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why nobody talks about vendetta online?
in this pandemic after a tiring online search for a space mmo I found the best game available. It's this one. a doubt floats in my head. why was it so hard to find vendetta online?
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”
What's half of the value of Incarnate's future marketing spend at net present value?
What's half of the value of Incarnate's future marketing spend at net present value?
I guess people have never heard of it because it's not that popular. I really don't understand why it's not more popular because it has plenty of depth, is available across many platforms and is very cheap. The twitch based aspect means that it's as good as any multiplayer shooter so I just don't get it. I guess the graphics are a bit basic and there are a lot of missions to chew through when getting started. There's unjustifiably colossal grind if you want to play capships but this shouldn't affect most players. I know it's stupid but maybe the name is holding it back because it's pretty meaningless and fairly forgettable.
Guild Software, to my knowledge, has not spent anything on advertising in a long time. Their resources have gone into developing the game and in making strategic partnerships that ultimately benefit development.
My understanding is that the devs would like to have resolved issues with the game that impact player retention before committing resources to drawing in a crowd.
An apt expression would be "You only get one chance to make a first impression."
They have made significant changes to scalability, server load, developing the economy, and the changes to freemium, to name a few recent changes.
My understanding is that the devs would like to have resolved issues with the game that impact player retention before committing resources to drawing in a crowd.
An apt expression would be "You only get one chance to make a first impression."
They have made significant changes to scalability, server load, developing the economy, and the changes to freemium, to name a few recent changes.
First of all, the game and company are in a great position right now, but we're still being a bit "quiet" as we work on some of the things Whistler mentioned. However, I'll try to lay out a more nuanced answer to your question. It is a complex topic, so bear with me..
(I'm answering this in a lot of detail, as some other players have also asked me related questions over the last couple of months; it's easier for me to respond in a single post, and reference it later).
We never historically had a real marketing budget. Our game originally launched just as our retail publisher filed for bankruptcy; we had no "backing" or investors, and we bootstrapped entirely from revenue (direct game income + content partnerships).
Our best historical cases of "User Acqusition" (game industry term for marketing) has always been primarily through industry partnerships, like the TV commercial with Verizon, from years back. This is a strategy I've practiced from the very beginning of our game (like much of the industry), going back to the PC days of doing retail promotions with GameStop, or trying to get VO bundled with all of Logitech's joysticks. If you don't have a "real" marketing budget, you try to make up for it somewhere else.
There have also been more-recent changes to "organic" discovery that have impacted us, like the massive Play Store "discovery" changes in 2018, that drove a lot of indie developers out of business.
Google claimed that these changes were around retention, but some of the impacted developers claimed to have robust retention (at least, for mobile). Ultimately, Google is a business, and it would not be surprising if they drove traffic towards titles that yield the best overall monetization (revenue generation), which is probably going to be the top-50 titles. Google receives 30% of that revenue, so it's in their best interest to optimize for the titles that generate the most money.
We've been saving money, for years, towards a significant marketing spend and "re-launch" of the game; but to add another well-known saying to what Whistler said, "timing is everything". The same holds true of, say, the game launching on Steam. The difference between launching on Steam with marketing backing, versus not, is a multiplier in the hundreds, or more (so, instead of earning $2000, you earn a million dollars). This is, in part, because the "falloff" after a Steam launch is really significant, and you never really get a chance to generate the launch excitement again. There's an inherent bubble of interest that happens around an initial debut, of some kind, so you'd better make it count.
Plus, the cost of User Acquisition ("UA") has been substantially increasing, over the last decade, as the big top-50 games are paying higher and higher amounts to fight for available players. The process of games marketing is basically the act of comparing the cost of User Acquisiotion (UA) against the Life-Time Value (LTV) generated by a player. "LTV" is determined a number of different ways, and can depend on the individual title, but retention and success of monetization-model are both critical. Without figuring that out very robustly, there's a good chance that you'll blow your entire marketing budget.. without generating more money than you spent (usually followed by.. "going out of business").
Particularly on mobile, the top game studios have teams of data scientists sitting around, crunching their LTV versus their UA spend at any given moment, and A/B testing tweaks, which is part of why they're able to be the most successful at large ad spends, and succeeed even if the Cost Per Install (UA) continues to go up. Their projected return-on-investment is very refined. It's kind of a mathematical arms race.
On top of that, one of the more effective paid-UA mechanics, at present, is training the Google and Facebook ad-tech systems, both of which use Machine Learning to search for optimal "archtype" players that will be more-likely find your title appealing. But the process of "training" is a fairly significant spend, and you're training the AI model around particular players, particular retention types, and the like. For instance, there's a big difference between a player who plays the game for a lot of time, versus one who is willing to spend money. Similarly, the quality of the AI's success is based on the quality of the data you give it to "learn" from: if you then change your new-user experience mid-stream, you may invalidate the AI model you trained.
"Streaming" and other forms of marketing have also evolved, but often have significant costs and risks associated as well. It becomes increasingly important to tell the difference between a "good investment" and a "bad one".
All of this led to us investing a significant amount of energy, over the last few years, on expanding our analytics capabilities. All of the above points I mentioned tend to generate lots of "opinions", but as one can learn from reading many industry "post-mortem" articles and content out there: the only way to know how to solve your own issues is by empirically studying and measuring what's happening. Opinions aren't really worth much, decisions need to be made based on data, because each game is different.
There's also the logistics of managing a larger audience (such as, reacting to problematic behaviour, or answering tickets), or simply scaling the server capacity to handle substantial "spike" loads. There's a lot of testing involved in this, building services and the like. Otherwise, you get a whole bunch of people to show up.. and have a bad experience.
Beyond this, there's also a lot of data points I can't reference, because they belong to friends of mine, told to me in confidence. Because of my longevity in the industry, I'm fortunate to get advice from dozens of experienced industry execs, ranging from "successful indies" up to giant studios. While what worked (or failed) for them is not a 1:1 indicator of what we should expect, because audiences and game types vary, I've made the best use of that insight to carefully plot the course that we currently follow. What we're doing is not an accident, or a reaction, it's been planned for quite some time.
We try to make the best decisions we can, long-term, for the company and the game as a whole.
Finally, none of this is really what I "set out to do", when I created a game company: I wanted to make space games, not worry about different ways of modeling a player's "Life-Time Value".
But, there are just a lot of challenging realities about this industry, like the fact that (from the article I linked above): "You are either in the top 0.1% of indie game developers, or you are unemployed, with an expensive hobby where you make effectively free games." Changes like global pandemics don't make this any easier.
Outside the "indie" space is still not a picnic, the game industry is very volatile. Any given year, I get emails from different studio heads I know, as their companies shut down (often unexpectedly, due to some deal-collapse), while their distraught former leaders try desperately to secure jobs for their former employees, by reaching out to their personal networks. All of us, who run game companies, are used to this.. trying to help out others, and knowing it may be "you" tomorrow.
I don't mean to end on kind of a bleak note, as I said at the start, things are actually going great for us. But, I do feel like it's challenging to speak honestly about the "business" of games, without a foundational understanding of how chaotic and volatile it really is, as a business and career. We have to approach a lot of decisions carefully, and everything we do is resource-intensive (takes a lot of someone's time).
This isn't an excuse for anything; I also want the game to be more visible, or have more players, or have development happen more quickly. But it is the stormy ocean on which we sail, and generally if we're still sailing.. somewhere, I consider that to be some measure of "success".
(I'm answering this in a lot of detail, as some other players have also asked me related questions over the last couple of months; it's easier for me to respond in a single post, and reference it later).
We never historically had a real marketing budget. Our game originally launched just as our retail publisher filed for bankruptcy; we had no "backing" or investors, and we bootstrapped entirely from revenue (direct game income + content partnerships).
Our best historical cases of "User Acqusition" (game industry term for marketing) has always been primarily through industry partnerships, like the TV commercial with Verizon, from years back. This is a strategy I've practiced from the very beginning of our game (like much of the industry), going back to the PC days of doing retail promotions with GameStop, or trying to get VO bundled with all of Logitech's joysticks. If you don't have a "real" marketing budget, you try to make up for it somewhere else.
There have also been more-recent changes to "organic" discovery that have impacted us, like the massive Play Store "discovery" changes in 2018, that drove a lot of indie developers out of business.
Google claimed that these changes were around retention, but some of the impacted developers claimed to have robust retention (at least, for mobile). Ultimately, Google is a business, and it would not be surprising if they drove traffic towards titles that yield the best overall monetization (revenue generation), which is probably going to be the top-50 titles. Google receives 30% of that revenue, so it's in their best interest to optimize for the titles that generate the most money.
We've been saving money, for years, towards a significant marketing spend and "re-launch" of the game; but to add another well-known saying to what Whistler said, "timing is everything". The same holds true of, say, the game launching on Steam. The difference between launching on Steam with marketing backing, versus not, is a multiplier in the hundreds, or more (so, instead of earning $2000, you earn a million dollars). This is, in part, because the "falloff" after a Steam launch is really significant, and you never really get a chance to generate the launch excitement again. There's an inherent bubble of interest that happens around an initial debut, of some kind, so you'd better make it count.
Plus, the cost of User Acquisition ("UA") has been substantially increasing, over the last decade, as the big top-50 games are paying higher and higher amounts to fight for available players. The process of games marketing is basically the act of comparing the cost of User Acquisiotion (UA) against the Life-Time Value (LTV) generated by a player. "LTV" is determined a number of different ways, and can depend on the individual title, but retention and success of monetization-model are both critical. Without figuring that out very robustly, there's a good chance that you'll blow your entire marketing budget.. without generating more money than you spent (usually followed by.. "going out of business").
Particularly on mobile, the top game studios have teams of data scientists sitting around, crunching their LTV versus their UA spend at any given moment, and A/B testing tweaks, which is part of why they're able to be the most successful at large ad spends, and succeeed even if the Cost Per Install (UA) continues to go up. Their projected return-on-investment is very refined. It's kind of a mathematical arms race.
On top of that, one of the more effective paid-UA mechanics, at present, is training the Google and Facebook ad-tech systems, both of which use Machine Learning to search for optimal "archtype" players that will be more-likely find your title appealing. But the process of "training" is a fairly significant spend, and you're training the AI model around particular players, particular retention types, and the like. For instance, there's a big difference between a player who plays the game for a lot of time, versus one who is willing to spend money. Similarly, the quality of the AI's success is based on the quality of the data you give it to "learn" from: if you then change your new-user experience mid-stream, you may invalidate the AI model you trained.
"Streaming" and other forms of marketing have also evolved, but often have significant costs and risks associated as well. It becomes increasingly important to tell the difference between a "good investment" and a "bad one".
All of this led to us investing a significant amount of energy, over the last few years, on expanding our analytics capabilities. All of the above points I mentioned tend to generate lots of "opinions", but as one can learn from reading many industry "post-mortem" articles and content out there: the only way to know how to solve your own issues is by empirically studying and measuring what's happening. Opinions aren't really worth much, decisions need to be made based on data, because each game is different.
There's also the logistics of managing a larger audience (such as, reacting to problematic behaviour, or answering tickets), or simply scaling the server capacity to handle substantial "spike" loads. There's a lot of testing involved in this, building services and the like. Otherwise, you get a whole bunch of people to show up.. and have a bad experience.
Beyond this, there's also a lot of data points I can't reference, because they belong to friends of mine, told to me in confidence. Because of my longevity in the industry, I'm fortunate to get advice from dozens of experienced industry execs, ranging from "successful indies" up to giant studios. While what worked (or failed) for them is not a 1:1 indicator of what we should expect, because audiences and game types vary, I've made the best use of that insight to carefully plot the course that we currently follow. What we're doing is not an accident, or a reaction, it's been planned for quite some time.
We try to make the best decisions we can, long-term, for the company and the game as a whole.
Finally, none of this is really what I "set out to do", when I created a game company: I wanted to make space games, not worry about different ways of modeling a player's "Life-Time Value".
But, there are just a lot of challenging realities about this industry, like the fact that (from the article I linked above): "You are either in the top 0.1% of indie game developers, or you are unemployed, with an expensive hobby where you make effectively free games." Changes like global pandemics don't make this any easier.
Outside the "indie" space is still not a picnic, the game industry is very volatile. Any given year, I get emails from different studio heads I know, as their companies shut down (often unexpectedly, due to some deal-collapse), while their distraught former leaders try desperately to secure jobs for their former employees, by reaching out to their personal networks. All of us, who run game companies, are used to this.. trying to help out others, and knowing it may be "you" tomorrow.
I don't mean to end on kind of a bleak note, as I said at the start, things are actually going great for us. But, I do feel like it's challenging to speak honestly about the "business" of games, without a foundational understanding of how chaotic and volatile it really is, as a business and career. We have to approach a lot of decisions carefully, and everything we do is resource-intensive (takes a lot of someone's time).
This isn't an excuse for anything; I also want the game to be more visible, or have more players, or have development happen more quickly. But it is the stormy ocean on which we sail, and generally if we're still sailing.. somewhere, I consider that to be some measure of "success".
I talk about Vendetta on nearly every website that allows it as a matter of passion, but sometimes people will assume I'm a dev (so I have had to temper my approach).
It's the real reason nobody talks about Vendetta Online: Phaserlight has done all the talking for us. XD
Maybe we need to change the first rule of VO.
Thank you incarnate for explaining this. I've wondered this question many times myself. It's really great to know you have carefully thought out strategy. I for one, would absolutely love to see VO get the recognition it rightly deserves for being the amazing game that it is and see the player base explode in numbers. I also wonder what I can do as a player and a fan to help spread the word like create a fanpage website or make YouTube videos? Like what would help benefit the game the most?
As to SlashGordon's description of the graphics being basic, I disagree, especially for a game as old as it is. I personally think the backgrounds are particularly beautiful. My hats off to whoever created them. I like being fully immersed in the games I play and I easily do in VO. Maybe it's because I usually play VO on pc using a 32 inch gaming monitor at 4K resolution (2K native). Of course it has it's flaws, I think the UI (mainly station interface) needs some work but nothing major.
Most of all, what keeps me coming back or deciding to play this game over something else, it's the gameplay. It keeps me coming back again and again. The gameplay is VO's strongest asset in my opinion. It's very unique and addictive. Yes it is a grinder but I find making progress in VO very rewarding because of the unique gameplay.
As to SlashGordon's description of the graphics being basic, I disagree, especially for a game as old as it is. I personally think the backgrounds are particularly beautiful. My hats off to whoever created them. I like being fully immersed in the games I play and I easily do in VO. Maybe it's because I usually play VO on pc using a 32 inch gaming monitor at 4K resolution (2K native). Of course it has it's flaws, I think the UI (mainly station interface) needs some work but nothing major.
Most of all, what keeps me coming back or deciding to play this game over something else, it's the gameplay. It keeps me coming back again and again. The gameplay is VO's strongest asset in my opinion. It's very unique and addictive. Yes it is a grinder but I find making progress in VO very rewarding because of the unique gameplay.
Phaserlight has probably done the most to promote VO outside of Inc and the devs. Props to Phaser for sure. I'll never forget being on vacation in Puerto Rico and seeing the VO ad Inc is referring to in a bar there. I saw it a couple more times back in the states.
I tried for a while to help out back in the day but probably could have done more. Marketing is a lot of work. MMORPG.com giveaway was good exposure as well I remember. Keep up the good work Inc and don't be afraid to try small scale advertising buys. Pretty sure I've seen sponsored ads on social media fairly recently but not 100% sure.
Best of luck
-MiexonBionic
I tried for a while to help out back in the day but probably could have done more. Marketing is a lot of work. MMORPG.com giveaway was good exposure as well I remember. Keep up the good work Inc and don't be afraid to try small scale advertising buys. Pretty sure I've seen sponsored ads on social media fairly recently but not 100% sure.
Best of luck
-MiexonBionic
His YouTube videos sure helped me out when I first started playing. If he did marketing as well god bless him. I've never seen any ads for this game before. I never even heard of VO until I one day I discovered it while randomly browsing games on Google Play, then I found out it was available for pc after I started on mobile.
"...to try small scale advertising buys."
Actually, putting ads out on Facebook is quite inexpensive. I once had a Facebook fan page for a mobile war strategy game I was addicted to for a while (mostly just written tutorials on the new updates and how to play with pictures to illustrate). I started messing around with creating ads and pay small amounts of money for them to run for like a few days at a time. I was in an alliance that desperately needed more members so I tried to create targeted ads. I wasn't very successful though I only got a few people join but it did get my page good amount of views. Maybe it could be a way for Inc to do it on a smaller scale if they aren't already. It helps they already have a Facebook presence. Just about anyone can afford to put out an ad there, even if it's just for a short time.
"...to try small scale advertising buys."
Actually, putting ads out on Facebook is quite inexpensive. I once had a Facebook fan page for a mobile war strategy game I was addicted to for a while (mostly just written tutorials on the new updates and how to play with pictures to illustrate). I started messing around with creating ads and pay small amounts of money for them to run for like a few days at a time. I was in an alliance that desperately needed more members so I tried to create targeted ads. I wasn't very successful though I only got a few people join but it did get my page good amount of views. Maybe it could be a way for Inc to do it on a smaller scale if they aren't already. It helps they already have a Facebook presence. Just about anyone can afford to put out an ad there, even if it's just for a short time.
Happy to hear you guys are on steady financial winds!
I think I bitched once or twice about how much cash I put in the game but in retrospect it was a small price to pay for the coolest space sim no one knows about. :-)
I think I bitched once or twice about how much cash I put in the game but in retrospect it was a small price to pay for the coolest space sim no one knows about. :-)