You know what's funny for me about all the Coinami talk and so on: even if their goal is to strictly monetise like everyone says, then they are not doing a good job at it since their leveling mechanics and training rewards are way to forgiving. I tried my team to be top players (all players from my favourite team like Filip Kostic) and haven't spend a dime on the game. So they basically allow me with all their rewards to build a good team. Unless you are a fan of Batistuta or so there ready is no need to spend money.
This gets repeated a lot. But the way Konami monetise is quite subtle and over a longer arc.
So to begin with, they hand out lots of GP and training points as login bonuses, as well as give a select number of people a good amount of legend players. What this does is allows people to feel like they're in charge of and have the means to strengthen their team, while coming up against stacked teams of legends who overpower your players incentivises you to get them as well.
Next, they release challenges where to get extra currency or training points, you have to use certain players; those players are locked behind lootbox paywalls.
So what you have over time is a ceiling of high-stat players that keeps increasing (which ensures people keep spending), and a rotating cast of players that give short-term benefits (which keeps people spending).
So yes their focus might be on monetisation but with just playing Matches against AI I was able to level up my team without paying anything.
So, for someone who claims to work on mobile F2P games, I'm surprised you don't recognise the above strategy of early handouts which are sufficient for the early game and then increasing the difficulty through releasing and incentivising stronger or otherwise advantageous assets that the player needs to pay for.
You only have to look at the comments in, e.g., the eFootball sub or on Twitter threads: people are already finding that whereas they felt Dream Team was really nice at first, over time they're finding that they're suddenly going on runs of bad form, their players aren't as effective as before, opponents can overpower them (balls go through them/their defensive radius is higher/their curled shots are unstoppable, etc). This is what happens when you start to give more access to specially statted players, and do so behind paywalls.
And for me there is still a difference between focussing on Online and not valueing a type of players or modes (offline). We will see what they do with master league, but again judging now without knowing what it will be is just shooting in the dark.
It borders on corporate bootlicking to suggest that a multibillion company has some set of core values and attitudes towards its different audience segments AND that we cannot (indeed, should not) interpret these from their behaviour. As though they are just a complex person who doesn't always wear their heart on their sleeve, so appearances may be deceptive.
No: an organisation this big, in an industry this profitable, has one thing on its mind, and that is profit. That is the
entire point and purpose behind killing a decades-old franchise, cutting out and then centring the mode that has gambling components in it, releasing that first and putting development time first and foremost into it. That tells you what the priority is, and indeed we can rightly infer from it what (and who) they value.
To suggest that, actually, they might well strongly value the offline community is to utterly misconstrue the relation between company and consumer in the first place. It is at best naivety.
(I'll give you "corporate bootlicking".)
