Chase_Arcanum

Probably intentional. Those changes get interesting when dealing with copyright law:

"Alice in Wonderland" itself is now in public domain.
Disney could thus create their own "Alice" features without paying any fees.
So can anyone else.

BUT Disney's modifications to the "Alice" story ARE theirs, legally. If you make an Alice story that bears too strong of a resemblance to the Disney version, expect a lawsuit. Same goes for "Tarzan" and most of their fairy tales.

What constitutes "too string of a resemblance" is tough to judge.

Take Snow White
- in the original Grimm version, the witch wants snow white's lungs and liver to eat. Disney made it a "heart." Would just having that same change "heart" in your work constitute infringement? Potentially....

Fortunately, unlike Trademarks, copyright isn't lost through dilution, so copyright owners don't have to feel compelled to challenge all of these. If Disney saw you made a lot of money on a derivative of their work, they might try to go after you for licensing, but they could just as easily realize that your story has renewed interest in their original work and helped increase its value, not dilute it. They just might be comfortable with letting it slide-- no risk to them.

What? your second choice wasn't Arctic Areola

Probably some of that- we haven't really seen water blast beta'd after all, so we don't know what stage its in.

Some of it is they DO have to pace themselves- there are other threads with people venting about market burnout, so you need to mix some "light" weeks in as well...

Also note that the new issue is still brewing. They usually don't want a 'big' thing to be released concurrently with an issue- the issue is news enough, so the market item gets lost in the hype.

That actually IS a decent amount, relatively speaking. $3.9 million us dollars isn't anything to sneeze at. A 2d browser based multiplayer game might have 1% of that bandwith cost.

Look at it another way:

their total bandwidth costs was 6.9% of their total labor cost, which I assume would include the labor costs of all wholly-owned studios. IIRC, two of those are in late-stage development, and part of Paragon Studios has another project too, so a LOT of that staff represent projects using very little bandwidth.

That means that if you could actually extrapolate the costs of bandwith with the cost of labor for those already-launched titles, you'd see that its a painfully sizable chunk of their budget... one that can directly correlate to staffing availability.

(admittedly, there is a a personal bias here: Where I work (not a game company) our coders finally started to minify all code before release, reducing a batch of files from 500kb to 42kb. This savings in bandwidth costs alone let us budget in another graphic designer for the year. )

First, you have to look at what market you're reaching with those ads.

Those crapware 2d F2P games will run on the crap systems that most non/casual gamers use. I'm not talking "casual" as "I only log in 3-5 hours a week." I'm talking "casual" as. "Minimum system requirements? I have a PC. This is a PC game. I should be able to play it." It doesn't matter to these guys. Odds are that anyone that sees that commercial has a machine/tablet/device that could pull up the url and play the crap browser game.

The same can't be said of CoH for a good portion of its existence. It had requirements that were higher than the average PC out there. A "casual" player sees the ad, tries it out, and ******* out customer support over things they don't understand hoping for a refund. That's lost revenue (wages to the support staff, refunds, if you give them, credit card processing fees, bandwidth, etc). Hopefully, you attract enough good customers (paying, happy, non-support-intensive) to offset them. If not, you end up losing money by placing an ad that's too broad... or you find that a different kind of ad- more specialized-- targeting the areas that are frequented by fewer of those casual types-- might be a better source of your revenue.

Next, you have to look at the costs of hosting F2P

The big expense for most MMO's is hosting & bandwidth. You control these by making a product that doesn't require much traffic, memory, or CPU time to deliver the experience.

In traditional 3d mmo's, there are lots of techniques you can use to do this-- throttle back the number of updates per second, reduce the amount of data needed to describe a character to display (less customization-- saying "use asset a dressed in asset b is shorter than "hand asset a color 2, shoulder asset b color 9, etc), reduce the frequency of updates needed every second to make everything flow smoothly (get advanced "path prediction" to let you go longer without sending a positioning update, for example), reduce the number of assets that need to be tracked and communicated, reduce the computation cycles for combat AI, etc.

For all these techniques used by 3d mmos, they're still bandwidth hogs in comparison to the browser-based creations. We're talking orders of magnitude differences here. 2D browser based system need very little data transfer with very long waits between updates.

They're VERY cheap to host, per person.

... And that's critical.

Many of the people you attract with a broadly-targeted tv ad will NEVER pay a cent on your game. There are certain market segments that will just play what's free and never convert to paying customers. Since A 2d game doesn't see much of a per-person cost, t can afford to soak up several thousand freebie players to gain one paying customer. A 3d MMO (particularly one of CoH's generation) has substantially more costs-per-player, so it needs a better proportion between free and paying customers.

Gaining too many free players that have no potential to convert to paying customers means you're paying for ads that'll just make you lose money faster.

You need to again target your customers more intelligently. Hit the places where people that already play MMO's and historically have proven more likely to pay/subscribe frequent. This often isn't on television.

There are a lot of other factors that weigh against direct TV advertising, but I've written enough for now.

Dammit, Rian, you stole my post.

I know, we'd been talking about ideas like this off n on for a while now, so its as much your thought as mine, but when the master of randomly-colored-costumes comments on "breaking immersion," it doesn't sound very genuine.

... then again, you do pretty much the same with RL attire, so I stand corrected.

not saying it won't be allowed, saying that when you count all the individual items (like every single separate costume piece) available, the odds are good that the random selection will be a relatively low-cost item.

Add all the individual costume pieces to that list.

When you look at the total number of relatively low-cost items that could be in that giveaway, the odds of a higher-cost item getting picked free are relatively low.

Still a great promotion, not complaining, just don't think people should expect "costume slot 6" for free anytime soon...

True, but you charge what the market will bear, not what it costs you to make. If you can make a widget for $.25, but the market will pay $5, you charge $5.


(... and get ready to adjust the price when the $1 knockoffs appear.)


---------
... and realistically, will more people buy it just because its available to more characters? I buy a new powerset, I roll an alt. I bought 1 set. I buy a pool power, I roll no alt. I use it across a whole mob of my characters. I see the additional value, but the devs are only paid once. The only additional sales this would provide would be to people that don't have any interest in alt-ing or rerolling, so they're not buying the full powerset.
... and from a marketing perspective, there are additional benefits to the full-power-pool. When rolling and leveling an alt, there are other potential sales (new character slots, enhancements, boosters, etc) that aren't there when you're just augmenting an existing character. If anything, this would encourage them to subsidize a full archetype powerset (and recover the cost elsewhere).

Playing devil's advocate: that pool set would be available to all characters, all archetypes, all builds, all the time. That's incredibly more versatile than a set you choose once at the start of character creation and never get to 'spec out of/into. That adds quite a bit of value despite having fewer powers. Also keep in mind that many full 9-power sets usually have one or two really specialized or situational powers that won't be taking up a slot in the pools (buildup, taunt, tier-9 situational powers, etc) and the actual functional difference is even smaller.

Try it. It really works!

I vaguely recalled something similar, so had to look it up. Agents of SHIELD?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_and_Mary_Parker

EDIT: From the sound of it, they're using something closer to the "ultimate" spidey series, where Dad's a scientist working on the same field that Curt Connors is in. Makes sense, as IIRC another studio's got license to the "shield" stuff...

Just about.

Usually, when someone pays to "retain the rights" to an IP, there's are clauses which state how many years may go by without action in the IP before the agreement essentially terminates. From what I've heard, these are growing to become something closer to chapters as studios learned to play games with the wording to escape the clause (make a feature-length film but never release it... make a junk movie on an indie-film-like budget with limited distribution just to stay legitimate, etc).

Every contract deal can be different, though... and even lead to some mental gymnastics and complications to the script writer-- like a license for Spider Man to one studio, but a license for the villain "Kingpin" to another meaning that they can't use references to Kingpin in any Spidey script unless Kingpin's license reverts.

Yep, and strangely enough, your forum name is pretty close to that hometown's name.

thanks for the laugh.

IED, in case you were serious, though technically thats a misnomer.

IED is "improvised explosive device"-- nothing improvised about their bombs. These are more correctly termed "duds."

Though, as a former combat engineer, I've always been amused by the way we disarm these Rikti bombs. I mean, we engineers lived by the mantra "if at first you don't succeed, find a bigger hammer" but we never really used that philosophy when dealing with bombs explosives. That's more "infantry."

or it serves out a generic error message that gives an incorrect impression.

Needing a whole week off to recover from a single weekend?

...Either I missed one heckuva insane party or you guys are getting old.