After all these years we have yet another half baked project by Mr. Allen I was a beta tester in Horizons and have heard this song and dance before Now as to where he manages to find such naive investors I would truly be interested in <smiles mischieviously>
Hmm sign me up..I can use a little extra money as well
So I have this idea for a great movie, its about these three gnomes who find a "bracelet of power".......
The game, on your particular hardware configuration, is having issues. That hardly constitutes as broken since it runs perfectly fine on my hardware and all the other people that are currently logged into the servers playing. They fix a crazy amount of stuff each patch, maybe the launch day patch or the most recent one solved your problems... Who knows? Once the trial servers are up give it a try.
Runs perfectly fine on yours, and how many others doesn't it work for? I suppose your implication is because it works on your computer and not his, he is the anomaly and not you? How do you know there is going to be trial servers btw? I am curious, because I can't find that mentioned anywhere... sure you aren't an employee at QoL?
There's a post on the alganon forums by a dev talking about an upcoming trial server. I specifically mentioned my hardware because I have experience with my hardware. I mentioned 'others logged into the server' because I've read on the forums similar experiences from people such as Mhantra who has only crashed once since the game launched. You just seem deadset on your view that there is nothing good about the game. That's fine, it's your opinion and my opinion is my opinion.
Posted by Tork on Alganon official site when someone said the game won't last long..
Glad to have you as a member of our forum community MadDemon64. As these forums are a place for the Alganon community to discuss the game I encourage you to give it a try. We are currently offering the game client at a discounted price of $19.95 for a limited time during our soft launch.
Now is a great time to try the game and experience it for yourself. We have great players and a great community. I doubt you could find a better community in the MMORPG space right now.
I look forward to seeing your future posts.
Yay for discounted price at 19.95!!!
I think I will save my 20 bux for something else ...
The game, on your particular hardware configuration, is having issues. That hardly constitutes as broken since it runs perfectly fine on my hardware and all the other people that are currently logged into the servers playing. They fix a crazy amount of stuff each patch, maybe the launch day patch or the most recent one solved your problems... Who knows? Once the trial servers are up give it a try.
Runs perfectly fine on yours, and how many others doesn't it work for? I suppose your implication is because it works on your computer and not his, he is the anomaly and not you? How do you know there is going to be trial servers btw? I am curious, because I can't find that mentioned anywhere... sure you aren't an employee at QoL?
There's a post on the alganon forums by a dev talking about an upcoming trial server. I specifically mentioned my hardware because I have experience with my hardware. I mentioned 'others logged into the server' because I've read on the forums similar experiences from people such as Mhantra who has only crashed once since the game launched. You just seem deadset on your view that there is nothing good about the game. That's fine, it's your opinion and my opinion is my opinion.
No, but I asked you before tell me what is so good and different from this game than WoW without using the words study, library or community, you never responded. Lets try it again, tell us what is so great about the game.
The game, on your particular hardware configuration, is having issues. That hardly constitutes as broken since it runs perfectly fine on my hardware and all the other people that are currently logged into the servers playing.
That's pretty common for amateur game developers, though. They don't have the resources of a real game studio to test on a broad range of hardware/OS/driver combinations, so you will get a game that works fine for some people and badly or not at all for others.
I think it's fair to say that the game is broken, though, since if you bought a real commercial-quality game from a real developer, you'd be much less likely to see this sort of fluctuation in quality.
I think I will save my 20 bux for something else ...
I think that is a wise decision. And while you get something to snack for those 20 bux, and still want to play a game of this type, there are always free alternatives such as Allods or Runes of Magic. Both of those are probably of higher quality compared to Alganon.
How long it'll last? I doubt their monthly expenses are as high as that of other most other MMORPGs, so they can probably last a while. And that bashing is rather silly. Most people bash it because other people bash the game and they are too lazy or scared to get an own opinion. Or to use a quote: "If I'd have wanted your opinion I'd have told you what it was".
How long it'll last? I doubt their monthly expenses are as high as that of other most other MMORPGs, so they can probably last a while. And that bashing is rather silly. Most people bash it because other people bash the game and they are too lazy or scared to get an own opinion. Or to use a quote: "If I'd have wanted your opinion I'd have told you what it was".
Well think about it logically -- you know that they have 40 people on staff. Assuming they work full time, that's 40 hours per week, though most are probably salaried. Lets assume that the average staff person is making 30K a year (around the average for an American job) . If they work 52 weeks a year they make around 577 a week. Which is around 14.42 an hour. Now, to break even in just paying your employees you have to have 58 customers at 9.99 per employee. So a staff of 40 people requires 2320 people subscribed just to keep them. Any less and people will need to be let go which leads to corner cutting eventually and bad patches, or less people to run the in game events. Now, this is just to keep those people hired, how much is the server costing and how much do they have to pay their initial investors back factors in as well. Assuming both of those a 500 person server probably costs around a couple thousand a month. So, you lets say another 4K for both servers combined and you now need another 401 customers. Electricity, building lease fee, and so on. You are probably looking at around a minimum of 3500-4000 subscribers to keep QoL floating. Sure, preorders and box sales may allow a couple more months but this isn't like Turbine where they started with 12 people in someone's living room just having fun. This is supposedly a real company with 40 employees and a lot of obligations to investors, leasing agents, server maintenance, electric/water bills, and so on... that size company costs a lot a to maintain, and it really has to be considered as a factor in the games longevity.
From what I've heard they are a distributed company and not everyone works out of central office. They have tried to control costs since the beginning. I heard that there is revenue sharing to keep the salaries on the low side.
Your math is wrong BTW. A 30k salary requires 250+ $9.99 subscriptions per month. With over 10,000+ to sustain 40 full-time employees. That's not accounting for all the misc fees like paying for half the social security, payroll overhead, and any sort of benefits. I doubt everyone is full-time, but still the monthly burn rate is probably in the $100k/month range once everything is factored in.
In any event, the math doesn't lie and neither does it add up.
I can't imagine the company will last long with its current business model. They might actually stand a chance if they go F2P, but they had better hurry if they don't want to crash and burn...
Well they might be able to last a good long while with a f2p model. DDO proved that quite simply. If you wnat everything you still have to pay for the game at 15$ a month but you can buy items to help you through the game. I could see qol doing a similar thing. charging for random items everywhere, then doing a 9.99$/month for someone to experience everything. Also i doubt it'd last long as everyone out there knows someone who's played wow and the instant they tell them they're playing this game and that they ONLY had to spend 15$ a month to get all of this shiny stuff when they release it.
From what I've heard they are a distributed company and not everyone works out of central office. They have tried to control costs since the beginning. I heard that there is revenue sharing to keep the salaries on the low side. Your math is wrong BTW. A 30k salary requires 250+ $9.99 subscriptions per month. With over 10,000+ to sustain 40 full-time employees. That's not accounting for all the misc fees like paying for half the social security, payroll overhead, and any sort of benefits. I doubt everyone is full-time, but still the monthly burn rate is probably in the $100k/month range once everything is factored in. In any event, the math doesn't lie and neither does it add up.
You are correct I was accounting for 58 per week. But to redo it, lets assume -- 40 employees, half are full time working in the office for 30K a year (which is on the low side for a game developer) 30K/12 = $2500/mo. = 250 subs. Now at 250 subs per full time employee you are looking at 5000 subs to pay for them. Assuming 20 part timers at 20K each, you need an additional 167 per person or 3,340.
8,340 for the employees, which doesn't assume investors, and bills. So yes, they would need 10,000 subscriptions just to break even. With no expansion. They have around 1,000? Seems like there is a breaking point that will be coming up soon.
I think the stability and performance issues are the biggest current hurdle. Switching to F2P might have the potential for more revenue, but until the game works well it's just going to turn off new customers. It would also gut the current user base which are attracted to the small close community. Also, Allods is a much stronger product for a F2P game so it's not like it would be an easier market. Alganon is in a tough spot. A bad strategy, bad execution and bad implementation are difficult to recover from. It's difficult for me to find something that they've done well. The only real positive is that their staff has keep a uniformly positive attitude.
I think the stability and performance issues are the biggest current hurdle. Switching to F2P might have the potential for more revenue, but until the game works well it's just going to turn off new customers. It would also gut the current user base which are attracted to the small close community. Also, Allods is a much stronger product for a F2P game so it's not like it would be an easier market. Alganon is in a tough spot. A bad strategy, bad execution and bad implementation are difficult to recover from. It's difficult for me to find something that they've done well. The only real positive is that their staff has keep a uniformly positive attitude.
The only way to save Alganon is to completely rebuild Alganon.
That sucks, it was so much fun reading it ...helps passing time at work. Oh well maybe someone else will start another one. Although the youtube review one is getting funny too.
Disturbing Trend: Visits to the Alganon Website per day have gone down 20% in the last 7 days, down 4% from the previous day. What does that mean? Well, currently Alexa has Alganon's Traffic below .002 -- that is fewer than 2K page views a day, and if the chart is correct (www.alexa.com/siteinfo/alganon.com) only around 1000 people show any interest in it at all. Even worse is the statistics for their "social network" and community site -- expected to be the source for people to get together and talk about the game -- you have on average the same 1000 views. (www.alexa.com/siteinfo/myalganon.com) (59.3% of traffic for alganon.com and 57.7% for myalganon.com come from the US.)
Why do any of the numbers matter, because at a running cost of between 80-100K a month, 1000 subscribers can only support about 10,000 of that. It means that their business will be hemorrhaging money and quickly. Also, for all the claims of maturity about the game, take a look at the demographics charts -- you will find that the majority of people interested in the sites are Males between 18-34, while females and people over 34 are underrepresented for their internet population. They also tend to be single people, with no children, and some college.
What does this all add up to? Alganon is populated by players who tend to bounce from game to game, rather than those actually looking for a place to go. Most likely, people will try the game, hit 50, get bored and leave for another game. That is their population.
Many of those that go to Alganon are single page turners, meaning they look, click and link and are gone. I presume to look at the forums or myalganon.com which in turn consists mostly of single page turners as well.
So, how does the outlook for Alganon really look? Grim, very very grim.
Another indication of their outlook is that, another poster has asked that they combine their servers again. Here is the big concern -- take those players who purchased the game in advance, probably close to 200 or so. Then take those people who are playing because it was a cheap free month -- $20 is pretty low price wise. Now, if at half the price and 2/3rds the monthly subscription they could only get around 800 people to purchase the game, when they relaunch the game (essentially they are running an extended paid beta right now -- a "soft launch.") How many people will actually bother with it? Not only will they have a bad rep for running a paid beta, a bad rep for the bugs and other issues, they will also be close to shutting the doors. I can't imagine they have enough money right now to keep going for more than a couple months. I am sure that, their accountants already explained to them the situation. Investors are probably looking for their money as well. The game won't survive another launch. The only chance they have right now, is to scrape the game or go F2P like DDO. The difference is that DDO.com gets about 300K hits a day.
If they go free to play with a cash shop then it might survive but probably not.
I played a human ranger up to level 11 in closed beta at which time I stopped playing because the games wasn't any interesting and rangers are a very easy class to PvE with so it's just that the game is yawning dull to play.
To clarify: I liked my class and it would probably be considered to be OP but the game is just boring.
"WoW has 10+ million users and makes crazy revenue. Their product just borrowed features from a bunch of other games and assembled the first main stream MMO. I'm going to borrow a lot of features from WoW, but add some really cool new ideas that make it even more casual gamer friendly. WoW is getting old and people are tired of it. These players are comfortable with how WoW works so they can easily move to our fresh and exciting content without missing a beat. Technology has advanced so quickly that a small team can do this pretty quickly. We're going to basically out-WoW WoW. With a small team and our low costs, we just need a small fraction of their user base to be wildly successful. Just one percent of their user base would make us crazy money. We can easily get one percent. My last project, Horizons, launched with 40k subscribers and we only need 10k to break even. Horizons wasn't main stream enough and I'm not going to make that mistake again."
Originally posted by parrotpholk Ok I think we need an intervention because we are teetering on obsession now.
Perhaps, but I like data, and I think being able to look at website trends is a good indication of how a game may actually fare. Take for instance, yesterday the game was at a reach of .0013, down 40% from the day before, today it is down another 40% to .0006, this tells us that the people who bought the game can't even be bothered going to the website anymore. Probably a majority have already quit the game.
Comments
Hmm sign me up..I can use a little extra money as well
So I have this idea for a great movie, its about these three gnomes who find a "bracelet of power".......
Dem hibbies! Dey be wrong!
Damn that was stolen too! -blinks-
Runs perfectly fine on yours, and how many others doesn't it work for? I suppose your implication is because it works on your computer and not his, he is the anomaly and not you? How do you know there is going to be trial servers btw? I am curious, because I can't find that mentioned anywhere... sure you aren't an employee at QoL?
There's a post on the alganon forums by a dev talking about an upcoming trial server. I specifically mentioned my hardware because I have experience with my hardware. I mentioned 'others logged into the server' because I've read on the forums similar experiences from people such as Mhantra who has only crashed once since the game launched. You just seem deadset on your view that there is nothing good about the game. That's fine, it's your opinion and my opinion is my opinion.
Posted by Tork on Alganon official site when someone said the game won't last long..
Glad to have you as a member of our forum community MadDemon64. As these forums are a place for the Alganon community to discuss the game I encourage you to give it a try. We are currently offering the game client at a discounted price of $19.95 for a limited time during our soft launch.
Now is a great time to try the game and experience it for yourself. We have great players and a great community. I doubt you could find a better community in the MMORPG space right now.
I look forward to seeing your future posts.
Yay for discounted price at 19.95!!!
I think I will save my 20 bux for something else ...
well, it almost died before it was even released... so idk
Fixed tbqfh
Runs perfectly fine on yours, and how many others doesn't it work for? I suppose your implication is because it works on your computer and not his, he is the anomaly and not you? How do you know there is going to be trial servers btw? I am curious, because I can't find that mentioned anywhere... sure you aren't an employee at QoL?
There's a post on the alganon forums by a dev talking about an upcoming trial server. I specifically mentioned my hardware because I have experience with my hardware. I mentioned 'others logged into the server' because I've read on the forums similar experiences from people such as Mhantra who has only crashed once since the game launched. You just seem deadset on your view that there is nothing good about the game. That's fine, it's your opinion and my opinion is my opinion.
No, but I asked you before tell me what is so good and different from this game than WoW without using the words study, library or community, you never responded. Lets try it again, tell us what is so great about the game.
Darzin -- A Gnome in a Night Elf World
That's pretty common for amateur game developers, though. They don't have the resources of a real game studio to test on a broad range of hardware/OS/driver combinations, so you will get a game that works fine for some people and badly or not at all for others.
I think it's fair to say that the game is broken, though, since if you bought a real commercial-quality game from a real developer, you'd be much less likely to see this sort of fluctuation in quality.
I think that is a wise decision. And while you get something to snack for those 20 bux, and still want to play a game of this type, there are always free alternatives such as Allods or Runes of Magic. Both of those are probably of higher quality compared to Alganon.
How long it'll last? I doubt their monthly expenses are as high as that of other most other MMORPGs, so they can probably last a while. And that bashing is rather silly. Most people bash it because other people bash the game and they are too lazy or scared to get an own opinion. Or to use a quote: "If I'd have wanted your opinion I'd have told you what it was".
Let's play Fallen Earth (blind, 300 episodes)
Let's play Guild Wars 2 (blind, 45 episodes)
Well think about it logically -- you know that they have 40 people on staff. Assuming they work full time, that's 40 hours per week, though most are probably salaried. Lets assume that the average staff person is making 30K a year (around the average for an American job) . If they work 52 weeks a year they make around 577 a week. Which is around 14.42 an hour. Now, to break even in just paying your employees you have to have 58 customers at 9.99 per employee. So a staff of 40 people requires 2320 people subscribed just to keep them. Any less and people will need to be let go which leads to corner cutting eventually and bad patches, or less people to run the in game events. Now, this is just to keep those people hired, how much is the server costing and how much do they have to pay their initial investors back factors in as well. Assuming both of those a 500 person server probably costs around a couple thousand a month. So, you lets say another 4K for both servers combined and you now need another 401 customers. Electricity, building lease fee, and so on. You are probably looking at around a minimum of 3500-4000 subscribers to keep QoL floating. Sure, preorders and box sales may allow a couple more months but this isn't like Turbine where they started with 12 people in someone's living room just having fun. This is supposedly a real company with 40 employees and a lot of obligations to investors, leasing agents, server maintenance, electric/water bills, and so on... that size company costs a lot a to maintain, and it really has to be considered as a factor in the games longevity.
Darzin -- A Gnome in a Night Elf World
From what I've heard they are a distributed company and not everyone works out of central office. They have tried to control costs since the beginning. I heard that there is revenue sharing to keep the salaries on the low side.
Your math is wrong BTW. A 30k salary requires 250+ $9.99 subscriptions per month. With over 10,000+ to sustain 40 full-time employees. That's not accounting for all the misc fees like paying for half the social security, payroll overhead, and any sort of benefits. I doubt everyone is full-time, but still the monthly burn rate is probably in the $100k/month range once everything is factored in.
In any event, the math doesn't lie and neither does it add up.
I can't imagine the company will last long with its current business model.
They might actually stand a chance if they go F2P, but they had better hurry if they don't want to crash and burn...
Well they might be able to last a good long while with a f2p model. DDO proved that quite simply. If you wnat everything you still have to pay for the game at 15$ a month but you can buy items to help you through the game. I could see qol doing a similar thing. charging for random items everywhere, then doing a 9.99$/month for someone to experience everything. Also i doubt it'd last long as everyone out there knows someone who's played wow and the instant they tell them they're playing this game and that they ONLY had to spend 15$ a month to get all of this shiny stuff when they release it.
You are correct I was accounting for 58 per week. But to redo it, lets assume -- 40 employees, half are full time working in the office for 30K a year (which is on the low side for a game developer) 30K/12 = $2500/mo. = 250 subs. Now at 250 subs per full time employee you are looking at 5000 subs to pay for them. Assuming 20 part timers at 20K each, you need an additional 167 per person or 3,340.
8,340 for the employees, which doesn't assume investors, and bills. So yes, they would need 10,000 subscriptions just to break even. With no expansion. They have around 1,000? Seems like there is a breaking point that will be coming up soon.
Darzin -- A Gnome in a Night Elf World
I think the stability and performance issues are the biggest current hurdle. Switching to F2P might have the potential for more revenue, but until the game works well it's just going to turn off new customers. It would also gut the current user base which are attracted to the small close community. Also, Allods is a much stronger product for a F2P game so it's not like it would be an easier market. Alganon is in a tough spot. A bad strategy, bad execution and bad implementation are difficult to recover from. It's difficult for me to find something that they've done well. The only real positive is that their staff has keep a uniformly positive attitude.
The only way to save Alganon is to completely rebuild Alganon.
Darzin -- A Gnome in a Night Elf World
Damn, there was a post about how Alganon wont last long in official site...I think it got deleted...nooo...it was so much fun to read it...ugh
http://www.alganon.com/forums/index.php?/topic/3976-this-game-wont-last-long/
it was moved to the graveyard.
That sucks, it was so much fun reading it ...helps passing time at work. Oh well maybe someone else will start another one. Although the youtube review one is getting funny too.
Disturbing Trend: Visits to the Alganon Website per day have gone down 20% in the last 7 days, down 4% from the previous day. What does that mean? Well, currently Alexa has Alganon's Traffic below .002 -- that is fewer than 2K page views a day, and if the chart is correct (www.alexa.com/siteinfo/alganon.com) only around 1000 people show any interest in it at all. Even worse is the statistics for their "social network" and community site -- expected to be the source for people to get together and talk about the game -- you have on average the same 1000 views. (www.alexa.com/siteinfo/myalganon.com) (59.3% of traffic for alganon.com and 57.7% for myalganon.com come from the US.)
Why do any of the numbers matter, because at a running cost of between 80-100K a month, 1000 subscribers can only support about 10,000 of that. It means that their business will be hemorrhaging money and quickly. Also, for all the claims of maturity about the game, take a look at the demographics charts -- you will find that the majority of people interested in the sites are Males between 18-34, while females and people over 34 are underrepresented for their internet population. They also tend to be single people, with no children, and some college.
What does this all add up to? Alganon is populated by players who tend to bounce from game to game, rather than those actually looking for a place to go. Most likely, people will try the game, hit 50, get bored and leave for another game. That is their population.
Many of those that go to Alganon are single page turners, meaning they look, click and link and are gone. I presume to look at the forums or myalganon.com which in turn consists mostly of single page turners as well.
So, how does the outlook for Alganon really look? Grim, very very grim.
Another indication of their outlook is that, another poster has asked that they combine their servers again. Here is the big concern -- take those players who purchased the game in advance, probably close to 200 or so. Then take those people who are playing because it was a cheap free month -- $20 is pretty low price wise. Now, if at half the price and 2/3rds the monthly subscription they could only get around 800 people to purchase the game, when they relaunch the game (essentially they are running an extended paid beta right now -- a "soft launch.") How many people will actually bother with it? Not only will they have a bad rep for running a paid beta, a bad rep for the bugs and other issues, they will also be close to shutting the doors. I can't imagine they have enough money right now to keep going for more than a couple months. I am sure that, their accountants already explained to them the situation. Investors are probably looking for their money as well. The game won't survive another launch. The only chance they have right now, is to scrape the game or go F2P like DDO. The difference is that DDO.com gets about 300K hits a day.
Darzin -- A Gnome in a Night Elf World
This is great question. It baffles me that there are people willing to invest millions into such a bad idea.
Playing: EvE, Warhammer free unlimited trial, Allods Online
Played: Anarchy Online, WoW, Warhammer, AoC, Ryzom. Aion
Strongly Recommend: Ryzom, EvE, Allods Online
If they go free to play with a cash shop then it might survive but probably not.
I played a human ranger up to level 11 in closed beta at which time I stopped playing because the games wasn't any interesting and rangers are a very easy class to PvE with so it's just that the game is yawning dull to play.
To clarify: I liked my class and it would probably be considered to be OP but the game is just boring.
My guess is that it went like this:
"WoW has 10+ million users and makes crazy revenue. Their product just borrowed features from a bunch of other games and assembled the first main stream MMO. I'm going to borrow a lot of features from WoW, but add some really cool new ideas that make it even more casual gamer friendly. WoW is getting old and people are tired of it. These players are comfortable with how WoW works so they can easily move to our fresh and exciting content without missing a beat. Technology has advanced so quickly that a small team can do this pretty quickly. We're going to basically out-WoW WoW. With a small team and our low costs, we just need a small fraction of their user base to be wildly successful. Just one percent of their user base would make us crazy money. We can easily get one percent. My last project, Horizons, launched with 40k subscribers and we only need 10k to break even. Horizons wasn't main stream enough and I'm not going to make that mistake again."
Perhaps, but I like data, and I think being able to look at website trends is a good indication of how a game may actually fare. Take for instance, yesterday the game was at a reach of .0013, down 40% from the day before, today it is down another 40% to .0006, this tells us that the people who bought the game can't even be bothered going to the website anymore. Probably a majority have already quit the game.
Darzin -- A Gnome in a Night Elf World