Author Topic: A thought about Wildstar  (Read 3650 times)

Quinch

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A thought about Wildstar
« on: October 26, 2012, 05:08:50 PM »
Not a call to action or anything, but it's been bugging me since I thought of it.

NCsoft is developing Wildstar, right? A brand new MMO and all that. Now, considering that a hefty chunk of MMORPG startups don't survive the initial content crunch, where's the sense of investing tons of money into a game that has to start at square one and may very well not survive it {even without the CoH PR fiasco} as opposed to doing something completely unorthodox and using that money to advertuse the one they already have?

I'm just curious if there's any logic to that, or if it's just another stone to be thrown on the pile of "WTF were they thinking?"

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Re: A thought about Wildstar
« Reply #1 on: October 26, 2012, 05:11:21 PM »
Because it came down to money when they made the choice to shut down CoH. Even though it operated in the black, it was less than 6% of their total income and wasn't popular in their home country. All right, so it came down to money and nepotism.
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Luna Eclypse

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Re: A thought about Wildstar
« Reply #2 on: October 26, 2012, 09:23:35 PM »
It really is a shame about Wildstar.

When I first saw it about a year ago, it looked like a really fun concept and I signed up to be included in the Beta (I never heard back so I don't know if I made it in. Probably not.)

And I think their team is probably as cool and creative as Paragon Studios and Arenanet.

But I think they are doomed now.

If they could - along with Arenanet, remove themselves from NCSoft, they'd have a much better chance. Sadly, I don't see that happening.


Victoria Victrix

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Re: A thought about Wildstar
« Reply #3 on: October 27, 2012, 12:23:03 AM »
It really is a shame about Wildstar.

When I first saw it about a year ago, it looked like a really fun concept and I signed up to be included in the Beta (I never heard back so I don't know if I made it in. Probably not.)

And I think their team is probably as cool and creative as Paragon Studios and Arenanet.

But I think they are doomed now.

If they could - along with Arenanet, remove themselves from NCSoft, they'd have a much better chance. Sadly, I don't see that happening.

QFT

As for advertising....literally a week before Black Friday, Black Pebble and I were going to get together after DragonCon for a couple of phone calls on how I could boost City's presence and advertising.  For free.

Remember the Humble Bundle?  Sold over 80k copies.  It's a pretty fair bet that many of those were shared, so....let's say that means as many as 120k readers.

Know what was going to be a Forward to my contribution?  If you guessed a full page hymn of praise to City, and the link to Freedom you're spot-on. 

Then on my Facebook page and the front page of my webpage we were going to not only have that, but the preview of a brand new MA arc:  Secret World Chronicle: INVASION! where you would fight the invasion forces alongside John Murdock (New York), Red Djinni (Atlanta), Red Saviour and Soviette (Moscow), Belladonna Blue (Area 51) and Victoria Victrix and the Atlanta SWAT team (Atlanta).

Free advertising in a very high profile project, followup enticements, also free.
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Terwyn

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Re: A thought about Wildstar
« Reply #4 on: October 27, 2012, 12:51:40 AM »
QFT

As for advertising....literally a week before Black Friday, Black Pebble and I were going to get together after DragonCon for a couple of phone calls on how I could boost City's presence and advertising.  For free.

Remember the Humble Bundle?  Sold over 80k copies.  It's a pretty fair bet that many of those were shared, so....let's say that means as many as 120k readers.

Know what was going to be a Forward to my contribution?  If you guessed a full page hymn of praise to City, and the link to Freedom you're spot-on. 

Then on my Facebook page and the front page of my webpage we were going to not only have that, but the preview of a brand new MA arc:  Secret World Chronicle: INVASION! where you would fight the invasion forces alongside John Murdock (New York), Red Djinni (Atlanta), Red Saviour and Soviette (Moscow), Belladonna Blue (Area 51) and Victoria Victrix and the Atlanta SWAT team (Atlanta).

Free advertising in a very high profile project, followup enticements, also free.

Not to put a monetary value on such a matter, but I presume an estimate that could be measured in scientific notation wouldn't be entirely inaccurate.

Nothing comes close to the power of Word of Mouth, which is entirely what you would have been doing. ^_^
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Re: A thought about Wildstar
« Reply #5 on: October 27, 2012, 03:00:14 AM »
a brand new MA arc:  Secret World Chronicle: INVASION! where you would fight the invasion forces alongside John Murdock (New York), Red Djinni (Atlanta), Red Saviour and Soviette (Moscow), Belladonna Blue (Area 51) and Victoria Victrix and the Atlanta SWAT team (Atlanta).

Sounds like a fun arc, one I'd enjoy playing. Can it be developed before Nov. 30?   :)

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Re: A thought about Wildstar
« Reply #6 on: October 27, 2012, 03:10:06 AM »
Sounds like a fun arc, one I'd enjoy playing. Can it be developed before Nov. 30?   :)

Nope.  It got transferred over to Dev side and now I don't have access to it anymore.
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Ammon

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Re: A thought about Wildstar
« Reply #7 on: October 27, 2012, 05:32:01 PM »
I am sure that Ammon will reply to this post, and rip it all apart (waves at Ammon, "Hi, i think i owe you a couple of cigarettes from the Omega Sektor"), and say that I am hideously incorrect in how advertising works.
No, nothing really wrong there at all.

All I will add is that advertising and marketing are not magic.  Advertising a bad product only increases the number of people telling others how bad a product it is.

Not that CoH is a bad product, but it is a specialized one.  It is not for everyone.  The very things that set the game, and its community apart are things that also prevent it being as 'mass-market' as a game like WoW. 

People who are not very social often struggle to enjoy CoH to the full.  Its a good enough solo game, but its strength, and much of its focus is in teaming and interaction.  Lots of people are not very good (or even interested) in the social aspects.  Lots of people play games to call others losers and be quite anti-social, and CoH is generally a poor offering for those.

The game itself, and its community, strongly reward creativity.  The game actively jumps on people doing the obvious thing of cloning their favourite heroes too clearly.  Lots of potential gamers are really just not that creative, or at least, don't have the confidence to enjoy creativity and expose it to all.

The game has no single 'right' way of doing things.  In other games, which tend to be more popular, its easy for a new player to copy a walkthrough, or copy a 'best build' etc.  They know for sure which is the 'best' AT, the best gear, etc.  CoH doesn't have that simplicity of right and wrong.  Right is whatever is fun and works for you and others you play with.  There really is no 'wrong' at all, and that can frustrate many players of other games.

As I've said in a couple of other posts, CoH is not really a 'mass-market' game.  Mass-market stuff usually appeals to the lowest common denominators - cheap; easy; fast; thoughtless.  CoH is more thoughtful and quality oriented than most WoW-clones.  We love it that way, but it means it is not for everyone.

A mass-market game can spend X amount of money to advertise and expect to get more people who stick, and pay.  CoH can't expect the same numbers to stick, so it is more expensive per result for them to advertise.  They know, they did try several marketing activities and most were quite miserable in results.

Add in that NCsoft seem to struggle to understand the market their game does appeal to, and certainly struggle with public relations (as the current crisis shows all too clearly), and their attempts at marketing are doomed to be expensive failures with the customers they need.

The best marketing for CoH was its winning awards, its coverage in the gaming press, and of course, word of mouth and personal recommendations, all of which CoH went out of its way to encourage.  They helped advertise fansites, fan-fiction, they provided news you could link to, frequent events you could talk about, and rewarded you for referring a friend.

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Re: A thought about Wildstar
« Reply #8 on: October 27, 2012, 09:58:13 PM »
Wildstar is quite a vulnerable target for the "NCSoft = game-killer" angle, as it's the only game if theirs that's not been released anywhere yet, so it could be more sensitive to an bad PR.
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Surelle

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Re: A thought about Wildstar
« Reply #9 on: October 27, 2012, 10:17:57 PM »
Wildstar is quite a vulnerable target for the "NCSoft = game-killer" angle, as it's the only game if theirs that's not been released anywhere yet, so it could be more sensitive to an bad PR.

Actually, I'd think warning gamers at large about Blade & Soul would strike home harder, because it's much closer to being released.  That's when people really start paying attention to a title-- when they're making the final decisions about whether or not they're going to buy it.  :)

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Re: A thought about Wildstar
« Reply #10 on: October 27, 2012, 10:23:56 PM »
As I've said in a couple of other posts, CoH is not really a 'mass-market' game.  Mass-market stuff usually appeals to the lowest common denominators - cheap; easy; fast; thoughtless.  CoH is more thoughtful and quality oriented than most WoW-clones.  We love it that way, but it means it is not for everyone.

This is where the entertainment industry has gotten me wanting to see it implode in on itself to reset the playing field. So tired of being told by every branch of the industry that there's nothing for me because I'm not dumb and impulsive enough. Music, TV, movies, games, gawd. The classic idea the only difference between a car that gets sold and one that doesn't, is whether or not they can get a Daisy Duke to sit on the hood and smile. Sick of it all. Sick. Sicker. Sickest. Entertainment used to be able to cater to to just one group and do fine. Now for example, we have sci-fi that isn't sci-fi, just love triangles that happen to take place in space. Has society really gotten so crappy that we're not entitled to have products made for us because we're a minority?

The only difference in gaming though... and this may be why there's a hint of a backlash in the industry right now, is that video games are not a passive experience like other forms of entertainment. The industry is used to just dictating to the consumer. "We give you this, you sit down and enjoy it, and that's all there is too it. We go to the movies and we watch the heroes do all the work. But video games by their nature are more proactive. Even the simplest game requires more thought than watching a film, and it requires an effort on the part of the audience. And while TV and film can allow us to relate to a protagonist, video games actually put us into that role. We have to do things in order to get the desired outcome. Is it possible that basing an entertainment model on this behavior, has accidentally developed a type of consumer who is now moving beyond the confines of the games themselves, in order to get that desired outcome?

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Re: A thought about Wildstar
« Reply #11 on: October 29, 2012, 10:57:07 PM »
Its an interesting thing to consider, especially when it comes to MMOs.  I mean the developers of EVE Online have admitted on several occasions that they have no idea what the actual effect of some of the changes they make to their game will be once it hits the main server and 40-50,000 people start poking it with sticks to see what they can do compared to what they intended it to do.