How About A New Trophy Reward Company

[Adoede]

Hey Nate, I've been trying to put in the time to earn some free trophies from the reward company you've been using and I've got to say it has been a terribly frustrating experience. Most of the surveys end up disqualifying me after I've spent 15 minutes on them and thus earn me no trophies. I know you've said that the game economics are set up so we either use real cash to get trophies or utilize your advertiser's platform to earn you ad cash for our time. That latter part isn't working very well.

I suggest you think about changing your trophy reward management company to one that gives more opportunities for managers to earn some extra free trophies and take full advantage of all this game has to offer - one without the bogus offers that take up our time with no payout. I'd bet a lot more managers would take advantage of better trophy reward offers if they were available and that this in turn would earn your company more cash for development.

[Nate]

Sorry to hear you are having trouble. All the free surveys work that way regardless of the company, and if you do pass their filters they pay in my experience over the years. Sometimes there is a glitch but it is generally fixed by TrialPay's customer service to satisfactory results. They are not bogus offers, they are simply trying to filter out people who are not in the target demographic for the survey they are doing and the only way to do that is to ask questions. Most games don't make very much money off of advertising with the exception of those who have 100,000s or millions of players. I don't ever see that as a revenue stream that will account for too much, but every bit helps. Ads and companies like trialpay usually account for less than 10% of a games revenue.

Have you tried the refer-a-friend system. Have you told all your friends about the game? Posted it on game forums, posted it on facebook multiple times? People often need to see something three or more times before acting on it. I don't suggest spamming your friends of course, but intermittent postings every so often isn't offensive.

Good luck in the Pit!

-Nate-

[Adoede]

Ah, well then what are we waiting for - let's get those 100,000s playin already!

Kidding aside, good work with all the updates recently. Despite the valid concerns others have brought up about the recent changes, overall, I think most of us generally appreciate that you are constantly updating and keeping the game fresh. Does it present some unexpected competitive challenges? Sure. But that's part of what keeps the game competitively interesting for the top teams and glads.

Am I right to assume you're hoping that most customers would become monthly subscription-types then if ad-revenue isn't what you're shooting for?

[Nate]

Glad to hear you are enjoying the game. I do my best to give players enough flexibility to be as creative as possible while still maintaining balance. It is no easy task and I have a lot of room for improvement.

Your last question flirts dangerously close to a very polarized and philosophical debate in the game industry right now rivaling that of religion and politics. There is no right or wrong answers as it is a matter of opinion. I will however offer you my thoughts. I would not use the phrase "subscription" as that conjures up images of something completely different and already has a very concrete definition based on other industries. In order to properly answer your question it requires a much deeper response.

Here is the TL;DR version:

The free-2-play model is different than a subscription based model. Pit of War uses the free-2-play model because in my opinion it is the only viable business model that will work in today's hyper competitive game environment especially if you are a niche game or indie and hope to make even a modest living. To understand why that is, read the full version below. I will never require anyone to spend money on the game, however, if you enjoy the game and it entertains you day to day, week to week, month to month and year to year it behooves you to consider giving it the same attention financially you give your other hobbies and entertainment choices on a consistent basis. It costs money each month to run PoW and continue its development and thus it requires income on a monthly basis to do so. If you buy a Starbucks coffee each day for $5 that lasts for 30 minutes, does 30 minutes of PoW offer the same or more enjoyment? How about the $20 you just spent on going to the movies? Does PoW offer the same or more enjoyment as that two hour movie? What about those $8 beers you just bought at the bar? The tickets to Disneyland, so on and so forth. Maybe you don't spend any money on entertainment and thus give PoW the same treatment. That is fine. I'll never tell someone how to spend their money, I'll only bring up things to consider. Pit of War like most free-2-play games survive off of players who have become fans and for whom the game has become a hobby. The game continually requires resources to run and have further development made and as such a $20 payment a year ago has been long used up many times over by today. Games with large player bases are able to keep costs very low (or keep them the same and generate insane revenues: Games like Candy Crush, Clash of Clans and Puzzle & Dragons over in Japan make over $3,000,000+ USD per day (feel free to put you pinky to your mouth and say it like Dr. Evil) which by the way is why little guys are getting priced out of ad networks which work on a highest bidder gets more exposure basis). In a nutshell, if you enjoy playing PoW and do so on a daily basis, consider supporting it as often as you are able to with however much you are able to. If that is a large sum, great. If that is a small sum, great. If you are unable to support the game financially, support it by helping in the forums, getting your friends to play, spreading the word, disabling your ad blocker for PoW, etc. As long as I am able to continue developing and running PoW I will do so, when I am no longer able to do so, I will stop. I will always do my best to make the game as fun for everyone as possible and give everyone the best experience and customer support regardless of how often or how much you have supported the game. I am thankful and appreciative of all my players. Thanks! For a more detailed response read below.

[Nate]

Full version:

One must first understand the business of games and its history. I won't go into great depth, but will instead offer a very brief summary:

In the beginning (of video games that is), a dev team (often one or two programmers) created a game released it and never touched it again. Everyone paid a fixed cost to purchase it and if the dev team made enough money on it they could make another game. This worked for awhile because games were simple.

Fast forward and games became more complex and required the aid of a *gasp* artist! Those artists wanted to get paid for their work (nonsense, I know, who pays someone to draw pretty pictures?), and eventually games required a dedicated designer (and once again, these people wanted to be paid for their efforts, silly I know, why pay a person to do something that is fun?). Teams grew in size and now required a watchful overlord to maintain the schedule and make sure everyone was able to do their job (enter producers, who also wanted to get paid). Add in sound engineers, animators, cinematic specialists, marketing people, biz dev, lawyers (full stop. Lawyers. You know when your industry and company requires lawyers shit just got real).

Then someone got the bright idea to make a persistent world (i.e. MMOs). One where they player would log in and all their details were stored on the server and they could play with other players. Players would also pay a monthly fee and this made the bean counters happy and actually made good business sense. This also solved the piracy problem. Awesome idea right? This came at the cost of increased complexity and resources. Budgets for games exploded and players continued to demand ever increasing quality for the same price. It wasn't sustainable. My first professional game had a budget of around $1,500,000 back in the early 2000s and had a team of about 15-20 people. The last game I worked on at a company as an employee had a budget of over $80,000,000 and had 100s of people working on it. Today's top games rival Hollywood blockbuster movies, often times exceeding them. They fast became risky investments and rightly so. Most games fail and lose money. Piracy started to become wide spread for the non-MMOs (many claim it hurt sales, others argue it helps but that is a discussion for another time), and eventually the bean counters figured out the best way to mitigate risk was to produce sequels of hit games and license hot brands (Madden 3000, the cyborg league with all your favorite teams! Same game as last year, we just changed the names on the back of the jerseys! Profit!). Small and mid size companies found it harder and harder to find publishers to give them money to make games (even big name players in the industry and so many closed shop leaving only the big boys). Some well known smaller devs from the past have had a bit of a renascence with Kickstarter.

Eventually competition go so stiff and enough companies were getting their asses handed back to them in the form of millions upon million of lost dollars (anyone remember Warhammer Online) studio heads put their heads together again and tried to figure out how to make money in this industry.

Look to the Far East. Our Asian brothers and sisters had already figured out a way to make money in this environment, one born from a real need to combat piracy which was absolutely rampant in that region. Competition was so fierce and many games had similar levels of quality (and were often just clones of each other) the difference between a success and a failure often lied in marketing. Getting as many eyeballs on your game as possible was key. Thus the free-2-play model was born. Who wouldn't try out a game that is free? Soon the player base for these free-2-play games swelled into the millions than the 10s of millions and then over 100 million for some of the top games. Eventually that model made its way West and was met with a lot of resistance. Turns out Western gamers weren't as keen on the model. Mostly because companies were implementing it poorly and the games were truly pay-2-win and companies like Zynga (of farmville fame) with the help of Facebook turned millions of non-gamers (Hi Grandma) into gamers but in the process abused them and poisoned the well because of the antics and ethics of people like Marcus Pincus (ex-CEO of Zynga). In that time it was easy to get new players because of viral channels. Games could spam people's facebook walls (I'm sure many of your remember this time) and GULP your game just got 1000s of new players FOR FREE. Facebook saw this and said...Hmmm, we need to not allow them to get players for free and they changed their platform and closed down the viral channels so games needed to pay money to advertise on FB now to acquire new players, which was their right.

Game designers have matured over the years and now the free-2-play model when done right can be very fun for all players involved and has solved a number of problems from the business side of making games. The model also scales well for small/niche games and mainstream games with a little bit of tuning. The bulk of money made on mobile is from in-app purchases and that doesn't surprise me one bit. Games that don't have in-app purchases do not generate enough income to keep the developer afloat usually unless he gets lucky with a break out hit. Today there are more than 1000 new games added each day to the world (and that is an old statistic from a few years ago), most of which are free, by necessity. If your game isn't priced at "free" the number of people who will try it (or even see if for that matter) is a fraction of what it would be if it were free. If you are giving your hard work away for free you need a way to monetize it some other way and that is where the free-to-play or in-app purchases comes into play and companies and indies such as myself are hoping to increase their conversion rates (number of people who become a paying player) and increase their ARPU (average revenue per player) and increase their ARPPU (average revenue per paying player) and increase their "sticky" factor (the percent of players still playing after 1 month) and a whole host of other acronyms meant to help measure the health of a game. Like it or not that is how it works and it has proven to be the best way thus far to compete in today's blood bath known as the game industry and app stores and still most fail. A moment of silence for our fallen brothers and sisters...

There you have it, more than you ever wanted to know about the evolution of the games industry albeit a summary and many details have been left out and many points glossed over. I am going to always do my best to provide the highest quality product that I can because I respect my players and I respect the art and craft of making games. If my players think I'm doing a good job, I hope they will continue to support me and the game on a regular basis, if they don't I hope they'll find someone else's game (preferably another indie) and support him or her. Niche games like PoW are at the mercy of a smaller player base and always will be. In order to really expand PoW to have 10s of thousands or 100s of thousands of players I would have to spend a not so small fortune on advertising and or make another version of the game and strip out a lot of complexity and add a lot of flashing lights and beeps and bops. I'd probably need to add a mobile component as well. :) Aaaaaaannnnnddd, I need to do some programming now. :)

Hope that helps give you a better understanding of the game industry in general and the business model.

Good luck in the Pit!

-Nate-

[Apoca1ypse]

That was a pretty neat read :)

The first time Oedi made the comparison to "a case of beer or trophies to last 2 months" many years ago, it really made me go "hmm, it isnt really that much at all to support a game that I probably spend way too much time on. Time to swing Nate some money".

Its the first time I've spent money on a game like this, and yes, sometimes I think I've spent too much on the game, but for the amount of fun I have had over almost 4 years its been well worth it. PoW's content and Nate's customer service are amazing and feel like it's totally worth the money I have spent.

[Adoede]

Thanks for the response, Nate - and for helping us understand your business dynamics. I was originally under the impression that free-to-play games made it a priority to seek ad-revenue and a large user base. I guess that's an over-generalization.

[Sotc]

Great read Nate! Appreciate you taking the time to share your insights

[Adoede]

Have you tried the refer-a-friend system. Have you told all your friends about the game? Posted it on game forums, posted it on facebook multiple times? People often need to see something three or more times before acting on it. I don't suggest spamming your friends of course, but intermittent postings every so often isn't offensive.
-Nate-

Rather than the facebook thing, I think I'll troll around on the forums over at Duelmasters and try to convince some people to come try Pit of War. I still think people who pay (a lot) to play Duelmasters would be the most interested in a free-to-play online iteration like this game.

That said, I agree with whoever said that HOL glads vs. regular glads is an unnecessary wall for new players in this game.
1) Most will not stick around long enough to grind through to HOL glads
2) After getting their first HOL glads to blood gods, many new managers will discover their builds are flawed and need to be scrapped for new HOL glads - causing yet more to throw up their arms and quit

I'd be for reducing the number of fights needed to retire a glad...say, to something like 300-500. That's short enough that more people might stick around to try to get there in a month or two of playing. 300-500 fights is high enough to keep players from just spamming more teams to find an awesome prospect, yet low enough to not be such a grind for genuinely interested new players.

[Nate]

Good luck with your recruiting efforts!


That said, I agree with whoever said that HOL glads vs. regular glads is an unnecessary wall for new players in this game.

I've mentioned this a few times already, but I'll say it again and hope it sinks in this time. ;) I've tracked non-HoL vs HoL gladiators and it is not the wall some make it out to be, more like a small road bump. The population of non-Hol gladiators vastly outnumbers the HoL gladiators and they aren't matched up very often. A player who really wants to get to the "end" can do so in a fairly short amount of time with the options available to them. PoW is always evolving and one day the requirements may change to retire as they did some time ago. I don't see a change in the near future happening though.

Good luck in the Pit!

-Nate-

[Adoede]

I agree non-HOL glads can be competitive when properly managed, but for me (and others, I suspect), it is more psychological - knowing HOLs have a slight competitive advantage and all (every bit matters in blood gods)

[Nate]

I understand where you are coming from. The Human mind is a fascinating and complicated machine. I hope to one day find mine...it has been so long since I lost it! :p

[Alba Kebab]

I've actually thought about what could help PoW get more mainstream appeal, and that is to make the game more visual - make things more graphic-based instead of text-based, that will involve a lot of $$$.
Though I don't work in the gaming industry, I do know that kind of investment, short of a large charitable donation from a rich patron, is unrealistic for the niche genre that PoW occupies.
and PoW does have a quality standard to maintain for its graphics, so no cheap 2pixel stick figures.

As a hardcore strategy fan, I'm happy with PoW as it is. But most people are visual creatures and respond better to graphics or at least graphics with text.

[Theonlystd]

I will say as a new active player. The whole Hol glad thing is pretty disheartening to think about. Not only do the older players just have more experience more resources but then they also have gladiators who are quite superior to mine. Bah

[Adoede]

Theonlystd

It's actually gotten much easier to get access to HOL glads. Used to be only for glads who retired with +55% win/loss after 1500 fights...Nowadays, it is down to 1000 fights and the percentage needed goes down the more fights you have (as low as 30-something percent win/loss for glads with lots of fights). That means eventually everyone can access the HOL glads.

Think of the time spent earning your first HOL glad as padawan-training and it's not so bad. If you use trophies for the doubling of training points and arena tokens you can retire a glad in about two months or so...

[Nate]

Don't let the others get you down. HoL glads have better stats yes, but they are not so far superior as to be unbalanced or unbeatable. They are also rare, the vast majority of your matchups will not be against them. There are original non-HoL gladiators alive today that do well. Think of it as something to aspire towards, not a roadblock.

Good luck in the Pit!

-Nate-

[Theonlystd]

Theonlystd

It's actually gotten much easier to get access to HOL glads. Used to be only for glads who retired with +55% win/loss after 1500 fights...Nowadays, it is down to 1000 fights and the percentage needed goes down the more fights you have (as low as 30-something percent win/loss for glads with lots of fights). That means eventually everyone can access the HOL glads.

Think of the time spent earning your first HOL glad as padawan-training and it's not so bad. If you use trophies for the doubling of training points and arena tokens you can retire a glad in about two months or so...
I understand what you are saying but this game is already decidedly slow paced, then your telling new players they can look at 2 months of "padawaning" at least even if they pay is a lot to ask.




Don't let the others get you down. HoL glads have better stats yes, but they are not so far superior as to be unbalanced or unbeatable. They are also rare, the vast majority of your matchups will not be against them. There are original non-HoL gladiators alive today that do well. Think of it as something to aspire towards, not a roadblock.

Good luck in the Pit!

-Nate-

Yea I get that but ultimately when you boil it down my non Hol guys are at a disadvantage. Part of its human nature as you referred to earlier in the thread but I really can't help but think no matter what I do the guys I'm using atm don't have the same potential.

[Alba Kebab]

You have no disadvantage if you are not fighting against HoL opponents repeatedly, and for regular gladiators, most of the times you won't be.
If you think your disadvantage is how far you get to advance in the game, then we can tell you right now it takes a lot more than just a HoL gladiator(or not) to reach the top.
This is a strategy game, your strategy is the most important part. You can have the most expensive HoL slave there is and run him with a bad strategy and he'll still suck.

As for being a slow game, it works better so you can have a life. :)