Word of mouth is still the best advertising. If you think more people should be playing the game, go tell more people.
I'd rather see the advertising dollars go to maintain a "we're still here" level, and take the rest of that money and spend it on development. When there's a new physical box version of the game, like GR, on the way, pump more dollars to advertise that, but in the mean time, what Marketing is doing right now is fine.
Loose --> not tight.
Lose --> Did not win, misplace, cannot find, subtract.
One extra 'o' makes a big difference.
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Originally Posted by Father Xmas
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.
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This is my take whenever i see people going on about marketing. the mmo market is currently defined by one aberration that had a number of non replicable factors that caused it to be a insane outlier and a large number of companies trying to be it with graphics and engines that reflect the evolution of games from the several years that have intervened since launch.
coh has neither that series of fortunate coincidences that the giant has nor the benefit of being more recent and looking prettier than the latecomers. we are an old game, period, that age has lead to depth, no doubt, and that advantage is evident if you visit the forums of the competing superhero mmos and you see their players grumbling for content that we have in spades, but there are soem things being nearly a decade old in the aggressively evolving tech industry simply cant mask, and coh would look horrid in a commercial versus tera or gw2. we can get people here and there, but coh's main strength has been that it has a hardcore group of fans who stay with it for an unusually long time. as much was said by its former lead developer.
so trying to add flashy advertizements to an 8 year old game in a genre that has a spotty track record in video games really seems like a cause that is, if not lost, at least prohibitive, and word of mouth from the hardest core who can share exactly why coh is a game worth playing for nearly a decade.
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I believe the term was "biggest cost". I would content that 3.8% of quarterly expenditure is not "biggest cost". Though I believe programmers and game designers are budgeted with a salary and not paid per content or code, so the only way to diminish costs from the workers would be to fire them or impose draconian salary cuts on a regular basis. If you are saying that, after the game is made nothing else is done on it and a company basically absolves sans royalties and regular payoffs from the income of the game (sub maintenance and customer service), then the bandwidth would indeed be the most expensive part of managing an MMO. It would basically be the only expense.|
Originally Posted by Chase_Arcanum
1) You and I just have huge differences in opinion on what "large portion" is. When you look at this cost on just the few games that NCSoft has active compared to the amount it has working on other projects, it IS huge.
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Originally Posted by Chase_Arcanum
2) As you suggested, newer games manage data better, but CoH isn't a new game. Its 8 years old, and its always very challenging to change the underlying systems without damaging something. They go unchanged unless absolutely essential.
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Originally Posted by Chase_Arcanum
3) The context of that post was demonstrating that there are costs associated with customers (support & bandwidth being the two hilighted), some kinds of customers are more expensive than others, and some kinds of platforms are better at managing these than others. Those that aren't built to minimize these risks need to target their marketing differently to mitigate them.
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Originally Posted by Chase_Arcanum
The are you disputed was the statement that bandwidth plays a role.
In essence, a game with a lighter bandwidth (and related) load can afford a rather scattershot advertising campaign, because if his costs for all the 'free' players that won't buy ANYTHING is low. A game with higher costs needs to try for more targeted advertising, going after the market segment with a greater likelihood of paying out. I stuck with bandwidth because it IS directly scalable with the users (and user activity) so it can be more directly applied to the costs of attracting new players. (and... well, half my post was eaten by hitting the 'back' button.) |
That is just a theory, however. It could be many other things, such as a target audience (I notice many of these free MMOs appeal to younger demographics with large cartoony appearances), or a bad marketing department in case the former isn't true. Most of my job experience has been in banking and education so I don't have first hand knowledge, but wouldn't the marketing department attempt to go for better and more frequent focused adds with a larger budget than a scattershot one?
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Originally Posted by Chase_Arcanum
You mention labor costs, and yes, they're huge. They also differ dramatically between the game types. A 2D browser based game can simply produce more, faster, with fewer people, so it'll have this at much lower costs as well. This cost doesn't scale well, though, and there's not a direct-consumption-cost to it, so it didn't contribute to the section on "targeted advertising."
It IS a huge portion of the cost, agreed, but since it isn't directly scalable to the playerbase-- more free players doesn't suddenly mean more payroll expenses, so it didn't contribute to the conversation. Note, though, that you are kinda wrong in "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"." There very much is, as many that work in the industry will tell you. The months leading up to a launch will often see a surge in payroll expenditures as the production team scales into the hundreds, while maintaining a title may take a few dozen. Historically, even a 2-team system (1 working on expansions, 1 working on maintenance) has been dwarfed by a full-production team. NCNC's "reinvestment" in CoH after it was acquired is more the happy exception, rather than the norm. |
TPN trial guide video / MoM trial guide video / DD trial guide video / BAF trial guide video
/ Lambda trial guide video / Keyes trial guide video / Magisterium trial guide video / Underground trial guide
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Read again. Its "The big expense." Not "the biggest." it was also listed as "bandwidth and hosting." not just bandwith. hosting includes the servers, server space, infrastructure, and the pay for the guys that maintain those servers. I should have probably said "the big expense that scales with the number of users" but i thought every paragraph after that would make it clear what I was focusing on.|
Originally Posted by Blood Red Arachnid
I believe the term was "biggest cost". I would content that 3.8% of quarterly expenditure is not "biggest cost".
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Personnel costs do not scale with player population. Many an MMO has scaled back continuing development teams to "Just the guy sitting under the stairs" but left the game running. It really doesn't matter how many people are playing your game- if you want to control this cost by scaling down the team from a full-production staff, you really can.
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That evil back button... I do think that it might be a little more complicated than just bandwidth and cost-per-customer being low from a subscription/microtransaction point of view. Something I noticed alongside of many "free" mmos is extremely rampant advertisements from related/unrelated companies. Worst cases I have seen games that reward you in-game for signing up to mailing lists of various sponsors for the game. Now, those advertisements work by giving a percentage of their profits and sales as well as a sponsorship bonus to the game in exchange for ad space on that game. A televised advertisement for the "free" MMO therefore becomes by proxy and extended and continuous audience to be advertised to, and thus a televised advert can attract indiscriminate attention to be proxy advertisements buried within the website. Hell, advertisements are whats keeping phone books afloat in modern times, so the sponsors have to be more than just a minor influence on the marketing strategy of these games. That is just a theory, however. It could be many other things, such as a target audience (I notice many of these free MMOs appeal to younger demographics with large cartoony appearances), or a bad marketing department in case the former isn't true. Most of my job experience has been in banking and education so I don't have first hand knowledge, but wouldn't the marketing department attempt to go for better and more frequent focused adds with a larger budget than a scattershot one? |
A game that has higher costs per-user and doesn't offset those costs with advertisements needs to make sure that the people they reach out to with advertising have a reasonable chance of being converted to paying customers. Hence, a more targeted approach trying to reach the market that's receptive to their needs.
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| Workers are relocated to other projects more than they are hired/fired (With the ending of Tabula Rasa, CoH received a surge of reinvestment in the form of a larger team for awhile), since firing and hiring new programmers requires going through the whole hiring process. Interviewing, reading, testing (if applicable. Had to be tested for every job I got, but again; banking and education), assessing, training, inducting, and paying for their mistakes. The whole process is quite expensive, and doing so would require nearly every project to start from scratch with the new team. I know the job is fickle, being transferred from one project to another into different buildings and teams, but unless the programming field has been keeping it on the down low, I never hear about mass layoffs unless a company is losing money. |
What you're describing, though, is the LOGICAL IDEAL that I think the studios should follow. It just makes sense to take the guys that researched and assessed all the various engines and assets purchased for GW2 or Wildstar and have them apply that knowledge to CoH2. Hopefully, they've moved closer to that- it would be nice to see some benefits come with the decline of indie studios and rise of publisher-owned studios but the gaming industry remains a rather volatile field of work.
And again, were talking in the context of the game budgets. Even if we do assume that people are transferred between studios, rather than laid off, it doesn't change the argument in the slightest:
-We're seeing NCSoft's total personnel costs and total bandwidth costs.
-Studios with games under development would still have proportionally higher personnel costs than studios that are in "post launch" phase with modest updates.
- Studios in the "post launch" phase would represent the lions' share of the bandwidth costs because... well, people are playing their game.
- If we wanted to see a game's true impact on budget, we'd have to compare it to the expenses on a per-studio level.
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It got me to buy the game a lil over 7 years ago |
Originally Posted by Johnny_Butane
That was kind of a horrible advertisement. It didn't tell you anything beyond 'there's a city...with heroes in it...'
It didn't tell you it was a MMO that let you create your own hero with an extensive costume creator. It didn't hype up playing on a super team with friends and thousands of others online. Heck, it wasn't even clear the ad was even for a game until the very end. . |
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Originally Posted by Paladiamors
I love you, I Burnt the Toast!
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As a side note, I would like to see Sandy Collora (Worlds Finest, Batman: Dead End) produce this.
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Originally Posted by Anti_Proton
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.
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"Samual_Tow - Be disappointed all you want, people. You just don't appreciate the miracles that are taking place here."
We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.
(If you love this game as much as I do, please read that post.)