I’m not sure that giving your players the equivalent choice of playing for a month or fixing their broken character is entirely sound business acumen.
There may be a very good reason (if tax avoidance is ever a good reason) why game companies in general seem to use point systems to price their virtual goods and services, but from at least one perspective it looks like nothing more than a weasel wrapper attempting to obfuscate the real world price.
This was my first reaction (in Spink’s comments) but apparently what they are selling in the cash shop is basically the same as WoW sells as “account services” and you can get what WoW calls respecs in game in the normal way.
So they’re doing the same as WoW while cleverly disguising themselves as money-grabbing bastards desperately trying to keep a plummeting game aloft.
No doubt they assume the fans will realise it’s meant ironically and will unanimously take it as a wittily ironic proof that all is sweetness and light in superhero-land.
The fact that the new Batman game is apparently more enjoyable to play for 5 minutes than CO is to play for a lifetime might be inspiring these marketing gymnastics.
Personally I think their character skill system is more akin to WoW’s talent system, where you can pick a duff build fairly easily and it quickly becomes prohibitively expensive to respec with in-game currency for a low level character.
The fact that Cryptic keep nerfing and changing skills in fundamental ways (and granted they’ve given free respecs in a couple of the more extreme cases) makes it such that even if you build a really superb character, you may log in the next day and find that it no longer works because the synergy of the powers has been broken, or a key power has been nerfed or changed to operate how the developers actually intended it to work.
I think the equivalent in WoW would be if talent respecs cost 5000 gold to entirely undo, but you could pay $12 through the accounts system to avoid this cost. Not only that, but it would be possible to create an entirely unplayable character if you picked the wrong set of talents.
I think Champions is one of those games that needs six months or more of in-the-field testing before it settles down and matures enough to be more than a dip-in curiosity.