Television Commercials

I don't watch TV often. However, today whilst working out, I asked the attendant at the gym to change the channel on a TV over my exercise bike to Cartoon Network since I can't deal with any kind of reality programming and news is far too depressing. Both of them make me all table-flippy, and that's a bad thing to be at the gym.

(Said attendant offers to change the channel for me frequently since I'm usually there at non-peak times.)

During the commercial breaks, I saw not one but two commercials for F2P MMOs that I would categorize squarely as 'Crap 2D browser games'. One of these was published by a mousy company that very recently distributed as certain movie about super heroes. It can be safely assumed that they have an enormous marketing budget.

The other, and actually better looking game, IMO, was not by a big name studio. Today was the first I'd heard of them.

I have NEVER seen a CoH commercial in any time slot.

Paragon has produced some GREAT videos, but these never make it past Youtube, let alone afternoon cartoons on CN. Paragon's CUSTOMERS have created great videos.

Black Pebble or other marketing folks, will there ever be any CoH commercials on TV to draw new blood into our world? You guys already have all the talent, know-how, and production values to make one, and it seems like basic cable advertising slots would not be prohibitively expensive.

If not... why?

On tv? Don't bank on it happening ever.

Far to expensive for the return.

Those smaller F2P games, ala Wizards world and the like, can afford to for a few reasons.

Mainly the fact that they have FAR less capital invested in the actual product itself.
Far fewer developers working on the title, means more money not being spent on payroll and game resources.

With the vast majority of our games budget being allocated to true development, there just isn't enough left over for advertising on that scale. We've had numerous ad campaigns in print over the years, and the ever ubiquitous MMO website reviews.

Suffice it to say, there is a reason why the only 'real' MMO you'll see ads for on TV is WoW, as it's the only one with a budget large enough to justify it for the admitedly meager returns they'd generate. All other 'real' MMO's have to devote so much budget to the game itself well.. you get the picture.

This is why, anytime I see an ad for an MMO, I stop paying attention.

CoH did run a few commercials back in late 2004/Early 2005... that is how I came to even know about the game

I saw the commercial...ran to WalMart..grabbed a box of CoH and have been here ever since. Sadly WalMart (at least mine) does not even carry CoH anymore.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Paladiamors I love you, I Burnt the Toast!

Here is a link to the commercial that I saw on tv:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxMlw12Okm0

Quote:

Originally Posted by Paladiamors I love you, I Burnt the Toast!

Yeah, I should clarify that I meant at this point in the games life.

I know what you mean, here in the UK I've started seeing adverts for Runescape, all with fancy high resolution cartoon CGI to make it out it was some kind of light-hearted action-fantasy. But I've played that game years ago and remember the graphics of the browser game were all but pointy polygons.

After taking a quick look on their website now, it's nice to see they've advanced the graphics, I suppose my memory of the game when I used to play it threw me off a tangent.

Would I like to see a CoH TV advertisement? Maybe, but I think to make it a real eye-catcher it's going to need a bunch of work done to it to interest the glancing audience. I love the game myself but that may be my investment and sentimentality talking here.

The bottom line is that this game has long since passed the point where additional advertising isn't realistically going to bring in new customers and additional revenue.

Going Rogue was probably the last big attempt to generate new revenue for this game, and now we've shifted to a hybrid model instead where whilst new revenue is going to be generated, it's unlikely at this stage the game was going to grow in terms of numbers. Wisely, the decision's been made to move to maximising the retention of the playerbase we do have.

I will say I'm not in favor of everything being done in that regard, but by the same token, it's the smartest thing to do for whatever lifespan the game does have in it.


S.

Side rant: I hate my computer's auto-correct. I'm not sure how to turn it off, but I am tired of words like "for" becoming "form". If I misspell or mistype a word, just give me the squiggly lines underneath so I can go back to correct my mistake instead of replacing the misspelled word with the incorrect one. Now, to deal with the topic at hand:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chase_Arcanum 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. )

Nevertheless it is a percentage of the total expenditures for bandwidth for... every single server for every game they manage for the entire network of high graphics and fast streaming action, along with all websites and downloads and services. I am not sure where 6.9% comes from, since it is 3.8% of their total expenditures. Of course, the labor costs for the game developers don't drastically rise and fall with whatever is going to be released soon. Developers aren't hired on the basis that they will have to find a project to work on or be fired, and likewise developers aren't fired immediately after the game is released. To say that the costs of the bandwidth for the game would extrapolate to be a huge fraction of the game once development stops ignores the fact that development never stops. The games are being improved upon, given weekly maintenance, and new game content is being made, and new games are being made, and new projects are being underwent. There is no point where the company goes to it's programmers and writers and says "O.K. you're done. You can go home now".

I have seen the financial reports of NCsoft spanning over two years into the past, and the same story can be said of the financial expenditures for that entire time. If you can find an example in NCsoft's history where they weren't working on any project and thus their bandwidth expenditures made up a large portion of their costs, let me know. I would say that NCsoft isn't too worried about the costs of bandwidth, since their newest launch title isn't going to have a subscription fee (Guild Wars 2).

There is a proportional growth with bandwidth costs. Smaller companies will make cheaper games that will take less bandwidth, so they'll be a small expense. Bigger companies will make bigger games that take more bandwidth, so they'll be a small expense. In the past when MMOs were new, bandwidth costs might have been quite large, but with how much data is maximized nowadays the actual cost of hosting an MMO is no longer a large portion of the costs of an MMO.

The easy answer is that marketing feels that television advertisements draw in a disproportionately small amount of revenue and reaches a disproportionately small number of players versus other forms of advertising, such as going to conventions and working up cross-promotional deals with other companies, such as Dell, Apple, Antec, etc.

Keep in mind that the marketing budget is finite. If they were to advertise on television, that would necessarily mean that other avenues of advertising would be shut off. Would we rather have a television ad than, say, the Player Summit? Would we rather have a television ad than, say, a booth at Comic-Con? Those are the kinds of decisions that marketing has to make. Maybe you disagree with them, but if you really think about it, it makes sense. Personally, I see where they're coming from--it's likely that they do get more players and sustain their existing player base better through the activities they sponsor than buying a relatively expensive television ad.

Everyone knows how a real commercial would go. Live action would see a normal city scene with people going about their business until an explosion is heard off in the distance. Then we see a rush of police and ambulances headed off in the direction of the commotion. Then we see everyone on the street look up at once to see a flying figure darting across the skyline, suddenly you see a mother hand her baby to her husband and then burst into flames and shoot into the sky, a business man look at his watch and then turn into a giant stone golem and run off with the ground shaking under foot. We see a street vendor mumble an incantation, turn into a wizard and vanish into thin air. The camera turns to show heroes appear from all walks of life, all headed to the commotion and then we see the CITY OF HEROES banner.

As cool as a TV spot would be, at this point in the life of the game I think it would be more for us, the players, than garnering a bump of new and returning players. It would be something we can point to and proudly tell your uninterested friends that's the game I play.