shubla wrote:evilboy666 wrote:Ever so often I come and check the forums for anything new and exciting both from the devs and community. But everytime the best thing that welcomes me is onion and bacon. Theres 200 players tops in the vast world. Maybe its time you guys spend some money or effort into some marketing stuff.
Why would marketing work for the game? We had like 1000 players when the world began, but now only 200.
Is it reason of not marketing enough?
No, its not.
Player retention sucks.
People quit after playing for a short time only.
Marketing would maybe bring small influx of new players for a moment, but soon they would quit, for the same reasons that most quit soon after a world reset.
Could of course be argued that some small portion of them will remain as a longer term players but yeah.
How would you go on advertising this game anyway?
Google ads?
Pay some youtubers?
I'm not sure if its too straightforward.
Advertising is really expensive after all, do you have any idea how much games and companies use for their marketing!
There are companies that are ready to pay big money for clicks on their ads, so its not cheap.
Because by marketing, I dont just mean advertisement, but the marketing science as a whole applied to the game. Covering even game design too.
The player retention sucks because the game sucks! Not to us ofcourse, I still think it has a damn good plot and a damn good theme. But the 800 people that quit 1 month into every world would disagree. The game literally goes on with the same 100-300 hardcore players every world.
The reasons for this are the game is literally too damn hard and time-consuming for the typical player or even challenging players if I may say so. Let me list some:
There is an impractical official client that makes things even harder then they are right off the start. (people should search and find the third party clients and play with them)
(I believe there are some improvement to the client recently, years and years later.)
The function of the character selection chapter of the game can be debated.
You just spawn in the middle of the wilderness and have no idea what to do. Even with an intention to have people discover things by themselves, this seems too much.
(I think there is a small introductory walkthrough not but come on)
With the addition of more and more animals because they added there are all sorts of danger you need to beware of with your naked ass running around.
There are countless mechanics to know, but no proper place to learn them.(Tell me for example, how can one learn to tame an animal without the comprehensive tutorial on the forum?)
(Even with that knowledge its a hard thing to perform.)
There are lots of balance issues, the sad case of botting, the grinding nature of the game..
The game has an insanely steep learning curve, lots and lots of trial and errors, permadeath is too challenging for standard humans(I bet ya, put a patch to world of warcraft, when you die you start from level 1. Within 1 week there will be no one left playing.) And when you learn the game fully, its impossible to experience the game fully with standard 24 hours a day and a normal life. Not as a hermit, not in a village where there is too much shit going on and theres division of labor anyways.)
I could really list much and much more.
The story of the game is virtually the same as minecraft. Spawn in the middle of nowhere and survive. But their execution of that story is the difference that they are billionaires and jorb&loftar are here selling hats. Im not saying copy minecraft or anything like that, and I dont want to pick on them too this is probably too much work for just 2 people. But it seems obvious if they want to succeed they must do things differently.
These above mentioned issues arent even new, they have been around for so long. The fact that they arent being looked into is saddening. I would love to see this game succeed. But maybe my definition of success and J&Lo definition of success is different. Maybe they are happy with the 200 regulars and its enough for them I dunno.
And im sorry i believe i come out harsh when critizing the game at times, but its because im sad and angry that this game is still at this level. It has literally been so long dude so long. I remember it was 2012 when i first played this game and It was already at world 4. I would just be proud if this game took some traction thats all.