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The state of VO inquiry
I signed up for VO in 2020 and played off and on, and gave noticed a few things. VO has come a long way from what I was told by a couple of senior vet in ONE, and I have noticed this my self in the 5 years I've been playing VO. However it seems the player base is dwindling vets leave and move on, and this leaves the new players just joining VO for their very first day, very underwhelmed. Inc and ray, you both seem to be doing your absolute best, however it seems that the game may lose its player base and one day the server may have to be pulled offline. Phaserlight has done a terrific job with the events bring some vets back online. VO has a long and in-depth history either in the guild v guild relations, or just player v player relations. And I don't wish for VO to forgotten. From my point of view it seems VO is in decay. However this is from my perspective and I may not be seeing a side of this story and would like your input.
Your local nationalist Demonicat :P
Your local nationalist Demonicat :P
We appreciate the concern :).
VO is doing fine. Monthly Active Users (MAU) is up by about 30% over the last six months, and climbing. I'll talk about why this is happening later..
Probably the most important context to understand here is that we're in a "calm before the storm" stage, right now. Everything we're doing is in preparation for "Marketing", essentially an Expansion Launch of the game that sees substantial advertising spend. VO players have no reference point for this, because this will be at a very different scale from any advertising we've done before. We had a few historical moments of attention, like the Verizon TV commercial or some other external situations; but we've never had a serious, sustained big-budget marketing campaign. This is a complex thing to even approach, as games-marketing and performance-marketing tends to drastically change every few years; but I can say Vendetta Online is likely to have a much higher profile, and a far larger player-concurrency than anything the game has ever seen before.
This brings with it a lot of associated concerns and challenges, both infrastructural and administrative, given our "Live Ops MMORPG" nature, and most of that development is not going to be very interesting to existing players. For example, if you look at the Game Development Direction sticky thread on Suggestions, you don't see a whole lot of Content-related focus (at least, for the top items, there are some further down).
This is because we've needed to do a lot of work on fundamental architecture and administrative features of the game: basically, stuff that players do not see. This includes areas like chat-administration and expanding the Report system, which proved to be un-managable given our staffing size, so that meant we needed to invest a lot in re-designing the system.
Additionally, we had some really major distractions, like the widespread and corrosive misconception that PvP-cheating was "a thing". In order to "disprove" this, we had to do a lot of time-consuming work, and at the same time, we effectively laid the groundwork for eventually making the game "cheat-proof". So, this was kind of useful, but it was a big unexpected usage of time, when we might have otherwise gotten further on our intended goals, or worked on some content.
All of this kind of administrative and back-end work, while extremely necessary if we want to manage a larger audience and player-base, is not very "exciting" in the meantime, to existing players. There haven't been a lot of content drops or major changes. This leads to some existing players drifting away. I understand this, and anticipated it, but notwithstanding some out-of-left-field issues (like "non-existent cheating"), I'm fairly confident in our allocation of resources.
Understand, if we were a much larger studio, like Blizzard, we would have separate "Live Ops" and "Development" teams. Live Ops would work on day-to-day content generation to keep people entertained, and Development would work on the long-term march towards the next major expansion or feature-set. For games like Destiny (Bungie), they might have hundreds of people on each team. We obviously don't have that.
So, while we are always trying to allocate some time to new content drops (especially around new features, like our Persistent Event mission system), most of our energy is going into long-term goals, which are mission-critical to our goals.
In the meantime, really significant major features, like the additional localization support of 19 languages, are unlikely to be a source of much interest for the "veteran" playerbase, which has always played the game in English. That doesn't make it less important for the long-term economic success of the game, nor does it make it any smaller of an undertaking (~350,000 words times 19 languages, with custom memory-efficient handling of, say, 18,000 Korean "Hangul" fonts using Signed Distance Fields; or the correct right-to-left "cursive" rendering of Arabic fonts). This is the kind of thing that AAA games even balk at, and they don't have "continuous updates" to missions and content that requires building an entire localization infrastructure.
None of that excites existing players, and understandably so. They just want some new enemies, new drops, new weapons, a new capship type to build.. I know what they want. I get it. But, some (big) development projects really need to be "pushed through and finished" because of the human cognitive functions of development-flow and limited-term human memory.
The good news is that this is starting shift, this year. The MAU change I mentioned at the beginning is an example of that. This is not an accident, it's a result of our playing with various social and player-contact methodologies, and modernizing our mailing list system and so on. We're also going to do some very small test-cases on marketing, start rolling out more administrative / toxicity-management features and other things that'll allow us to begin to consider bringing the game's profile up (slowly), as we start to ramp out some additional features and improvements.
It is notable that this has been a plan for a long time. The fact that we didn't ship any Newsletters last year (outside Holiday) is not an accident. I mentioned this last year when people were asking for a 20th-anniversary-of-retail celebration. The unfortunate reality is that if we do anything really significant to get attention, a lot of press will re-review the game, and then say "This hasn't changed and is old!" and then we're basically stuck being judged by those reviews and Metacritic for.. years to come, which is a serious problem.
Additionally, until the next-generation Administrative player-management tools and things are rolled out, it continues to be pretty time consuming to handle player toxicity issues. This then becomes a bigger problem with more players. We really need the new tools.
In closing, I would say: Don't lose heart :). We're doing largely what I expected. I had planned a bit different timeline, that didn't involve the "cheating" thing or some server problems we uncovered in 2022, but things are still motoring along roughly on the course that I set some years ago. We're still covering the same ground, most of which is mentioned in that Game Development Direction thread on Suggestions.
It's actually a really good time to start working on reviving a guild, if that's an interest. I've written previously about the next-generation guild onboarding features, which are still part of the plan.
I wrote (in that thread) back in 2021 on the subject of marketing that: "It is likely that, when this comes to pass, the existing playerbase, even in historical aggregate, will become a small minority." There was some veteran skepticism about this, but, honestly, I was making an understatement..
Given the likely scale of new-user influx, it would be all the better if established guilds were available to help onboard new players, which is the intent of that above-linked RFC. This is one of many reasons why our ramp-up will be slow, as we test different methodologies and systems, marketing channels, engagement mechanics and so on.
But, at least from where I'm sitting at present, I wouldn't worry too much; good things are happening :). I hope this helps.
VO is doing fine. Monthly Active Users (MAU) is up by about 30% over the last six months, and climbing. I'll talk about why this is happening later..
Probably the most important context to understand here is that we're in a "calm before the storm" stage, right now. Everything we're doing is in preparation for "Marketing", essentially an Expansion Launch of the game that sees substantial advertising spend. VO players have no reference point for this, because this will be at a very different scale from any advertising we've done before. We had a few historical moments of attention, like the Verizon TV commercial or some other external situations; but we've never had a serious, sustained big-budget marketing campaign. This is a complex thing to even approach, as games-marketing and performance-marketing tends to drastically change every few years; but I can say Vendetta Online is likely to have a much higher profile, and a far larger player-concurrency than anything the game has ever seen before.
This brings with it a lot of associated concerns and challenges, both infrastructural and administrative, given our "Live Ops MMORPG" nature, and most of that development is not going to be very interesting to existing players. For example, if you look at the Game Development Direction sticky thread on Suggestions, you don't see a whole lot of Content-related focus (at least, for the top items, there are some further down).
This is because we've needed to do a lot of work on fundamental architecture and administrative features of the game: basically, stuff that players do not see. This includes areas like chat-administration and expanding the Report system, which proved to be un-managable given our staffing size, so that meant we needed to invest a lot in re-designing the system.
Additionally, we had some really major distractions, like the widespread and corrosive misconception that PvP-cheating was "a thing". In order to "disprove" this, we had to do a lot of time-consuming work, and at the same time, we effectively laid the groundwork for eventually making the game "cheat-proof". So, this was kind of useful, but it was a big unexpected usage of time, when we might have otherwise gotten further on our intended goals, or worked on some content.
All of this kind of administrative and back-end work, while extremely necessary if we want to manage a larger audience and player-base, is not very "exciting" in the meantime, to existing players. There haven't been a lot of content drops or major changes. This leads to some existing players drifting away. I understand this, and anticipated it, but notwithstanding some out-of-left-field issues (like "non-existent cheating"), I'm fairly confident in our allocation of resources.
Understand, if we were a much larger studio, like Blizzard, we would have separate "Live Ops" and "Development" teams. Live Ops would work on day-to-day content generation to keep people entertained, and Development would work on the long-term march towards the next major expansion or feature-set. For games like Destiny (Bungie), they might have hundreds of people on each team. We obviously don't have that.
So, while we are always trying to allocate some time to new content drops (especially around new features, like our Persistent Event mission system), most of our energy is going into long-term goals, which are mission-critical to our goals.
In the meantime, really significant major features, like the additional localization support of 19 languages, are unlikely to be a source of much interest for the "veteran" playerbase, which has always played the game in English. That doesn't make it less important for the long-term economic success of the game, nor does it make it any smaller of an undertaking (~350,000 words times 19 languages, with custom memory-efficient handling of, say, 18,000 Korean "Hangul" fonts using Signed Distance Fields; or the correct right-to-left "cursive" rendering of Arabic fonts). This is the kind of thing that AAA games even balk at, and they don't have "continuous updates" to missions and content that requires building an entire localization infrastructure.
None of that excites existing players, and understandably so. They just want some new enemies, new drops, new weapons, a new capship type to build.. I know what they want. I get it. But, some (big) development projects really need to be "pushed through and finished" because of the human cognitive functions of development-flow and limited-term human memory.
The good news is that this is starting shift, this year. The MAU change I mentioned at the beginning is an example of that. This is not an accident, it's a result of our playing with various social and player-contact methodologies, and modernizing our mailing list system and so on. We're also going to do some very small test-cases on marketing, start rolling out more administrative / toxicity-management features and other things that'll allow us to begin to consider bringing the game's profile up (slowly), as we start to ramp out some additional features and improvements.
It is notable that this has been a plan for a long time. The fact that we didn't ship any Newsletters last year (outside Holiday) is not an accident. I mentioned this last year when people were asking for a 20th-anniversary-of-retail celebration. The unfortunate reality is that if we do anything really significant to get attention, a lot of press will re-review the game, and then say "This hasn't changed and is old!" and then we're basically stuck being judged by those reviews and Metacritic for.. years to come, which is a serious problem.
Additionally, until the next-generation Administrative player-management tools and things are rolled out, it continues to be pretty time consuming to handle player toxicity issues. This then becomes a bigger problem with more players. We really need the new tools.
In closing, I would say: Don't lose heart :). We're doing largely what I expected. I had planned a bit different timeline, that didn't involve the "cheating" thing or some server problems we uncovered in 2022, but things are still motoring along roughly on the course that I set some years ago. We're still covering the same ground, most of which is mentioned in that Game Development Direction thread on Suggestions.
It's actually a really good time to start working on reviving a guild, if that's an interest. I've written previously about the next-generation guild onboarding features, which are still part of the plan.
I wrote (in that thread) back in 2021 on the subject of marketing that: "It is likely that, when this comes to pass, the existing playerbase, even in historical aggregate, will become a small minority." There was some veteran skepticism about this, but, honestly, I was making an understatement..
Given the likely scale of new-user influx, it would be all the better if established guilds were available to help onboard new players, which is the intent of that above-linked RFC. This is one of many reasons why our ramp-up will be slow, as we test different methodologies and systems, marketing channels, engagement mechanics and so on.
But, at least from where I'm sitting at present, I wouldn't worry too much; good things are happening :). I hope this helps.
As an additional side-note, we have started shipping Newsletters more often again, so make sure you have the little box checked for that in your Account Info area. That's a good way to stay updated on what's going on.
Try to add noreply@vendetta-online.com to your address book too, to improve the odds of delivery.
The major updates also get pushed out on our Socials:
Discord:
https://discord.com/invite/vendetta
BlueSky:
https://bsky.app/profile/vendetta-online.com
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/vendettaonline
Threads:
https://www.threads.net/@vendetta.online
Twitter / X:
https://x.com/VendettaOnline
Try to add noreply@vendetta-online.com to your address book too, to improve the odds of delivery.
The major updates also get pushed out on our Socials:
Discord:
https://discord.com/invite/vendetta
BlueSky:
https://bsky.app/profile/vendetta-online.com
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/vendettaonline
Threads:
https://www.threads.net/@vendetta.online
Twitter / X:
https://x.com/VendettaOnline
Cool thanks for the update; you know we love em! :P
Nice to see some good came out the 2022 shenanigans.
Nice to see some good came out the 2022 shenanigans.
I guarantee that simply going to sit in the lobbies of other multiplayer games and individually advertising will have higher conversion than running traditional marketing campaigns, and I'm willing to put money on that.
You could hire an enthusiastic intern to do that for minimum wage.
The current mindset seems outdated, a relic of a time when advertising worked very differently than it does right now.
Trust me when I say that almost no one will see your ads, and that isn't any kind of statement toward you: the internet is sick of people sellong them trash.
One look at trends in creator spaces on this topic show you just how vitriolic corporate backlash against nearly all forms of advertising and sponsorships has been getting lately.
You'll have a much better time reaching the types of people who want to play this game by talking to them than you will through algorithmic non-consensual assault over enduser sensory experience.
And yes, I did just equate advertising to that strong word, because that is exactly and precisely what it is.
Obviously, I wish the advertising to succeed, I wouldn't ever want for player growth efforts to fail.
I'm also not so unaware that I can have any faith that traditional marketing paths will do much of anything for this game.
Word of mouth, guerilla marketing has and always will be what sells VO.
You could hire an enthusiastic intern to do that for minimum wage.
The current mindset seems outdated, a relic of a time when advertising worked very differently than it does right now.
Trust me when I say that almost no one will see your ads, and that isn't any kind of statement toward you: the internet is sick of people sellong them trash.
One look at trends in creator spaces on this topic show you just how vitriolic corporate backlash against nearly all forms of advertising and sponsorships has been getting lately.
You'll have a much better time reaching the types of people who want to play this game by talking to them than you will through algorithmic non-consensual assault over enduser sensory experience.
And yes, I did just equate advertising to that strong word, because that is exactly and precisely what it is.
Obviously, I wish the advertising to succeed, I wouldn't ever want for player growth efforts to fail.
I'm also not so unaware that I can have any faith that traditional marketing paths will do much of anything for this game.
Word of mouth, guerilla marketing has and always will be what sells VO.
The current mindset seems outdated, a relic of a time when advertising worked very differently than it does right now.
Trust me when I say that almost no one will see your ads, and that isn't any kind of statement toward you: the internet is sick of people sellong them trash.
The mobile games industry is driven completely by performance marketing that uses analytic feedback loops and machine learning. When things don't perform, spend is quickly halted. Thus, big shops are doing things like continually A/B testing 1000 strategies across 1000 channels, concurrently. The mobile games industry is 100B, or larger than console (40B) and PC (50B) combined.
I'm not saying I love ads, or ads are the best. There are lots of different types of marketing (including "guerilla"), and I was non-specific in my post. But, it would be extremely naive to write off systems that currently drive, say, Genshin Impact to ~$180M/month in revenue.
I can assure you, the "current mindset" in game industry advertising is state-of-the-art. No one knows more about extracting value from "user acquisition" spend than the big fish of the mobile game industry (which is clearly not me). The mechanics and strategies change very quickly, as I mentioned above, but I've seen no other industry that adapts as rapidly, and successfully. Nor is it "non-consensual", as much of UA spend now ends up in consensual ads that are experienced in return for game currency, because games are both the most targeted spenders, and some of the biggest advertisers.
Again, it's a rapidly evolving world, I'm not saying it's my favorite, I'm just trying to figure something out that will help us. But, it would be foolish to roll the game industry in with, say, retail, or some other old-world channel that is trying to buy web ads or something.
Trust me when I say that almost no one will see your ads, and that isn't any kind of statement toward you: the internet is sick of people sellong them trash.
The mobile games industry is driven completely by performance marketing that uses analytic feedback loops and machine learning. When things don't perform, spend is quickly halted. Thus, big shops are doing things like continually A/B testing 1000 strategies across 1000 channels, concurrently. The mobile games industry is 100B, or larger than console (40B) and PC (50B) combined.
I'm not saying I love ads, or ads are the best. There are lots of different types of marketing (including "guerilla"), and I was non-specific in my post. But, it would be extremely naive to write off systems that currently drive, say, Genshin Impact to ~$180M/month in revenue.
I can assure you, the "current mindset" in game industry advertising is state-of-the-art. No one knows more about extracting value from "user acquisition" spend than the big fish of the mobile game industry (which is clearly not me). The mechanics and strategies change very quickly, as I mentioned above, but I've seen no other industry that adapts as rapidly, and successfully. Nor is it "non-consensual", as much of UA spend now ends up in consensual ads that are experienced in return for game currency, because games are both the most targeted spenders, and some of the biggest advertisers.
Again, it's a rapidly evolving world, I'm not saying it's my favorite, I'm just trying to figure something out that will help us. But, it would be foolish to roll the game industry in with, say, retail, or some other old-world channel that is trying to buy web ads or something.
Nah champ, Genshin is practically fully supported by content creators, especially V-Tubers and Japanese players, continually supporting it external to the existing marketing.
Games like genshin dump money into ads when they have so much they quite literally cannot spend it fast enough without legal ramifications. I'm sure you're well aware of the problems associated with corporate wealth as an American taxpayer.
Guild is no Netease or Asobimo nor should you try to be
This entire understanding is what lead to my thread here pondering on why VO seems to unphotogenic: I would LOVE to stream VO with a nice VRM avatar while fully immersed in the world, and contribute to its public image the way games really get sold.
I'm just not sure how to do so in a way that looks good and is entertaining to viewers, the game itself makes the process hard.
You can really look at any MMO adjacent game these days as direct comparison: practically any survival game like Ark or Rust, niche explosions like PalWorld, and if we're going to be generous and welcoming to all platforms: look at Peridot by Niantic, even after their disater of a launch;
These games subsist purely on word of mouth, content creation, and user-made content, as nearly all decent and surviving games do now.
Stop thinking you need to sell off your child like a product, simply explain to people the expected experience and allow them to form autonomy within your world, without you holding their hand and attempting to cater their expectations to your vision.
I work deploying machine learning models, John, and I can tell you for an absolute fact: we're selling you vaporware.
For every AlphaGo or ChatGPT or Diffusion model, you have a thousand failed transformers sitting dead and unused on huggingface, licensed products with significant investment shoved at the open source community in an attempt to save something that never should've been a product in the first place.
Just look at the google search AI and its constant hallucinations, or Gemini and its downright abusive way of interacting with users.
I'm in no way as familiar as what goes on in google's advertising departments as I am with their language model development teams and philosophy, so maybe I really am missing some magical panacea you see as apparent in this endeavor.
If you're trusting your fate to a megacorp, you're already doomed.
Please also keep in mind: I'm not proclaing you deny the investment you've put into advertising, back out or, really, to do anything by my demand. I wish nothing for you at all, on fact.
It just seems apparent given how well you'e always done on your own that your confidence in the future is shaken, when you're really in the strongest position you've ever been in.
It sounds, knowing the industry, like the techbros started getting to you with their vile and insidious YC mentality, which gets so many feeding on technocratic propaganda of infinite growth in a closed system.
I just have a simple point: i see the effort you're putting in here being less than impactful by whatever metrics of assessment you would personally use to determine success.
I guess only time will tell, but by then, we'll have disparate data to cite as cause for any number of outcomes.
Games like genshin dump money into ads when they have so much they quite literally cannot spend it fast enough without legal ramifications. I'm sure you're well aware of the problems associated with corporate wealth as an American taxpayer.
Guild is no Netease or Asobimo nor should you try to be
This entire understanding is what lead to my thread here pondering on why VO seems to unphotogenic: I would LOVE to stream VO with a nice VRM avatar while fully immersed in the world, and contribute to its public image the way games really get sold.
I'm just not sure how to do so in a way that looks good and is entertaining to viewers, the game itself makes the process hard.
You can really look at any MMO adjacent game these days as direct comparison: practically any survival game like Ark or Rust, niche explosions like PalWorld, and if we're going to be generous and welcoming to all platforms: look at Peridot by Niantic, even after their disater of a launch;
These games subsist purely on word of mouth, content creation, and user-made content, as nearly all decent and surviving games do now.
Stop thinking you need to sell off your child like a product, simply explain to people the expected experience and allow them to form autonomy within your world, without you holding their hand and attempting to cater their expectations to your vision.
I work deploying machine learning models, John, and I can tell you for an absolute fact: we're selling you vaporware.
For every AlphaGo or ChatGPT or Diffusion model, you have a thousand failed transformers sitting dead and unused on huggingface, licensed products with significant investment shoved at the open source community in an attempt to save something that never should've been a product in the first place.
Just look at the google search AI and its constant hallucinations, or Gemini and its downright abusive way of interacting with users.
I'm in no way as familiar as what goes on in google's advertising departments as I am with their language model development teams and philosophy, so maybe I really am missing some magical panacea you see as apparent in this endeavor.
If you're trusting your fate to a megacorp, you're already doomed.
Please also keep in mind: I'm not proclaing you deny the investment you've put into advertising, back out or, really, to do anything by my demand. I wish nothing for you at all, on fact.
It just seems apparent given how well you'e always done on your own that your confidence in the future is shaken, when you're really in the strongest position you've ever been in.
It sounds, knowing the industry, like the techbros started getting to you with their vile and insidious YC mentality, which gets so many feeding on technocratic propaganda of infinite growth in a closed system.
I just have a simple point: i see the effort you're putting in here being less than impactful by whatever metrics of assessment you would personally use to determine success.
I guess only time will tell, but by then, we'll have disparate data to cite as cause for any number of outcomes.
TL;DR: I feel you but... I have to disagree.
I wish I had more to build on what you said; at the end of the day vo isn't those games.
"I'm just not sure how to do so in a way that looks good and is entertaining to viewers, the game itself makes the process hard." Heh the community made vo clips made back in the day 2004~2008; that said you're not wrong making new ones would go a long way, I'd argue it's a hell of a lot easier today than it was back then.
I'm not a good digital artist by any means but yeah let me tell you that building on some elses work isn't easy, despite my constant bitching over the years I have to lay it out here that art isn't "easy" and that applies to making good machinima just as it does to skinning the game; and don't get me started about adding another dimension... two (or three in modeling/machinima's case) is plenty hard!
On one hand I feel you and I'd love to see it grow to the point but at the same time part of me knows that it would become something else in the process as such I can say that even if development/maintenance halted I like to think I'd still be here attempting to log in on time for the weekly nation wars and whatnot.
I wish I had more to build on what you said; at the end of the day vo isn't those games.
"I'm just not sure how to do so in a way that looks good and is entertaining to viewers, the game itself makes the process hard." Heh the community made vo clips made back in the day 2004~2008; that said you're not wrong making new ones would go a long way, I'd argue it's a hell of a lot easier today than it was back then.
I'm not a good digital artist by any means but yeah let me tell you that building on some elses work isn't easy, despite my constant bitching over the years I have to lay it out here that art isn't "easy" and that applies to making good machinima just as it does to skinning the game; and don't get me started about adding another dimension... two (or three in modeling/machinima's case) is plenty hard!
On one hand I feel you and I'd love to see it grow to the point but at the same time part of me knows that it would become something else in the process as such I can say that even if development/maintenance halted I like to think I'd still be here attempting to log in on time for the weekly nation wars and whatnot.
Nah champ, Genshin is practically fully supported by content creators, especially V-Tubers and Japanese players, continually supporting it external to the existing marketing.
Games like genshin dump money into ads when they have so much they quite literally cannot spend it fast enough without legal ramifications.
(Facepalm).. No.. "champ", everything you just said is surreally divorced from reality. You can learn all about performance marketing online if you like, and the games industry. There's even a whole conference next month in Vegas, called "MAU".
Practically every top-50 game on mobile has a massive UA budget, because their churn rate is terrible, due to poor 30-day retention. Large games tend to spend more, not less.
"Content creators" are great, but do not supplant the need for paid User Acquisition, particularly when a game is a massive scale, and especially for major expansion launches.
The minimum UA budget for a reasonable mobile launch is in seven figures. One can theoretically grow organically from a smaller start, but it's gotten far more difficult, and that is not standard practice in the mobile game industry.
Look, I just got back from GDC a couple of weeks ago, and I spent the entire time talking to my friends (who are far more successful), about their marketing strategies, successes and failures.
I've been building and shipping games professionally for nearly thirty years. I don't claim to know everyone, but I talked to a pretty big spread of people, across PC, console and mobile, who oversaw title/launch budgets of up to around $300M.
There's a lot of public information on everything I've tried explaining to you; but I'm blessed with not having to rely on it, because my industry is friendly about informal sharing of learnings.
I work deploying machine learning models, John, and I can tell you for an absolute fact: we're selling you vaporware.
For every AlphaGo or ChatGPT or Diffusion model, you have a thousand failed transformers sitting dead and unused on huggingface, licensed products with significant investment shoved at the open source community in an attempt to save something that never should've been a product in the first place.
Just look at the google search AI and its constant hallucinations, or Gemini and its downright abusive way of interacting with users.
Again.. What? I didn't mention LLMs, or back-propagation neural networks. Machine learning is a much larger and older field than the current "hotness" of ChatGPT-and-friends.
A lot of the most useful forms of machine learning are far simpler, and easier to understand. That's how we optimized our network protocol compression, how we optimized our control systems, how we've done lots of things, going back to ~2001.
I'm in no way as familiar as what goes on in google's advertising departments as I am with their language model development teams and philosophy, so maybe I really am missing some magical panacea you see as apparent in this endeavor.
If you're trusting your fate to a megacorp, you're already doomed.
Again.. I didn't mention Google? I don't care what Google is doing. In my world, they're most famous (with FB) for historically front-running their "bidding" process and bilking the game industry out of 40% overhead on advertising. Which is part of why they're currently being sued and threatened with an antitrust breakup.
I think you're so far afield from the reality of what I tried to explain to you, that it's difficult to even communicate. And you seem to be utterly convinced of your own expertise, which doesn't help.
It just seems apparent given how well you'e always done on your own that your confidence in the future is shaken, when you're really in the strongest position you've ever been in.
It sounds, knowing the industry, like the techbros started getting to you with their vile and insidious YC mentality, which gets so many feeding on technocratic propaganda of infinite growth in a closed system.
Your "read" on my personality and confidence and viewpoint is.. utterly and totally ass-backwards and inaccurate.
I just have a simple point: i see the effort you're putting in here being less than impactful by whatever metrics of assessment you would personally use to determine success.
Your summation doesn't really make any sense either.
Performance marketing is based on performance. It right there, in the name. The metrics demonstrate the success, or you quickly stop and do something different. The feedback loops are pretty short.
Determining relative player engagement by cohort is not that complicated. We've been doing that for.. a really long time.
It's entirely possible that none of this will work, for us. But, I do know it's working for other people. Because I know those people. And I know hundreds of millions of dollars a year are getting burned on it, and those studios are getting a substantial profit back out of it.
Soo.. again, it's just not that hard to understand. LTV vs UA-spend. The forms may shift, but the fundamentals remain.
Look, normally I'm pretty interested in open communication on here, but the main point of this thread is to convey to concerned community members that I have a plan for the future of VO, and that I'm optimistic about that plan.
You seem to mostly want to negatively dump on my statement, based on your "assumption of what I must mean" and mixed with confusion about my industry, and that's pretty counterproductive to helping my community feel more optimistic about anything.
I thought I could just.. help you understand my industry reality, and you would stop. But it seems like you're extremely confident in your.. "perspective", and hey.. good for you; but I'm muting you from responding further to this thread. It's just not helpful.
Games like genshin dump money into ads when they have so much they quite literally cannot spend it fast enough without legal ramifications.
(Facepalm).. No.. "champ", everything you just said is surreally divorced from reality. You can learn all about performance marketing online if you like, and the games industry. There's even a whole conference next month in Vegas, called "MAU".
Practically every top-50 game on mobile has a massive UA budget, because their churn rate is terrible, due to poor 30-day retention. Large games tend to spend more, not less.
"Content creators" are great, but do not supplant the need for paid User Acquisition, particularly when a game is a massive scale, and especially for major expansion launches.
The minimum UA budget for a reasonable mobile launch is in seven figures. One can theoretically grow organically from a smaller start, but it's gotten far more difficult, and that is not standard practice in the mobile game industry.
Look, I just got back from GDC a couple of weeks ago, and I spent the entire time talking to my friends (who are far more successful), about their marketing strategies, successes and failures.
I've been building and shipping games professionally for nearly thirty years. I don't claim to know everyone, but I talked to a pretty big spread of people, across PC, console and mobile, who oversaw title/launch budgets of up to around $300M.
There's a lot of public information on everything I've tried explaining to you; but I'm blessed with not having to rely on it, because my industry is friendly about informal sharing of learnings.
I work deploying machine learning models, John, and I can tell you for an absolute fact: we're selling you vaporware.
For every AlphaGo or ChatGPT or Diffusion model, you have a thousand failed transformers sitting dead and unused on huggingface, licensed products with significant investment shoved at the open source community in an attempt to save something that never should've been a product in the first place.
Just look at the google search AI and its constant hallucinations, or Gemini and its downright abusive way of interacting with users.
Again.. What? I didn't mention LLMs, or back-propagation neural networks. Machine learning is a much larger and older field than the current "hotness" of ChatGPT-and-friends.
A lot of the most useful forms of machine learning are far simpler, and easier to understand. That's how we optimized our network protocol compression, how we optimized our control systems, how we've done lots of things, going back to ~2001.
I'm in no way as familiar as what goes on in google's advertising departments as I am with their language model development teams and philosophy, so maybe I really am missing some magical panacea you see as apparent in this endeavor.
If you're trusting your fate to a megacorp, you're already doomed.
Again.. I didn't mention Google? I don't care what Google is doing. In my world, they're most famous (with FB) for historically front-running their "bidding" process and bilking the game industry out of 40% overhead on advertising. Which is part of why they're currently being sued and threatened with an antitrust breakup.
I think you're so far afield from the reality of what I tried to explain to you, that it's difficult to even communicate. And you seem to be utterly convinced of your own expertise, which doesn't help.
It just seems apparent given how well you'e always done on your own that your confidence in the future is shaken, when you're really in the strongest position you've ever been in.
It sounds, knowing the industry, like the techbros started getting to you with their vile and insidious YC mentality, which gets so many feeding on technocratic propaganda of infinite growth in a closed system.
Your "read" on my personality and confidence and viewpoint is.. utterly and totally ass-backwards and inaccurate.
I just have a simple point: i see the effort you're putting in here being less than impactful by whatever metrics of assessment you would personally use to determine success.
Your summation doesn't really make any sense either.
Performance marketing is based on performance. It right there, in the name. The metrics demonstrate the success, or you quickly stop and do something different. The feedback loops are pretty short.
Determining relative player engagement by cohort is not that complicated. We've been doing that for.. a really long time.
It's entirely possible that none of this will work, for us. But, I do know it's working for other people. Because I know those people. And I know hundreds of millions of dollars a year are getting burned on it, and those studios are getting a substantial profit back out of it.
Soo.. again, it's just not that hard to understand. LTV vs UA-spend. The forms may shift, but the fundamentals remain.
Look, normally I'm pretty interested in open communication on here, but the main point of this thread is to convey to concerned community members that I have a plan for the future of VO, and that I'm optimistic about that plan.
You seem to mostly want to negatively dump on my statement, based on your "assumption of what I must mean" and mixed with confusion about my industry, and that's pretty counterproductive to helping my community feel more optimistic about anything.
I thought I could just.. help you understand my industry reality, and you would stop. But it seems like you're extremely confident in your.. "perspective", and hey.. good for you; but I'm muting you from responding further to this thread. It's just not helpful.
I agree with incarnate to follow the big fish for mobile users market and keeping previous players exposed to VO with the newsletters etc.
There isn't a magic pill for this though. The game is unique and it is always possible that no matter the marketing that the demand is lower then other types of games. Which would make the cost of exposure even higher then other games.
ANY exposure is good exposure, but the question is as what cost right ?
Word of mouth referral business in any form should not be forgotten
Sadly any advise is only proven for notable successful known game where you can point to numbers.
What about the same advise applied where a game completely failed.
We have all seen them come and go on Steam and everywhere else.
Game Play vids are probably a good idea so people can see things in action.
But it's a tricky prospect.
How do you broadcast someone doing something like mining and then hauling some freight or doing a mission etc.
Without a good narrative of what is happening, it's not likely very interesting for the viewer either.
They might get a sense they have seen all there is already from the vid and make their decision based on a single boring mining vid or hauling vid etc.
Not that it's too boring but for a gamer that prospect isn't very attractive to someone looking for a game play video.
So maybe not that great of an idea except for more of a backstory type vid with highlights or something.
It's tricky all around and costly for sure.
There isn't a magic pill for this though. The game is unique and it is always possible that no matter the marketing that the demand is lower then other types of games. Which would make the cost of exposure even higher then other games.
ANY exposure is good exposure, but the question is as what cost right ?
Word of mouth referral business in any form should not be forgotten
Sadly any advise is only proven for notable successful known game where you can point to numbers.
What about the same advise applied where a game completely failed.
We have all seen them come and go on Steam and everywhere else.
Game Play vids are probably a good idea so people can see things in action.
But it's a tricky prospect.
How do you broadcast someone doing something like mining and then hauling some freight or doing a mission etc.
Without a good narrative of what is happening, it's not likely very interesting for the viewer either.
They might get a sense they have seen all there is already from the vid and make their decision based on a single boring mining vid or hauling vid etc.
Not that it's too boring but for a gamer that prospect isn't very attractive to someone looking for a game play video.
So maybe not that great of an idea except for more of a backstory type vid with highlights or something.
It's tricky all around and costly for sure.