Gems have no exchange rate back into real money - once they have your money, it's gone - and they can't be used to purchase anything else with intrinsic value so players have no idea 'how much' a gem is worth. Players don't see it costing $6.85 to enter a draft, they see however many gems. Casinos are under no such requirement to do this, they do it because it makes them money. The changing of real currency to funny money, especially when done at some difficult to convert ratio (like exactly what Arena and other mobile games do) essentially makes players devalue their money.

It's the reason Historic took forever to come and only after no small amount of bitching from the playerbase.įor what it's worth, what you're describing is also exactly what casinos do. They want you paying money for gems, bleeding those gems over time, and getting you to re-up. They don't want you playing non-rotating constructed formats. Ultimately, all of Arena is built towards funneling people back toward the gem shop. 'Well just don't let mobile clients queue for EDH lobbies!' This isn't a wise investment of development time or OpEx resources in the long term if it functionally limits the player pool to those playing on PC or very large tablets. You have to develop some sort of hacked together scrolling/expanding/contracting system for four boardstates that are known to get gigantic. The scope of Magic is fucking gigantic, and when the only really celebrated way to play multiplayer features a card pool in excess of 20k unique cards, you have to draw the line somewhere.Īdditionally, aspirations towards mobile phone screen sizes and resolutions would make representing your average EDH game visually all but impossible.

From everything I have seen of the project, the team was comically under-resourced and knocking off multiplayer support seems like just basic Project Management 101.

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