UnderTaker26 Again without seeing the numbers and data I can only speculate based on the companies actions.
Which 2 months and no change to premium, more premium releases and posts by Qidian and TL saying the numbers look good and are increasing. They could be blowing smoke up everyone's asses, it's impossible to tell.
But my train of thought is, if it was failing they would have dropped the price long ago rather then let it settle in.
That's not at all what I was asking about. I was asking about the pricing for buying spirit stones from the store. I spent $10 for 1500 SS a few months ago. Now, if I spend $10 I only get 600 SS. That is a massive devaluation of money spent for SS.
I think people forget that with the old system where it's not paid, people then cared about the translator and the team because they were part of a community. But now with the new premium system it's not really a community it's a vendor and a customer type of deal so yes at this point I don't really care for translator/editor's income status because now it's about is this worth $$$.
Contributing more $$$ to someone because they're doing me a favor is different from I need to pay $$$ for X commodity. Is premium very expensive? No but is it worth it? At the moment I don't really see much worth in it. Once my free SS runs out i'll probably just start dropping the content and move on, if there was a subscription for all you can read like some of the japanese light novels in some places then I'd be up for that.
For translators doing free work and that have patreon I'll continue contributing to them.
ZeroAspect Bonus SS was lowered, it was a trial period and always labeled as one.
Sugestions:
• Creation of a new charged stone, the Lightning Stone
Purpose: Will be a stone to decide which WN will get a mass release weekly, the top 10 will get new chapters according to their rank.
1 rank - 15 mass release
2 rank - 10 mass release
So on forth
The price could be 1$ each
Result: To instigate real competition between Authors, forming a real sense to the reader that he is contributing to the work, compelling the authors to write better story, therefore increasing the popularity of the site.
Other Idea would be the creation of a general goal for novels that increase their release rate through donations.
Take by an example INEBM, one of the top 20 novels which have only 1 release a day. Setting up a goal of 2~5k in donation to rise it up to 2 releases a day.
Playeone
Well it s common sense everyone knows that Occidental are milk cow for the Chinese. While in China you got premium monthly membership to gain access to unlimited chapter you can dream on to get that for the English version. And while a Chinese translator cost less then an author (payed with a small salary and by the words)
All the Oney they get here is indeed because of greed.
But hey it s not like we have a choice, is there such site who provides novel for free?
Oh yeah there is, well when more people leave and stop reading there maybe they will know that we aren't only milk cow.
And stop the shitty let's support the translator I know some of them but come do we really need to support them that much so they win more then 5k usd a month for two chapters a day ?
Better take professionnal Chinese translator for 2-3000 rmb a month (well who knows if it s not the case right now)
Gamblejay Good one, cash cow t(- -t). I could see someone selling you the full Naruto anime by episode and you'd be ecstatic to hand over your parent's money.
Millman97 I give 2 thumbs up on the quality you guys produce for LoHP. Many of the novels make me cringe at the number of glaring errors (hint: 2 books with MMORPG in their titles) but your work is almost always perfect. Well done.
manapotion Thanks, your support means a lot :D TBH the quality is mostly due to Starve, I'm pretty much a glorified proofreader :sweat_smile:
So going from 1000 bonus SS to 100 bonus SS sounds fair to you?
ZeroAspect Its not like they hid anything, they straight up said it was a % Bonus limited time promotional deal. So the reducing doesn't part doesn't really bother me either way.
Though I don't think anyone would be against the lowering of prices I just don't foresee it happening.
Just looking at the price makes me cry.
untalentedgoblin Not sure if you know this, but the authors wrote these chapters years/months ago. There's no getting rid of the filler from our side. The only ones you might be able to influence with your proposed system are translators and editors.
Gamblejay You assume that the profit maximizing price is known. So far, they can't tell how the pricing has affected demand. Two months really isn't enough time to analyse if premium is optimally priced, especially since they started with a small subset to experiment with. SS revenue may have increased since early adopters may have been testing the waters. Readers may have bought first, calculate spending later. Those who later found the prices extortionary (possibly due to more novels later going premium) certainly won't support the system again. Relying on such first time buyers and whales is not sustainable. Viewership "increased" since many new accounts were made to farm SS.
You say that the accounts are sitting idle waiting for pay out. I highly doubt that. The revenue has probably been 70% invested. They probably expect that the average account will have a non zero balances due to the inability to spend fewer than 3 SS per transaction. There's also the threshold for SS spending on each chapter before bonus payouts are made, so the costs per chapter are almost fixed and the release rate is predictable as well, thus that cost is pretty much known. The share that qi get from variable contacts has probably already been 90% claimed since a minimum publishing share likely exists. What remains are reserve amounts in case they need to make a pay out. If this calculated amount is too low, then they can get the cash from their parent company. They may also limit pay outs to monthly periods with a several day calculation lag in order to cash out liquid assets quickly.
Beware the expensive lure in front of you. It looks shiny and tasty, but it really isn't. Fishermen can only catch the fish that bite.
People seem to forget that if you buy premium chapters and run out, you're gonna have to wait a LONG time to let the free chapters catch up to the shit you bought. So unless you're patient, you're gonna have to buy more SS to be up to date lol
Gamblejay Qidian collects some of the data, but opportunity cost is next to impossible to measure.
How many people would have joined if it weren't for this scenario? Can you tell? Maybe you could guess, but who knows if some Youtuber will run across Qidian in the next year and boost its publicity tenfold.
If opportunity cost were that easy to measure, the stock market would be solved, and speculation would be worthless.
Bump
indeed
KoraL Agree to disagree, I run numbers off bi-weekly and monthly data for my company and have done so since I started it nearly 8 years ago.
It was Qidian and the TL themselves who said the money was in an Escrow Account. So believe it or don't but that was what we were provided with. And it was Qidian themselves who stated they have been paying out of pocket.
I'll agree they have most definitely taken a portion out but I don't imagine it's as big as you believe. Most likely to cover overhead costs because it's the beginning of the year, long as projection numbers show good there's no reason to rush.
By the way, TL just announced more premium releases for April 4th. That will now be 3 months of no change.
Bodhi i’ve experienced this myself
I basically dropped the novel because of this. I’ll be sticking to my one premium novel from now on.
Thats a lot of money
Haha yeh the spells they cast would be an entire paragraph of endless chanting instead of two words.....
Anyway some good discussion but as others mentioned it’s clearly a positive change on the $$ income for the company side therwise more and more novels wouldn’t be switching over with little to no announcements.
I still will hang on to hope for Netflix pricing, or reasonable novel pricing.
In any event I’m just using spirit stones on monster paradise, reading castle of black iron and a few others
Gamblejay nope. Because HP books has less fillers than novels where they tend to repeat what they say again and again
i am waiting for the pirate version.
for now i droped reading premium novel
Gamblejay I actually said the same thing about a week ago when i was running the a comparison on Harry Potter and the 25$ value spirit stones which is about 1250 spirit stones for that price and honestly although my math was way off in terms of word count and i discounted Harry Potter 1st book word count to about 35-40k considering i was simply doing guess work with the word count numbers, but the fact still remains 1250 ss is about 100-130 chapters depending on the story you're reading and the word count for that particular chapter or even spreading across multiple books still spreads out to 125k words per $25 (mind u that's CAD) if in US that's about $20 so either way that's 100% more words compared to HP book 1 as you have more factual numbers. Now people might argue "you can't compare these novels to Harry Potter'..... if that's the case then why are you reading? I certainly think some of these novels are on par with and even more superior to Harry Potter, and this is coming from someone who bought all 7 1st Edition books with the Hard Cover version twice and still have a complete set even now (only reason I don't have 2 sets is cuz my mom back in the day got pissed and destroyed them in rage :( she compensated me though, how I bought second set).
TLDR: Expensive? yes. Worth it? also yes. Story writing is a business. Always has been, will always be. We simply got used to the "free stuff" and completely forgot the nature of the industry, AKA we got spoiled. Not our fault, but you have to move on; either by continue reading or find another means of entertainment.
JcnPeng Writing is a business, now whether something is worth it? That's subjective to each person, for me few stories have been really worth it. Spoilt? Possibly but I would argue against it, I was watching anime when it was in a similar state as the translations of stories and I never had an issue with the jump from free to pay. I would probably have a lot less issue if I was buying a sub or specific books of a series so it really comes down to just how they are trying to monetize on it.
I really think a per chapter buying basis is just ugly, they already know how many chapter's per book since this is based on a translation. They can just pre-sell a whole book, so people just purchase the book and the chapters can unlock as it's been translated. People don't like to be nickled and dimed and I think more than anything that's how this feels like when you're paying by chapter but the cost of the chapter is based on word count?
I can tell that they're trying to sell this per chapter instead of books because they're trying to sell it more as a translation service type of deal. However the reason why the translations could go higher before is because it's more of people that wanted to donate and help a project. Now that it's being monetized it's not really a project but more of a product. Example: $5 per person for a translated episode of Naruto and people will pay for it, an episode of Naruto after it's licensed and released will not command a payment of $5 even when you buy the DVDs.
TLDR: It's probably more of an issue on how you monetize? Pay per chapter based on word count is not really normally how prices are gauged on the most part so most people won't like it cause it feels like being nickled and dimed.
Millman97 At least on Patreon it encouraged the translators to translate more chapters and interact with their fans more, premium is just a paywall with no incentives and the same release rate as previous.
ManOrSuperman Exactly. Donations carry with them an obligation, and as with all obligations, there comes a cost if not fulfilled; namely, you won't get them any more, and as such, won't get paid.
Whereas here, they raised the cost threefold, cut the free chapters in half, increased the pay only chapters infinitefold, and added 3ish bonus chapters per week that translators aren't even all keeping up on.
If Qidian wants to price this like a novel, they've got to treat it like a translation company, not a rabble of internet translators under an umbrella. You've got to get professional translators and editors working full time pumping out like 20 chapters a week, fully edited, with backup people to take over whenever a translator isn't keeping up.
I'll happily pay a subscription of 10 to 15 a month for all chapters or watch ads to unlock stuff. I won't pay easily 50 dollars a week or more to read as much as I want. This will just drive pirating or for people to just stop reading these specific novels and find others with more palatable requirements. Let's be honest there are some really good translated novels but there is also a lot of filler and word count padding even in the best ones. I'm hoping they change their minds on this.
