I’m a very casual Yu-Gi-Oh! fan, so this was all news to me. Does the more dedicated community share these views about Master Duel and the TCG?

  • xan1242@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    I’m someone who has tried to get into the game, multiple times over (and still want to!) but never managed to do it where I feel comfortable playing. This is more of a personal problem, but I remember being able to teach myself the game a lot easier before than now. I used to play DL extensively but gave up after 3 years.

    There is a very good reason why Rush Duels exist - TCG and OCG became too saturated and power crept. Konami knows this very well.

    Despite best efforts from anyone involved, the game is very closeted and hard to get into because of the complexity and partially because of the community surrounding the game.

    That, combined with Konami’s way of marketing TCG (they depend heavily on content creators) means they’ll always be niche by comparison.

    Master Duel isn’t helping anyone. It’s its own thing and it is treated as such. Because of that, there isn’t much of an overlap between IRL and digital Yu-Gi-Oh players.

    This matters because there’s a lot of IRL players who don’t care about MD whatsoever (and vice versa). This is a pretty big missed marketing opportunity.

    Sure, Konami has their reasons for keeping it this way but it’s slowly but surely backfiring as we can see.

    Their lazy approach to solving the game’s fundamental problems are starting to show. They wanted to keep good graces of whales (both IRL and MD) because they would be pissed if TCG and OCG were to merge. And that merge would at least allow MD to go inline with IRL game and be a unified experience.

    They’re more afraid of losing those potential IRL players, but realistically I think they’d profit more from MD if it followed OCG rules because I don’t believe there are that many new TCG/OCG players coming in, whereas they do have a better potential via a digital game.

    I want this game to be better because I love it. It can be better and it’s frustrating when you know that it’s could be better, but it isn’t.

    • Homespore165@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Konami will never prioritize MD over physical play.

      Firstly, physical play is just more fun. The social interaction is a big deal for TCGs.

      And secondly, physical play is way more profitable. Master duel probably barely makes money if you consider the upkeep while the TCG rakes in money. The average TCG players spends way more than the average MD player. I’m gonna take myself for example, I have spent about 30$ on master duel when it released but I go to 3 locals per week for a total of 15$. Now the 30$ i spent on master duel is mostly profit because there’s no physical product to manufacture, ship, etc. With the game being about a year and a half old, that comes to about 20$ per year. However, even if konami only gets about let’s say 1$ per tournament i go to (which seems likely) they still make 3$ a week which is 156$ per year. so a single tcg player is worth at least 8 master duel player. And i don’t think that master duel can ever be 10 times as popular as the TCG.

      So that’s probably why konami has been pushing to get people into the TCG with duel links, speed duel, rush duel, and master duel.