MMORPG - COH profitability

[JaguarX]

"It's too bad you have to move back in with your folks but here Davy, have a game that will suck up all your free time when you should be sending out resumes or working three part time jobs while waiting for someone to hire you.  I'm sure there are full time jobs for 18th century literature majors who were on the six year plan." 

lol. I know more than a few people with crazy majors that had to do that. And some of those people just sit around playing games all day.    

[srmalloy]

[Twisted Toon]

Let's see, Iron Man came out in May of 2008.  CoH still had around 70% of it's peak subscriber base.  Hmmmmm.

The question becomes how much?  How much to put together and show a theater quality trailer in front of a major motion picture.  With over a billion in annual sales it would be chump change for WoW but ArenaNet probably poured the majority of their ad budget for the year into that stunt rather than trying TV spots for the holiday season.  Also do we know if the ads ran just the opening weekend or are they still being shown?  I know they weren't in front of the midnight showing I went to, but that was just the vanilla 2D showing.

Also WoW: Mists of Pandaria and GW2 are both "new" titles, less than four months old while CoH/V would be celebrating it's 4th anniversary with Issue 12 just around the corner.  This would be before ultra mode so the graphics wouldn't be as pretty compared to other games at the time and on a 60 ft screen it might have looked downright bad with our relatively low poly models and limited high resolution textures and stilted (rooted) game play.  Of course WoW:MoP went with a rendered trailer and GW2 only showed a sequence of quick flashes of game play that for the most part didn't fill the screen, going to a mosaic of the logo.  And it was only 30 seconds long.

Also it's the holiday gift giving season.  The point was to highlight these two games as possible gifts.  No such reason in May, other than college graduation, in a poor job market. 

"It's too bad you have to move back in with your folks but here Davy, have a game that will suck up all your free time when you should be sending out resumes or working three part time jobs while waiting for someone to hire you.  I'm sure there are full time jobs for 18th century literature majors who were on the six year plan." 

Honestly, the best chance to get your money's worth is while the game is still new and during the gift giving season.

Spider-man 2 came out in 2004.
Batman Begins came out in 2005
Superman Returns came out in 2006.
X-Men: Last Stand came out in 2006
Spider-man 3 came out in 2007.
Hancock came out in 2008.
The Dark Knight came out in 2008.
Iron Man came out in 2008.
The Incredible Hulk came out in 2008.

There were plenty of opportunities to have had short ads for the game before a movie.

I peruse the web quite a bit when I'm not playing or working, and I never saw an ad on any website for CoH.

But then, I might have missed the one website that actually did have a CoH ad on it. It's possible.

[Little Green Frog]

I dropped from the game some time after Issue 9 and lost track of what was happening to it. That was until Going Rogue expansion went live by which time I resubbed. I learned about GR through ads on some gaming site, don't remember which one.

[srmalloy]

What they need to get through their heads is that respect isn't demanded, it's earned. And they've done nothing to earn it. I don't think that's even a Korea vs the West issue, that's them somehow failing at basic human nature.

The problem is that, across Japanese, Chinese, and Korean culture, respect -- at least overtly -- is an inherent part of your duty to your superiors. You may hate your boss's guts six ways from Sunday, but you are obligated to act as if you respect him completely in all your interactions with him; the same obligation exists in the military, where you show respect to the rank even if -- and especially if -- you have no respect for the person holding the rank. And a corrolary to that is deference to your superiors, regardless of whether you think they're correct.

So NCSoft management could have been expecting to be shown the respect due them concomitant to their superior position relative to Paragon Studios, without understanding that respect and deference don't work the same way in Western culture, and knee-jerked over what they perceived as insubordination. Which doesn't excuse their actions; a company that wants to be international and assumes that every other country's employees are going to automatically operate by your culture's precepts deserves to lose.

[Codewalker]

But then, I might have missed the one website that actually did have a CoH ad on it. It's possible.

I saw some banner ads on wikia, but it was a long time ago.

They also did a full page reskin of wowhead.com the day Going Rogue was released. Now wow players are probably among the most fickle out there and aren't really a good target, but it was still amusing to see.

GR was the last advertising blitz I saw. I don't remember ever seeing anything after that, not even when Freedom was announced.

[Little Green Frog]

The problem is that, across Japanese, Chinese, and Korean culture, respect -- at least overtly -- is an inherent part of your duty to your superiors. You may hate your boss's guts six ways from Sunday, but you are obligated to act as if you respect him completely in all your interactions with him; the same obligation exists in the military, where you show respect to the rank even if -- and especially if -- you have no respect for the person holding the rank. And a corrolary to that is deference to your superiors, regardless of whether you think they're correct.

So NCSoft management could have been expecting to be shown the respect due them concomitant to their superior position relative to Paragon Studios, without understanding that respect and deference don't work the same way in Western culture, and knee-jerked over what they perceived as insubordination. Which doesn't excuse their actions; a company that wants to be international and assumes that every other country's employees are going to automatically operate by your culture's precepts deserves to lose.

Time and time again this thing about NCsoft not being capable or willing to understand their Western subsidiaries pops up and is usually followed by an in-depth analysis of cultural differences between East and West. This analysis is often based on assumption being made that Easterners act like robots: unable to deviate from cultural programming the poster has only some vague idea about.

Look, cultural differences do exist and miscommunication is a real thing in multinational environments. Could what you describe really happen? Yes, in theory it is possible (but unlikely), however making such far reaching conclusions without having any real basis in evidence is guilty of doing the exact thing you accuse Eastern cultures of - that is of cultural ignorance.

[FatherXmas]

Spider-man 2 came out in 2004.
Batman Begins came out in 2005
Superman Returns came out in 2006.
X-Men: Last Stand came out in 2006
Spider-man 3 came out in 2007.
Hancock came out in 2008.
The Dark Knight came out in 2008.
Iron Man came out in 2008.
The Incredible Hulk came out in 2008.

There were plenty of opportunities to have had short ads for the game before a movie.

I peruse the web quite a bit when I'm not playing or working, and I never saw an ad on any website for CoH.

But then, I might have missed the one website that actually did have a CoH ad on it. It's possible.

You are missing the point.  How much would it have cost?  Would they be able to recoup that cost in added sales? 
How much of an advertising budget does a game making only $35 down to $20 million a year in it's first five years have?  How much of that is spent at E3 or PAX in those years?   Or SDCC?  Does NCsoft do what most game companies do and blow their advertising budget only on new games and expansions?

You don't spend money on advertising unless you are fairly sure you will end generating more income than you spent.  And if you don't believe you will, you don't spend the money.  Is that such a difficult concept to understand?

I keep circling around to this point, is it simply a psychological need as players to see the game we enjoy advertised?  Do we need some kind of validation or confirmation that we didn't choose wrong when everyone else we know is playing WoW? 

An ad would tell the world at large that we exist but ads aren't for us.  They've gotten us.  Ads are to attract new blood and they need to be effective enough for the money to at least break even.  It's folly to spend $100 to make $50.

Edit: So what ads for existing, not new or coming soon, MMOs have you seen recently perusing the web?

[Little Green Frog]

Edit: So what ads for existing, not new or coming soon, MMOs have you seen recently perusing the web?

Ads for EVE Online pop all over the web quite often, especially right after they release new expansion. CCP has been doing this for years and I must admit that it led me to sign for a trial account a couple of times.

[FatherXmas]

Looking around I found this article about the lack of advertising for MMOs.

And the mention but don't embed the "Corporate Gandalf" video.  Here it is.

[NecrotechMaster]

i agree that coh had absolutely no advertising, pretty much only way that we have maintained the base we have was through word of mouth and poeple trying out on free accounts

i see ads for other games all the time (mostly non mmo lately though), on tv the only ads ive seen are for (mmo wise) WoW, wizard 101, and pirates 101

in gaming magazines ive seen ads for GW2 (and i wanted to scratch them out so badly)

[Knight Light]

I think NCSoft could have afforded a short modest tv spot every Issue but it's clear that they suffer from total mismanagement, incompetence, massive ego and misunderstanding of the markets they are in. Sounds like they aren't even doing well at home any more.
They failed to promote City of Heroes properly in the US and utterly failed worldwide. I did my part to proliferate the game and I'm not even on payroll. What's their excuse?

[Mister Bison]

You are missing the point.  How much would it have cost?  Would they be able to recoup that cost in added sales? 
How much of an advertising budget does a game making only $35 down to $20 million a year in it's first five years have?  How much of that is spent at E3 or PAX in those years?   Or SDCC?  Does NCsoft do what most game companies do and blow their advertising budget only on new games and expansions?

You don't spend money on advertising unless you are fairly sure you will end generating more income than you spent.  And if you don't believe you will, you don't spend the money.  Is that such a difficult concept to understand?

I keep circling around to this point, is it simply a psychological need as players to see the game we enjoy advertised?  Do we need some kind of validation or confirmation that we didn't choose wrong when everyone else we know is playing WoW? 

An ad would tell the world at large that we exist but ads aren't for us.  They've gotten us.  Ads are to attract new blood and they need to be effective enough for the money to at least break even.  It's folly to spend $100 to make $50.

Edit: So what ads for existing, not new or coming soon, MMOs have you seen recently perusing the web?

It's not psychological, every single book on the subject will even tell you that advertising ends being the single most profitable department you can spend your money in. At least that's what I've been told.

Indeed, what's the point of having a wonderful fun game if nobody knows it exist ? I'm telling this because we still don't have that wonderful (or terrible) magic formula to make a game addictive enough you don't even need to advertise it. We live in an era where the market is saturated, most players will just take what comes to them (like the television does to us).

[Victoria Victrix]

More to the point, Ammon Johns, who is the expert in internet marketing, says that advertising would have paid off enormously, more than enough to have paid back the expense several fold over.  Since this is a guy who is cited in textbooks, I'll take his word for it.

[eabrace]

And the mention but don't embed the "Corporate Gandalf" video.  Here it is.

I loved that one when I saw it on TV.  Only saw it a couple of times, though.

[Minotaur]

Time and time again this thing about NCsoft not being capable or willing to understand their Western subsidiaries pops up and is usually followed by an in-depth analysis of cultural differences between East and West. This analysis is often based on assumption being made that Easterners act like robots: unable to deviate from cultural programming the poster has only some vague idea about.

Look, cultural differences do exist and miscommunication is a real thing in multinational environments. Could what you describe really happen? Yes, in theory it is possible (but unlikely), however making such far reaching conclusions without having any real basis in evidence is guilty of doing the exact thing you accuse Eastern cultures of - that is of cultural ignorance.

It can happen and has happened many times in the UK and the reports of the legal cases that ensued were legion in the newspapers. Most of it took place in the 80s and 90s, the Asian firms have mostly wised up now, but a friend who works for a Japanese company in Switzerland says that there are still major cultuural issues with underqualified people being shipped out from Japan above the heads of better qualified Europeans who are expected to defer to them.

[Twisted Toon]

You are missing the point.  How much would it have cost?  Would they be able to recoup that cost in added sales? 
How much of an advertising budget does a game making only $35 down to $20 million a year in it's first five years have?  How much of that is spent at E3 or PAX in those years?   Or SDCC?  Does NCsoft do what most game companies do and blow their advertising budget only on new games and expansions?

You don't spend money on advertising unless you are fairly sure you will end generating more income than you spent.  And if you don't believe you will, you don't spend the money.  Is that such a difficult concept to understand?

I keep circling around to this point, is it simply a psychological need as players to see the game we enjoy advertised?  Do we need some kind of validation or confirmation that we didn't choose wrong when everyone else we know is playing WoW? 

An ad would tell the world at large that we exist but ads aren't for us.  They've gotten us.  Ads are to attract new blood and they need to be effective enough for the money to at least break even.  It's folly to spend $100 to make $50.

Edit: So what ads for existing, not new or coming soon, MMOs have you seen recently perusing the web?

Actually, no. I did not miss the point. But apparently, you did. If they had actually put an ad in front of a couple of those movies I had mentioned, let alone the several others that I didn't, I'm fairly certain that they would have gotten more subscribers. I mean, the audience for those movies is already hooked on the genre, most likely.

As for what ads I have seen on the web for existing MMOs? Just in the last 5 minutes, I've seen ads for SW:TOR. And this is only the second site I've been to so far.

Time and time again this thing about NCsoft not being capable or willing to understand their Western subsidiaries pops up and is usually followed by an in-depth analysis of cultural differences between East and West. This analysis is often based on assumption being made that Easterners act like robots: unable to deviate from cultural programming the poster has only some vague idea about.

Look, cultural differences do exist and miscommunication is a real thing in multinational environments. Could what you describe really happen? Yes, in theory it is possible (but unlikely), however making such far reaching conclusions without having any real basis in evidence is guilty of doing the exact thing you accuse Eastern cultures of - that is of cultural ignorance.

I think they keep bringing that particular argument up because they can't really conceive of a company that mismanaged (deliberately or not) a profitable game so horribly. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that if a product is a large portion of a regional market, you don't cancel it and hide it in a vault somewhere. If the situation wasn't because of cultural differences, then NCSoft is either run by total morons with the IQ of a carrot, or they intentionally went about pissing off their western market. I'll let you decide which option they fall into.

[Segev]

Time and time again this thing about NCsoft not being capable or willing to understand their Western subsidiaries pops up and is usually followed by an in-depth analysis of cultural differences between East and West. This analysis is often based on assumption being made that Easterners act like robots: unable to deviate from cultural programming the poster has only some vague idea about.

Look, cultural differences do exist and miscommunication is a real thing in multinational environments. Could what you describe really happen? Yes, in theory it is possible (but unlikely), however making such far reaching conclusions without having any real basis in evidence is guilty of doing the exact thing you accuse Eastern cultures of - that is of cultural ignorance.

It comes up "time and again" because we - as human beings - are trying to find explanations and reason for what, initially, appears to be wholly irrational action for a business to be taking. Their treatment of the Paragon Studios employees was abominable, and makes them come off as the worst stereotype of mustache-twirling and pointy-haired bosses. Unreasonable and power-mad with no particular rationale behind their actions other than the fact that a lazy writer for today's episode needed a bad decision machine to make life difficult for the protagonists.

Since human beings typically have more reason than "I want to make life difficult for everyone else and justify it with a thin layer of illogic" for their actions, we have groped about until we found something that would explain the attitude and behaviors to us. It's written quite plainly in their cultural expectations. This isn't accusing Asians of being robots. It's recognizing that they have a culture with cultural expectations of behavior, and noting that American behaviors could offend in precisely the way that might lead to behaviors on the part of one steeped in Korean culture that we are seeing.

Can Koreans behave with greater cultural awareness of foreign social mores? Absolutely. I am positive that most who are successful internationally do. NCSoft apparently has not, and this explanation for their behavior fits from hypothetical cause to expected effect. Therefore, we feel the hypothesis is supported by the evidence.

[Ironwolf]

City of Heroes had virtually zero advertising budget. So many opportunities for movies, television and comics and they did almost nothing.

Smallville?
Heroes?

My god just go back through the years and there are DOZENS of television shows that had Super Hero themes. I will not be the NCSoft apologist on the boards - it appears a few from the old CoH boards have made it here.

Black Pebble was saying he had almost zero budget for any type of advertising. All it takes is a little effort and some cleverness and the game could have easily brought in new members. Once the game went F2P they could have spent some of the take on advertising but it got LESS advertising - bizarre if you think NCSoft wanted to keep the game running.

[UruzSix]

GR was the last advertising blitz I saw. I don't remember ever seeing anything after that, not even when Freedom was announced.

I distinctly remember MMORPG.com wallpapering their front page with an ad for Freedom.