen on or after Mon Aug 28 will renew at the updated price going forward. Subscribers can cancel their next subscription renewal at any time. Renewals that happen prior to Mon Aug 28 are not affected and will be billed at their original price.
Why is the price changing?
C.O.R.E. has remained at the same price since 2021 and our LA Studio’s recent restructuring, global inflation, and other economic changes have all influenced our decision. (This does not include any mandatory increases by the app stores, which are out of our control).
New rewards breakdown
C.O.R.E. will now provide a 4X value for its $7.99 (USD or equivalent) monthly price, with a 4X increase in CMU rewards from 2,500 to 10,000 CMU. The total rewards breakdown will be:
- 10,000 CMU
- +500 inventory capacity
- Monthly Loadout Kit, currently featuring:2 Rare Kinetic Capsules
- 2 Apex
- 10 Hypercubes
- 20 XMPs
- 20 Resonators
- 1 ITO EN (+)
- 1 ITO EN (-)
- 1 SoftBank Ultra Link
- 1 Very Rare Battle Beacon (if recursed)
- Codename Flair
- Subscriber Medal
This change will go live for new subscriptions and renewals starting Mon Aug 28.
Comments
This is because of the insane cost increase they're having, feeding all those machina requires a lot of expensive resources. The spice must flow!
Player decline caused by poor design decisions, and a load of scrapped garbage games have nothing to do with it, I assure you! This is all the fault of Covid, Inflation, Economic changes and your mom!
Didn't they just reduce their labor costs recently? Are they really hurting for money that bad? It's not a big cost increase but over time it adds up. I get it but man they should really be addressing the lag while they are at it. It's getting old.
I’m not fussed by it, inflation is hurting most other parts of living at the moment.
I like that, they’re at least offering more value by giving us more CMU.
Perhaps Niantic could look at different options for core subscription in the future. Maybe a CORE light that gives +200 space, regular CORE then CORE Pro Prime+ that gives 1000 and an appropriate mixture of other premium items.
i’m all for supporting the games that we enjoy, so long as Niantic make it worth our money.
If the inventory would go up by 1000, I would be all over this!
I don't mind the price rise, but they should make anomalies and events more dynamics in exchange.
I totally misinterpreted the +500 inventory. Would have been totally worth it for the already C.O.R.E subscribers. Thanks for selling us short smh
It's an increase of $2...perhaps provide a 6 or 12 month subscription at the current $5 rate?
I can understand and appreciate the need for the increase, and I will continue my subscription. It does make the extremely sparse event calendar, and the ongoing / increasing lag issues feel a bit worse.
Firstly with the upcoming update for c.o.r.e ads in the scanner, it's obviously that niantic is pushing for more monetization in the scanner.
And now with the increase in subscription price, it's obvious that agents are suffering/paying the consequences for the bad management decisions made by niantic in terms of revenue which results in restructuring.
Here is the main question for niantic:
Will the increase in price allow us to have a better scanner experience and support from Niantic? For ages we have been experiencing issues on scanner such as lag. In recent anomaly we are plague with different issues in each series onsite such as missing target portals, lag in scanner, missing shard animations.
I think you have heard this lots of time but please listen to the community on their feedback. Stop focusing on fancy AR stuff and develop/fix features which agents want. You had done it previously for features like portal markers for uniques hack,pioneer,scans, drone and kinetic capsules. Hence, you do know what agents want.
I find it funny people are bellyaching about core price here when the local smurfs are happily buying 400 of the virus bundles every anomaly weekend
So core is the straw breaking your back, and not the pandering to pay-to-win gameplay for retirees and bored house-spouses?
All steps to just keep reducing the player base, people keep abandoning ingress because of the constant lag, constant unpopular decisions around the direction of the game and niantic never listening to the player base. 🤷🏻♂️
I feel like if niantic made popular decisions or requests years ago regarding ingress, people playing the game would enjoy the game more and keep playing happily. ❤️
We want ingress to keep being a nice and happy place, did Niantic feel the same?
Push for more events while you at it to increase core, i dont understand their decicions middle of summer and zero fun events to engage agents
I truly wonder if more players had opted in to the $5 a month we wouldn't be in this situation of losing more players and the Ingress team upping the cost.
With this increase there had better be more events, and Niantic Corp to market Ingress rather than rely on word of mouth
And people say that Niantic doesn't pay attention to the forums...
An AI could have done the same function
I cancelled my subscription about nine months ago in protest at the repeated downgrading of the swag package that accompanied the subscription. I still have 22,500 CMU that I cannot use because I find nothing in the store worth buying. Only the key lockers, and I already have them. If there were the option to buy more key lockers, or increase their capacity, I would be all over it like a shot, but a quadrupling of something of which I already have too much and nothing on which to spend it? Nah.
If Niantic adds a MEDIA/VIDEO capsule that doesn't take up inventory space I might consider keeping C.O.R.E. But being a couple of players and the state of inflation in LATAM, I'd rather bow out.
On the other hand, I invite you to check in if the C.O.R.E. subscribers decrease, take a screenshot of the ranking of your playing area, check again on 15/08 and we will know if there is so much displeasure with the rise of the C.O.R.E. Anyway there is always someone who decides to pay, let's see how many are, I at least I will not continue.
Hey man Niantic, we need the players who have been playing the longest and stay active. Give players who recursion more than 3 times a +5 slot permanently for every recursion they have. Loyalty, that's what we need.
Ah yes, because a multi-million dollar company can't handle inflation, but us average joes that barely scrape by can. More CMU for it, sure that's great...but it hardly helps people that just don't have much money.
I make that a 60% increase - global inflation over two years hasn't been anywhere near that much. I can't help wondering if they'll actually lose more revenue from people cancelling their subscription than that gained from the increased price... but maybe we're all addicts, I don't know. Seems to me they could have softened the blow by picking a lower price point.
My complaint is that I don’t want half the gear in the load out. I want to exchange the ITO, SBUL, Battle Beacon, R8, X8 for more K-Capsules and Cubes. Each player should be able to select from a short list of load out options.
Also, at $7.99, I expect an extra 300 inventory slots…
Now I'm curious on what's Niantic's cut from PoGO's profits.
u mean to ingress or? zero really
NIA now have all these redundancies to pay out for. Which I suspect we will all paying for through the increased C.O.R.E price.
I'm also curious to know what the new UK price will be.
"Local currency conversion" in the UK just sees the $ symbol replaced with £ - meaning that we in the UK are paying far more than we should be.
Also evidence of this can be found in the store.
200,000 CMU is $99.99 in the U.S, here in the UK it is £99.99 - a straight swap of the $ symbol to £.
The true cost of $99.99 in the UK as of today is £77.73.
Therefore the 200,000 CMU bundle is overpriced by £22.26 in the UK - quite a considerable amount.
I know currencies fluctuate, however I highly doubt by that huge difference in price.
There is some serious ripping off going on in these 'local currency conversions'.
I’m pretty sure it’ll be £7.99 as it was $4.99 before for the US.
As for redundancies, I’m not sure that’s a thing in most US companies. You’re just told not to turn up to work the next day and have to start job hunting.
Then that would be a blatant rip-off for UK players.
As of today, $7.99 is £6.21.
Since when has $7.99 = £7.99.
Only in the rip off world of Google Play currency conversion.
I don’t disagree, but as the current one is $4.99/£4.99, I guess it’ll be £7.99.
App Store and Play Store can’t have a price of £6.21 for an in app purchase as far as I know, so they’ll go for £7.99
Apple is usually the more expensive one...
not everyone plays your game. Everyone has a breaking point. Maybe it's $7, for some, $5 wasn't worth it.
I have gone on and off of the subscription the last couple of years. Randomly, I cancelled it yesterday before seeing the news about this change, but that definitely would have pushed me to my own breaking point. Continued low effort from the ingress/niantic team in almost all areas besides anomalies.
The Silph Road (Pokémon GO) subreddit can’t understand why Agents pay for CORE -
The Silph Road has not been a place of rational discussion since the covid bonuses were removed. I have seen the craziest mental gymnastics on blaming Niantic about something not working correctly. The Pokémon Company controls the IP. Niantic can't do anything with the Pokémon IP unless it's signed off by TPC. I get the frustration but the community was already a ticking time bomb because whatever they thought how "Silph Road" was going to be implemented with trading never happened.
They announced the end of their community about a month or two ago along with Niantic ending their contract with them (sounds like it was a year contract) but you're telling me their server expenses were all dependent on Niantic? That's poor planning on Silph Road because nothing is forever. Whatever is present there is just an empty shell of whatever a community existed. They have spun so many things as negative press for Niantic like the thread you linked. This problem isn't even specific for Niantic, reddit does this in general.