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Transfer devs back from other games to CO plus some extra
battybattybats
Posts: 777 Arc User
Superheros are BIG right now. From box office smashes to kids cartoons on tv filled with superhero stuff its a big part of popular culture and CO is a great game and a great opportunity for bussiness especially precisely because it isn't trapped in the limitations of the big two comic publishers enabling more flexibility and more scope for personalised superheroics.
But it has been starved of resources for other projects lately and thats wasting a lot of opportunities. Letting Champions diminish too far would be a catastrophic error. If CO isn't doing as well as Trek which has never recovered from the backlash against enterprise of D&D also decades past its heyday and now has vast amounts of competition in the fantasy market (and i say that as a lifelong trek fan and i've played D&D since 1986 on a nearly weekly basis) then someone has been stuffing up royally.
So transfer more resources temporarily to CO to stabilise things and help boost content development to help keep longterm players playing and keep new players becoming long-term players.
This may slow things down a little on the D&D stuff and STO but they have foundry don't they? So they can get by on less anyway. CO has long lasting appeal and precisely because it isn't tied to a big corporation could be kept rolling well past the likely expiration of the other licences and the stupid petty bureacrat decisions that have harmed both franchises in the past.
CO is too good an opportunity not to keep strong and keep growing.
But it has been starved of resources for other projects lately and thats wasting a lot of opportunities. Letting Champions diminish too far would be a catastrophic error. If CO isn't doing as well as Trek which has never recovered from the backlash against enterprise of D&D also decades past its heyday and now has vast amounts of competition in the fantasy market (and i say that as a lifelong trek fan and i've played D&D since 1986 on a nearly weekly basis) then someone has been stuffing up royally.
So transfer more resources temporarily to CO to stabilise things and help boost content development to help keep longterm players playing and keep new players becoming long-term players.
This may slow things down a little on the D&D stuff and STO but they have foundry don't they? So they can get by on less anyway. CO has long lasting appeal and precisely because it isn't tied to a big corporation could be kept rolling well past the likely expiration of the other licences and the stupid petty bureacrat decisions that have harmed both franchises in the past.
CO is too good an opportunity not to keep strong and keep growing.
___________________________________
While she has been rescued
what diabolical mastermind
was behind the devious brain-napping of
the Volterrific Dr Cerebellum?
While she has been rescued
what diabolical mastermind
was behind the devious brain-napping of
the Volterrific Dr Cerebellum?
Post edited by battybattybats on
0
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Else Champions would be swarming with people, it isn't.
This weekend's population is a measurable drop from last weekends.
DC would also be jam packed with people but its daily population is 3,000 less
than it was when it hit Steam back whenever that was.
Still beating CO with an ugly stick though.
Batman enjoyed a rise to glory in gaming this summer on $11 for the
franchise sales and 91/100 metacritic score.
Supposedly the best combat in any game ever.
If it had character customization I'd have been all over it.
But instead its just..The Dork Knight. Zzzzzz.
So Cryptic copies that success and rides into town with a buggy update
way too late when their American player base is shuffling back to school.
Brilliant.
Marvel and DC franchise sells well. Knock off wannabes don't.
Cryptic knows that fantasy sells.
Even in a competitive MMO market fantasy games rule over all the other genres.
Thats why the same stuff keeps dripping out of the game development hole.
Elf turds are magical and turn into money, donchaknow.
Not really getting into anything here except to simply state that Guild Wars 2 did just come out, so that could explain for a large portion of the playerbase.
Deliciously nutritious!
Additionally, the patch instituted on Friday broke lots of things. There's going to be a fair number of people who aren't playing the New Shiny, but who don't want to bother too much with CO until this new thing is fixed.
One data point does not a trend make.
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
Maybe you haven't been watching the numbers for 14 months, I have.
This drop in population is not temporary.
The influx of returning players for On Alert was temporary, shooting up from
below 540 a weekend to near 800 Steam logins a weekend and diving back down around 600 in two weeks.
Game fell completely off the charts with less than 560 logins for a weekend about
four weeks ago, before the other game and before school started back up in the States.
Other F2P games are coming soon to compete for player attention.
I beta tested three games this month.
New Champions super group is at something like #380.
380 * 498 players is 189,240 new accounts since January.
That doesn't even count last years logins when the game went F2P, was promoted
on Seam and had 12,000 or so logins a day for a short burst.
Those numbers are almost entirely people that didn't come back.
I knew I should have copy and pasted numbers for the last year, then
I could have a cool looking chart to show off. But I figured actually being able
to visualize the downward trend would depress the crap out of me.
I don't see anything particular to the superhero genre that'd make it less successful in the medium of gaming than film, tv, cartoons, comics, toys, toothbrushes, stationary etc. So why are they less big currently?
While she has been rescued
what diabolical mastermind
was behind the devious brain-napping of
the Volterrific Dr Cerebellum?
With a toy a mom doesn't have to watch her kid like a hawk in fear some pervert in a superman suit is going to come ERP them. Best of all a toy keeps the kid busy in the backseat of the car or while 'Uncle Nick' is visiting.
Moms readily buy toys for their kids, even though the cheap chinese hunk of plastic
will get ignored and neglected for all time after just a few hours, if even that.
Why do moms do this? Because they are dumb.
The entire toy industry is built around easily impressed kids and really dumb moms.
Movies are passive and provide 90 minutes of pure escape.
No controls to master, no gear to grind, just sit back and hope nobody starts shooting.
Mom's pay the extra ticket to go see movies with their kids, they don't, in majority, pay
for extra subscriptions to MMOs to play with their kids. Even though the price is nearly the same now!
I think with the sub discount three movies cost more than three months of this game.
Comics aren't doing all that hot, never have. They've been an industry in crisis since they began.
Licensing the characters is what saved these comics companies.
$100,000 to put Superman on a toothbrush in South Africa?
Another hundred grand for the spanish language toothbrush?
Sure, we'll take the money for absolutely no work on our part, here's some S-man clipart we've been using since 1974.
Toothbrushes, stationary, etc are licensed to auxiliary corporations primarily as an
advertising vehicle to create and maintain brand awareness and loyalty.
You may see hundreds of these products in stores, doesn't mean they sell well.
They don't have to, they are practically free and effective advertising.
Champions doesn't have any of this reach.
There are no "Defender Penetrate The Other Side" personal lubricants or Foxbat 9 ton
lunch boxes or Witchcraft Double XP Boost push up bras to remind people about the game.
Even if they offered such items it would take millions of dollars in marketing to
make people aware that Defender, Foxbat and Witchcraft are associated with this game.
This would have to be a multi-national, multi-language, long term campaign.
RIP Caine
Are you taking your numbers from steam? If so there probably wrong CO was out a long time before it was available on steam and then vanished from steam when it went free to play for a good chunk of time its not a stretch to believe that there are several people there for that do not use steam to play. For example me I use steam when playing from my main PC but just use the client directly from else where.
See Here-
Fantasy MMOs are 85%+
Sci Fi 10%
And.. we're in that last bit of 4.9% ....someplace..
There nothing we can do about that, to make matters worse we have competition for this tiny market share, CO and DCUO.
Could CO try and take that share? Maybe, but they'd have to try a lot harder and .. well, that takes money.
Will we get more money?
Probably not.
That said there are many things to love about being in a niche game. It's kind of like being in a small town really...
Here we are now going to the West Side
Weapons in hand as we go for a ride
Some may come and some may stay
Watching out for a sunny day
Where there's love and darkness and my sidearm
In game as @forgemccain
I would say that's only because no one has done it right super heroes used to be nich movie market as well now look at them.
all it needs is for a company to actually put the work in.
I concur, they used to be niche cartoons too and now there's plenty of them.
While she has been rescued
what diabolical mastermind
was behind the devious brain-napping of
the Volterrific Dr Cerebellum?