Greetings.
I am currently what you'd likely call an “on the fence“ shopper, and I also happen to be a business owner and a technologist, specializing in COTS software but also versed in .NET code when necessary.
I also am fairly versed in trainers and CoSMOS. I was hacking codes in the days of Game Genie ⌠certainly much easier back then⌡, GameShark, CodeBreaker, Action Replay, etc. I'm not new to the industry, in other words, but I'm nowhere near advanced. Assembly is not a strong point of mine.
I have recently dug into CoSMOS and found it a solid tool, very well done for what it's suppose to do.
Thus, I appreciate the skill of those here who spend their time doing this, and in some cases likely for a living. It's a service to those who want and need that service.
I completely support what CheatHappens does and why they charge for what they charge for. I also feel the dollar amount for Lifetime is fair.
However...part of my hesitation has to do with - and I don't know how else to describe it - uncertainty with respect to the value proposition.
Paying per trainer? An awesome choice, say $1-5 per trainer. Problem is, many trainers don't appear to offer this option. Yet it would be the perfect choice for situations where it happens to be a niche or underexposed game where a membership doesn't make sense. I question why you don't just have this as an option for ALL trainers, then just adjust price based on the popularity ⌠or lack thereof⌡ of the game over time. So for example, if you do a trainer for FIFA '15, you're not going to be able to justify $5 for that in 2020.
Which brings me to my second concern.
So-called “Free“ Trainers? Another great side deal for those that don't want Premium. Problem is, of the list that returns when you filter against “FREE“, and I don't know the total number ⌠the search doesn't tell you the # of results, which I think it should⌡, probably somewhere in 50-100 range, I counted about 10-ish games I recognize and two I would ever play ⌠Stardew Valley and Ultra Street Fighter⌡. But then when I dig deeper, it seems slightly misleading, because the latest trainer isn't free, only one for an old build. Which as we know from Steam, is challenging to pull off. The only way you can find the “FREE“ trainer is to open the older build section, which is purposely collapsed and hidden from the user, rather than prominently displayed.
Piggybacking off of the charge model above, I question why you can't just have it to where, after a certain period of low popularity, all trainers eventually go to the “buy each“ model ⌠still included via Premium⌡ with regular price drops over time, then after more lull, goes to FREE, rather than having the mixed “this version is free but this one isn't“ that just lends itself to false positives in the search.
Lastly, and this isn't your fault and I don't know that there's a clean way around it but I see it as a risk - is with trainers for unfinished games. Like Edge of Eternity, for example. Ultimately, someone's got to hack that and keep them updated when they change the code, but if they change too frequent it's not sustainable. But, if I buy Premium, then yes, I expect you to update it on whatever cadence necessary to get my money's worth because you started down the path. Had there never been a trainer for it and a message that you will not do trainers for games that are not full released, there'd be no such expectation. Am I making sense?
So I'm doing three things here.
1. I'm questioning the strategy, the value proposition, and the thought process behind why there's such a haphazard approach to making trainers available to people; and I'm questioning why you don't just take the simple approach of making every trainer purchasable separately ⌠which avoids the problem almost entirely⌡.
2. I'm sharing feedback, from the eye of someone who wants to be a consumer but also needs to make sure that the value is truly there for the dollar - it doesn't matter if the price is reasonable if I get nothing out of it. It's why I recently canceled like 5 subscriptions, because there was no value, despite them collectively being only about $60/month.
3. I'm commenting on the UX of the website itself; that it doesn't seem to really tell the story to someone who's browsing of what to expect with each tier, and instead seems to have been written to basically convince people to buy Premium. That's fine...but I'd rather see an approach that proudly broadcasts that certain older, lesser touched trainers where people actually know what the F they are and not just obscure games are completely free; then inside the trainer itself, do some unobtrusive advertising about the latest, greatest games where trainers are available for a price or with a Premium.
Oh, and the forums being unable to properly and securely parse common ASCII characters such as parentheses is appalling. vBulletin and similar such services have been doing this correctly for decades.
...That said, hi everyone!
Thanks for your input and taking the time to offer some insight.
The honest answer, without going down hours of responding to all of your well thought out points, is that:
We've been doing this a long time. Like a REAL LONG TIME. Most of the things you see in other trainer sites or other trainers have all been done here FIRST, for the most part. It doesn't mean we always did things or do things the best way to start with, or the things we tried didn't have some negative outcomes over time. But, we've been around almost 2 decades. A lot longer than any other trainer focused cheat site. People who used to ridicule us or complain that we charge for trainers are now trying to make bank doing the same thing, albeit 20 years later.
In the end, it all boils down to experience of being in tune with the gaming industry, operating system changes, and what simply works or doesn't work, and then trying to mesh all that with a price point, and service offerings that will allow us to continue doing this in perpetuity. Some things, like updating Early Access Alpha game that is in early access for 3 years and still is patching 2 times a week, with MAJOR changes, is a time sink that simply NO SITE is going to be able to keep up with that without dedicating 100's of programmers to handle it all. Do you want your subscription to be affordable, and make sense? It won't if we did that, and we would cease to exist.
It's mostly that economically, the decisions we make are to enable us to keep putting out MORE CONTENT THAN ANYONE, more UPDATES TO GAMES than anyone, and to continue staying around year after year, while still keeping our prices generally the lowest of anyone doing this.
I hear you on some of the internal server website stuff (like forums parsing text, rejecting text, etc.) All good points.
The best way to look at it is this way. If there is just about ANY game out, and HAS BEEN OUT, or is COMING OUT, Cheathappens is THE source for it. Yes, we will continue to make audible calls on trying titles, or titles that are in development by people who have no idea what they are doing and are rewriting their games in total over and over. Some titles WILL get retired. However, on the whole, there is no bigger gorilla in the trainer jungle than Cheathappens. It's been that way for years, and continues to be that way. We will be around when the others get lazy, tire out, flame out, their anarchic mentality programmers turn on each other, or the economic downturns simply wreck them.
Choose carefully!
Your points are well taken, and we will certainly discuss them in our weekly meeting, and perhaps see what can be done in regards to some of it. In the end, there is 24 hours a day, and X amount of subscription income. We have to prioritize, manage, and make decisions how to best make use of both.
Have a great day, and just go subscribe already! Lifetime is LIFETIME. Like the cost of a pair of jeans, you have unlimited access to ALL of our Kazillions of trainers and future content. There's no better deal on the net for what we do.
best,
Cal
I would just like to add that the main reason that we don't sell trainers individually for $5 is because we have no idea if that game is going to get 1 patch or 100 patches and the purchaser is going to expect all of the updates that the game gets until infinity. Seeing as how pretty much EVERY game being released these days are in some form of EARLY ACCESS, ALPHA, BETA, etc then it's just more work because those games WILL likely get several patches and $5 doesn't even begin to cover the work involved with training games in this day and age, especially when people expect it work for every gaming platform such as STEAM, EPIC, GOG, EA PLAY, UBISOFT CONNECT, GAMEPASS, etc. So, we could sell every trainer, including updates for $5 each and then it's just not cost effective for the end user as we have some trainers that have been updated over 150 times (on average it would likely cost a user $125 for one trainer + 25 updates). Ar far as how old the game is, that doesn't change the amount of work that went into creating, updating and supporting that game trainer so it doesn't justify a "bargain bin" price, especially because it could just as easily patch again out of nowhere like many older titles seem to for no apparent reason. We don't really do much free stuff any more except for our PROMO versions of our trainers which go out to our advertising network of websites and we've recently increased these promos from +1 to +4 thru +10 or higher. Lastly, we tried the individual price thing many years ago when we opened a site called CheatScapes where we and other trainer makers could sell their trainers for a fixed price. It ultimately failed because the majority of the trainer makers weren't keeping up with all of the game patches and people just seemed to prefer the subscription model, especially our LIFETIME subscription. As far as I know, we are the only ones to offer such an option and have for almost 15 years now. Wouldn't it be nice if you could pay $100 and get every game released from now until eternity for free?
[Edited by moderator PWizard, 2/13/2021 1:27:37 PM]
Thank you - and everyone who responded. This in particular explains the lack of single purchase trainers - and it's what I suspected. And as a software guy your answer is 100% logical.
I just want consistency.
If what you say is true, all trainers are at risk of the same.
Thus, why do some have pay-per, with no discernible pattern?
I'd rather see a model where ALL trainers have pay-per, or none do.
Same with free on older builds. I'd rather see that ALL trainers' older builds end up free, or none do.
Same with trainer releases - if it's released, you will continually work it if/when needed, or you won't even start because it's not sustainable to work it.
I get the gist of what everyone's saying - do Lifetime and be done with it.
The main lingering concern is, if it's a game that I see there was a trainer...Edge of Eternity is the most notorious example...and I see a post from CH that basically says “we're not doing any more hacking on this until it's finished“ - which as a developer I 100% understand and agree with - then I'm like, okay, but I'm not getting what I paid for, because maybe that's the game I care about at the moment.
This is easily resolved - as a general rule, DON'T even start a trainer on an unfinished game. Then I'd have no reason to complain, because what I'm paying for isn't a guarantee that you will hack every single game when I ask you to, it's assurance that what you do hack will work consistently.
That's the difference I see. I know it's a community-based deal, people ask and you deliver, but that's not sustainable to me, and Edge of Eternity - and many other unfinished games - are perfect examples why. But if you just switch it up and opt not even to start hacking a game that isn't finished and instead just direct people to do their own basic stuff in CoSMOS or even CoSMOS, people still get some value - maybe even more, because it encourages people to learn to self serve for the low 20% that isn't worth you guys' time.
I really hope I'm making sense with my argument. It's all about value.
This would be more like 80% not 20% as that is the percentage of games that are released in a "finished" state as of now. We would be making about 10 trainers a month instead of 300 and our income would plummet along with our userbase. It's not consistent because the gaming world is not consistent. First it was finished games with maybe one patch EVER. Then it was a few more patches, then it was BETA access then it was EARLY access then ALPHA access, etc. Then it was just STEAM. Then it was STEAM and GOG. Then it was STEAM and GOG and Game for Windows Live. Oh and then it wasn't GFWL any more, it was now GAMEPASS. Then it was UPLAY, then it wasn't, then it was something else. See where I am going with this? If the gaming world would stay consistent then so would we. But we're not going to go back and change every trainer on the site or our entire way of doing business every time the gaming wind blows. We make trainers based on what the community votes on and based on what our capabilities are, not having any idea how many patches or complete re-writes the game with have along the way. If ultimately it comes to a point where it's changing direction too often and eating too much of our time then we have to put certain titles ON HOLD until they stabilize or we would never get to the other games that people are playing and want trainers for. It's a system, our system, and it works for us.
If "value" is all you're looking for, you will find no better value on the internet than our LIFETIME subscription. Just ask pretty much anyone that has purchased one over the last 15 years.
Granted.
All I'm wanting is what Caliber offered: that it's discussed as a team in this weekly meeting referred to, and an openness to see it from a different perspective, rather than a one-sided shut down of feedback.
Much of my feedback has less to do with the winds of change in gaming, and more to do with user experience here, from the perspective of someone who runs a business.
Certainly there are those here who believe Lifetime is a value for them, and I can clearly see why.
But I would hope that you would - as part of the weekly meeting and a group objective consensus - be open to feedback that has the potential to further increase that value to more people by simply embracing a singular consistency in the messaging.
No free? Great. No pay-per? Great.
So someone should go through and remove all instances of "free" and pay-per across all trainers - of course, that's assuming the backend is built for you to simply do that. If it isn't, ideally there's a project to clean that up, so that you can change easily in the future.
When I say to just not start a trainer for an early access game, you're affirming the logic...not stabilized, changing direction, etc. These attributes were true from day one. Thus, there was no logic in even starting to hack it, because you would have seen a time sink. Then, you want until you see stabilization, THEN start releasing trainers.
How is that any different than your current approach, except that now, the user isn't getting the perception that at any given time, the trainers they were provided will stop working, you won't work on it, yet their money is gone?
Is that a fickle perception? Absolutely. But that's how consumers work. That's value. You pay, you provide. Your response of - paraphrased, “we'll provide until we don't feel like it“ works if it were free.
Even if you did as little as, say, a “conditional trainer“ concept, that specifically and clearly announced that the trainer was subject to discontinuation at a future date due to the instability of the developer. At least then the consumer knows going in they're not to expect constancy.
As-is you're asking someone to pay a small amount of money for...what? What's guaranteed? Beyond the dollar amount, WHAT is guaranteed? Nothing.
Then the value isn't there.
BUT...if you provide some assurances - “We won't start hacking a game we perceive to be unstable, until it stabilizes“, clearly broadcast in your TOS or FAQ - and you commit to your update cadence for the stable games, now you're telling the customer, “the money you spend is on quality“ - NOT quantity.
You said you've been doing it “your way“ for decades...awesome. The downside is that tends to create a bubble, where you're resistant to any outside feedback because you believe you're perfect. The truth is, nobody is, nobody can be. But then I question why bother with a forum specifically titled “Feedback“ if your first inclination is to rebuke it - respectfully, but you are rebuking it.
All I'm asking, is that you guys as a group...as a group, not just one, consider the feedback from the perspective of an outsider, not your own zone.
If you've lived in a blue house for 30 years, you probably have a bias against other colors, but if someone came long who was colorblind to blue and couldn't see anything, certainly you wouldn't immediately change just for that one person, but you should really discuss as a family whether a single color is the right answer. Get out of your comfort zone.
Remember...if I didn't care, I wouldn't bother offering any feedback at all.
And without feedback that's actually acknowledged and considered, nobody gets any better at what they do. They get “comfortable“ - and comfort doesn't lend itself to greater success.
Good day. I won't beleaguer the point further.
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