symolan wrote:
don't know the exact story of SWG. but how is this possible? 2 million users paying 10$ or something a month is actually quite a nice cash flow...
SWG had in some ways the opposite problem Ryzom had. I mean while Ryzom was built on scarce resources SWG was built on huge capital.
So they made an awesome big world (5 planets, satellites etc), hugely resource consumming freedom of player housing, cities, vendors, CSR teams for 15 servers (they were lousy, but still working for money), good connection for all these servers, aso, aso.
Now a business not only has to be positive in numbers but also pay back the initial investment. With all huge success SWG didn't pay back at a fast enough pace, or - at any rate - at the pace WoW showed possible for a game. And corporate investors are always the worst because they are not people involved with that precise business, but only with the revenue it generates.
On top of that was Sony brand which is renown for their "respect" towards customers. That's, in short, how a niche game became a vulgar fps and lost 3/4 if not more of the player base.
I belive from both SWG and Ryzom previous failures there are things we should learn, in "we" as current Ryzom makers not us, the players.
symolan wrote:
regarding marketing: I somehow feel that resources will once more be very limited and thorough marketing campaigns do cost a lot.
This depends a lot on whom is paying. For Gameforge, we like it or not, a web ad campaign was almost for free. I have personally not the slightest idea what are the new owners able to pay. WHat I know is they auctionned a considerable price for Ryzom that's why I hope they would want to see those money put to work.
One way to cheaply advertise is have game opened, or beta opened so that word passes from people to people. A working game advertises itself better than a closed future release, that's what all game makers know when they give keys to full of bugs betas.
ANother idea about advertising for free is have a newbie island with some of the hidden landscapes of the game to give people a target. Have a glimpse at the underworld, never mind you get killed in seconds when you walk 10 meters, have a glimpse at some scenery from the desert etc. Give people a reason why they should learn a difficult game and work a slow levelling curve up. Maybe open up only the free trial for some months, give imagination some food.
symolan wrote:
So, it would be useful to get the new players addicted as soon as they appear on Silan. To decide on this, one would need to know the data: how many trial accounts quit after what time? After what time period did new subscribers quit and what was the percentage of quitters? If this percentage was too high (I guess you could benchmark that to other mmo's) you would need to change something for the starters. If this percentage was good, spend more money on marketing. (some should be spent anyway)
Biggest problem is there are probably only 3-4 other similar games, one is SWG who won't give away data, another is Horizon which is not very successful, has wonderful craft, horrible graphics. So comparizon is not quite available.
My opinion is most people left game after reaching mainland, but again the island addressed a wrong player base who was strongly disappointed when reaching mainland where there was no quest to lead them by the hand. Of course I might be mistaken...
It's nothing wrong to love quests, but Ryzom player base generally doesn't need them to be happy while quest lovers feel lost, bored etc.
By the way, a maybe efficient way to address typical ryzom player base might be a thick good game printed/download/CD manual.
And a second way to make the game more expensive without telling so (even if I would not dare to codnemn the company for doing so) is to limit the number of masters one can have and the number of characters one can build.
On the community side one can take the countermeasure to emphasize the anti-bot policy.
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