meryan wrote:Since the players are customers, I would think that the player information would be very valuable to any buyer looking to get the complete package. I would not want to spend the kind of money that they did and only get a partial game.
You did not think of option 3, where they have the software and are trying to fix the bugs and develop a marketing strategy that will work. Any marketing strategy takes time and they will need a good one to fix the mess that Gameforge has left behind.
Hey MLM ! I'm looking forward to be able to say I'll be playing "in the midnite moonlight tonite" (remember our music lyrics conversation ?
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The player information's value has to be considered in context.
1. What % of the original playe rbase was left at the end ?
2. What % has fluttered off since then ?
3. What % has found new games / new communities in the "between"
4. So how many are left ? How many were "Ryzombies" (players who were perennially afk)
I don't know how many peeps were on the other two servers before GF's problems started but let's just look at the English server. On any given night, it would be extremely hard to find 20 people playing......but with time differences, let's call it 50.......let's say 4 times as many were playing at least once a week, let's say 2 times that were paying subs....that's 400 peeps.
Triple that to remove any argument and you have 1200 folks.
1200 x $15 = $18,000 a month or $216,000 a year. What can you buy and how many people can you pay with $216k ? Remember you need:
24/7 TS/CS available
Billing
Marketing
Management
24/7 IT Geeks
Put 1 person in ecah 8 hour slot for just that lineup and it's 9 people. Consider that "to pay the bills", you generally incur 1-2 times (let's say 1.5) direct salary costs to pay bennies, phone, credit card costs, electric, rent, insurance etc. So 216k / (1.0 salaries + 1.5 overhead) = $86.4K to hire 9 people or under $10k each. That's in mimimum wage territory.
By that I conclude that the income from the remaining player base is not a significant factor on the potential success of the "new" game.
As for taking time to develop marketing strategy, one would think the best bang for the buck they could get would be word of mouth from th existing player base.....sure doesn't cost anything. But my thinking is, it would be a financial drain. So they could be holding off to develop something along the lines you are thinking ..... or they may look at the rsults of a google search on Ryzom and figure the 100's of obituaries would be a hard thing for the marketing team to overcome. Maybe a rebranding of Ryzom into a new game (same world - different episode) is under consideration. Maybe using the engine, they want to make a completely new game.
In short, what my thinking is, that **if** there was going to be any reopening of the old servers in the near future, it would be somewhat foolish of them not to be in here and making some sort of announcement saying something before more and more people drift away.