I stumbled across this title quite by accident when a post about GM events caught my eye. Since then I have been reading up on this game more, and it really seems like a breath of fresh air. I like the concepts, and the game representative who posts here seems like he (?) has a clear vision for where the game is going and how the dev team plans to get there.
What most attracts me is that back when I played EQ, I started the game 2-3 years in, and yet I never felt pressured to advance. I just did what I felt like doing, joining in with other people content to share in whatever they had going. In most games I have played since then (except for CoH and GW2), I have felt like I needed to keep up with the Jonses.
This game looks like one where I could once again enjoy the freedom to do as I please, without worrying if I have reached level x or finished quest y.
Nice work so far. Looking forward to playing this someday.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
Comments
Infact it's hard to really say if one will be more polished than the other.
One or the other, both or none....Time will tell
They will have PvP servers; we will not.
They are class-based; we are not.
They have entirely different lore than us, entirely different character models than us, entirely different art style than us, and so much more that is entirely different from us.
We'll be actively playing Pantheon alongside our own game (and whatever else we are playing at the time, such as we are currently playing LOTRO and Shroud of the Avatar actively).
I was referring to attracting first generation style players.... Actually they both have fantastic features.
What I'm also trying to say is that people are giving more credit to Pantheon where SoL deserves the same amount of credit and has the same chance of being successful. I should have been more specific.
Visionary Realms is a much more "professional" development effort, meaning a bigger, more experienced (and paid) team, with presumably deeper pockets to fund just about everything.
There is also the celebrity factor, though that might cut both ways in terms of notoriety as well.
As Renfail noted, two very different efforts in many ways.
But hey, I'm pulling for both to succeed.
https://www.pantheonmmo.com/about_us/the_team/
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
There's the celebrity factor that Pantheon has. Which (regardless of past baggage) contributes to visiblity and "hype".
They have a far larger investor pool. Which allows far more of them to work full-time than our team. I am, to-date, the ONLY person on our team who is working full-time on the project. Everyone else splits their time between day jobs and this project.
They've also done several conventions/conferences over the past couple of years, such as Pax, GDC, etc. We have done zero, to-date.
They've also done some Reddit AMAs, and etc. We've done zero, to-date.
They also did a highly publicized Kickstarter, which regardless if it failed, generated a boatload of publicity for the project. We're self-funded, and flying under the radar.
It's natural that they've got more "notice" than we do, due to all of the above.
We're fine with it, to be honest. We're plugging along at our own pace, and we don't have any weight over our heads in terms of players expecting X, Y, and Z based on previous outings (EverQuest, Vanguard), which gives us a lot more breathing room to build our own creation and make our own mark without being beholden to what came before.
We've also yet to do any marketing, other than a few digital ads around some of our builds. Everything we've done so-far has been 100% word-of-mouth and players sharing info with each other, outlets like here, Massively, MMOGames, etc., picking up and sharing our Mondays In MMORPGs blog posts, and the like.
We'll get around to conferences eventually, once we're ready.
Often I wonder how effective marketing is to get "the word out". How several million got the word and are logged in on opening day. I Often wonder how did they know about this game?
I know zero about marketing,
But I could guess "the word out" has never been more complicated because of diversities of populous viewing habits.
Take me for instance.
Before I got married last year, I only had internet and Hulu and minor word of mouth for anything. Now that I'm married, I dropped Hulu and was forced to get full cable, but watch very little and with hundreds of channels I only watch a few and their THE OFF BEAT ONES... Never ever CBS,NBC and ABC like people did in the 70 and 80's.
My video game exposure is limited by Steam, mmorrpg.com and what I see being reviewed on the right side of YouTube as I'm watching a totally diffract game's review. Sites like IGN and Game Spot tend to be all over the place and only spin my head in crap I'm not interested in, so that's not a good source for me.
My point !!!
Everyone has their own source and 180 degree different than me or the next guy. As you can see from my example, I keep myself limited.
I would guess most keep themselves limited but different.
It must be a scary feeling to dump so much cash into advertising (high cost vs. return) as some may see it but millions don't because of diversity in sources viewed.
However some go ALL OUT like Pearl Abyss and Black Desert Online that is all about marketing, then turn around and make ten fold on marketing for $$$ within their own game !!!
Where the game it self has hundreds of things to do and everyone of them being shallow, making it a mediocre game that very few stay after they realize they were taken advantage of.
But hay, the marketing worked !
The SOTA team has stated recently they believe the reason millions of people aren't buying the sure fire "Richard Garriott" created UO game is due to ineffective marketing so they are directing more effort into it.
The Crowfall team got $7M or so in outside investment recently they claim is largely for marketing, not game development.
As noted above, I'm aware of this title since I hang out here and follow all things MMORPG, but I can't tell you how often conversations occur here about some block buster (usually single player) game thats been out for years.....yet I've never heard of it due to my limited or more focused gaming news sources.
So perhaps the SotA team is correct, maybe many have no idea their game exists, (probably a positive in their case if true) but it is a clear and present danger for almost all indie game efforts outside of perhaps Star Citizen.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
The last decade of my career (outside of game development, which I'm only 4.5 years into), has been spent entirely in digital marketing.
The decade prior to that was spent in physical marketing.
In the 2000s, I had my own construction company. As a small business owner, I was hands-on with 100% of the marketing. I had two employees. Marketing techniques back in those days included things like printing out 1000 business cards, and then driving around in-development subdivisions and carpet shops and the like, handing out business cards, shaking hands, making connections, and then following up to close deals. Also lots of conference attendances. I was reasonably successful, keeping a couple of employees going + making around 80k a year for myself.
In the 2010s, my wife and I managed our travel brand, Marginal Boundaries. Around 80% digital marketing, 20% physical marketing. We've spoken at 18 conferences since 2014 on social media marketing and brand building. Not only did we work on our own projects, we also have worked on and managed high-end campaigns for regional tourism boards, such as for Costa Brava, Spain (a 3-month boots-on-the-ground project with a follow-up 15 month marketing campaign), and then last year for Failte Ireland (national tourism board for the Republic of Ireland) with a 1-month boots-on-the-ground project with an ongoing marketing campaign. We just pushed the latest video out today, actually (out on Facebok and YouTube), with some drone footage from the 2nd half of our Ireland trip, which was a 15-day road trip up the Wild Atlantic Way.
From August of 2016 until December of 2017, I was the social media strategist and manager for The Adventure Collection, a collective of nine adventure-travel companies. Spin-off projects included consulting Backroads Travel for two months in early 2017 on a Working With Influencers white paper document. We completed our 2017 contract with the AC with a 325% increase in website referrals from social channels, 46% increase in audience retention, 21% increase in pageviews, 32% increase in pages/session, and 27% increase in email referrals.
Looking at Crowfall in particular, seven million dollars for a marketing budget is a ridiculous amount of money. Having worked at the national level with tourism boards around the world (the above two are only our highest profile projects), I can tell you firsthand that you don't need to spend that kind of money to see out-of-this-world success with your marketing campaign. You can spend a FRACTION of that amount and achieve blowout results.
A good example is the iambassador win last year at the World Travel Awards, where our friends from Costa Brava took home the Europe's Leading Marketing Campaign for a campaign revolving around a 7-day press trip with a handful of food/travel bloggers (including our close friend Emiliano, an amazing videographer).
They were up against easyJet, Eurostar, and Royal Caribbean, among others...companies that were spending literally MILLIONS of Euros per year on their marketing campaigns, only to be beat out by a tiny little blogger team led by two small tourism boards from Costa Brava (Spain) and Emilia Romagna (Italy).
While my experience in digital marketing is not 100% related to gaming...I've been working in marketing since 2001, when I first started my push into self-employement/brand building/business ownership. There are a vast array of truths in marketing...and none of them revolve around spending huge amounts of money.
Now that Portlarium have moved their marketing in-house, I have no doubt they will start seeing the success they were looking for in the first place.
Money helps, no doubt. You can't go to a conference without a bankroll. Adverts cost money, regardless if they are print or digital.
But the power of word-of-mouth and personal recommendations trumps advertising spend EVERY DAY OF THE WEEK, and that's where you get into influencer marketing (which Pantheon is doing to some small degree with some high-profile streamers; Zenimax is probably the leader in this, IMO, in how they work with more than JUST high-profile streamers. They regularly invite even small content creators to their events and use them to help leverage their ongoing dominance of the space).
We are still in the building phase. While we will never say no to pre-orders and revenue, we aren't in our marketing phase yet. While we're more than happy to do some blog posts around our Release Builds and run a few digital advertising campaigns (we're currently holding steady with a 2x - 3x return on our CAC; in other words, we're doubling and tripling our advertising spendatures), we're not ready to "turn on" our campaigns or scale things up.
Rest assured that whenever we get to that point, you'll start to hear about us in a variety of places, and from more people than just at a couple of niche websites around the 'web who share our blog posts and our videos.
Added after edit:
The MAJOR issue with many indie projects is they have zero business people on their team, and zero marketing background/knowledge. The one thing we have going for us, more than anything else, is that I've managed several successful businesses and worked almost exclusively in marketing for 17 years.
I'm currently working on a "Diary of an Indie Game Dev" video series where I'm talking about a lot of the business side issues, including marketing and project management, which are issues where many indie teams fail, especially the couch developer types who had a great idea, went to Kickstarter, raised a few hundred k or a couple of million, and then four years later are bankrupt and failing to launch.
There's sooooo much on the business/project management/marketing side that is either forgotten in favor of building the game, or just ignored in favor of flashy graphics and "ideas". Unfortunately, without good management and marketing, you are doomed to failure.
거북이는 목을 내밀 때 안 움직입니다
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
It's no different in photography. My wife and I are on the lower end of camera gear, though we did splurge last year on the drone + all the fixin's.
Meanwhile, we have hobby blogger friends of ours who are more than happy to drop 10k on camera lenses. They aren't doing it professionally; they just have a passion for photography.
Actually, this month is the launch of our monthly sessions. Our main builds come out quarterly (every 3 months), but we are spinning the servers up for a limited-window Roleplay Session once a month from here on out, using whatever was the most recent build.
Mostly for community engagement/roleplay, but it's also a window for players to log in and test if they missed out on the main build launches.
The main difference is that the build launches are 48-72 hours, and our roleplay sessions are only 3-4 hours on a Saturday afternoon. Next one is July 28th. https://sagaoflucimia.com/monthly-roleplay-sessions
It's burned us a bit, but that goes with the territory.
We've shared videos that have been ridiculed because they showed off all of our bugs and glitches and raw progress. But we're OK with it because for us it's a badge of honor to show how a little team with NO previous experience and NO budget has been able to make this happen despite the odds, and despite everyone telling us it was impossible.
There's also the competition to think about, but we're of a mind that there's nothing wrong with more than one company working on a similar idea/theme; it only means at the end of the day that the idea gets fleshed out in the best ways possible by multiple teams over multiple iterations, eventually leading to something that benefits everyone.
At the end of the day, BECAUSE we are gamers first, and not game publishers working on Game #15 in their collection of titles worked on to keep investors happy, that transparency is what has won most of our fans over.
For better or worse, we share the things no one else will, because we're proud to show off that progress, warts, bumps, scrapes, bad days, and all.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Have you considered this? I can't see any way round it, you either go quite and players will demand to know what is going on; or you keep putting them out and to players they just become a reminder the game is not out yet.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Instead, they are hour-long episodes where I'm talking shop, going into the details of bootstrapping (and how we did things), business management, business formation, taxes, finances, project management, people management, art direction, writing, and etc.
No gameplay footage whatsoever; it's geared towards those who are interested on learning how we did things and who maybe can take that and apply it towards their own project, rather than thinking the ONLY way to do things is with Kickstarter or investors.
It's boring, "business" vlogs. The series is currently in development, and I'll be launching it either later in July, or in August.
We currently play Tues and Fri nights at around 9 p.m. central, so if any of you want to pick up the free trial and give it a go, or have a copy collecting dust, you should totally come join us.
I've actually met MORE people who haven't played SOTA because of a review written somewhere, than people who aren't playing because they didn't like the game.
Yeah, it's got issues. What game doesn't?
At the end of the day, I'm having fun, and that's what matters to me.
I rarely, if ever, put stock in what someone else says about a game. If it looks/sounds fun to me, I'll try it out.