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Erevorn

Letter to the Devs / Suggestion for the future

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Dear Developers,

 

As we all know Wurm (both Unlimited and Online, but Online is better) is little known to the major playerbase. I know plenty of people that would gladly play a game of Wurm's likes but just can't ever find one. I don't know if something like this has been suggested before but I will anyway:

 

start advertising

 

How many times did you people bump upon World of Tanks' ad when it was in earlier development? It started out with a rather low playerbase too and look at it now. Same happened to a lot of games and as much as I do realise that newcomers might make some problems every now and then like griefing, building shacks all over the land and leaving to never return again remember that the more people get into the game the more people keep the development up. The more people keep the development up the nicer stuff we can have etc etc.

 

Create some ads, speak to the peoples' dream of freedom, tell them the world is theirs. They will come.

PS: Remember to state that it's indie or they'll go off about poor graphics (whatever).

 

Sincerely,

Like over a half of Wurm's community

 

I'll leave this thread open for discussion as I believe this is worth looking into.

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Here I was just writing wurm on potatoes and throwing them at cars

 

Advertising is in the plans, please leave this poor horse alone

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IT'S ALMOST LIKE

THERE'S

PEOPLE FOR THIS

IN SOME KIND OF

ALREADY DETERMINED PLAN??

 

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I didn't mean to make it sound sarcastic or offensive in any way and if I did I apologise. One thing is I'm a bit bored and just wanted to help out and maybe give some ideas that might come in handy. It's just that I haven't yet seen any advertisements about Wurm anywhere and we all know how great and original the game is. We also need sla... more workers.

 

If I can help out in any way I believe it would be a nice idea to pass it on to an advertising company. They know their stuff and sometimes I'm pretty sure you can find good deals. The investment has a good chance of paying off if new players are greeted well enough and with all the communities, villages and settling opportunities it's not a distant dream.

 

Another idea - I'm gonna get lynched for this - is appointing someone to make posts and thread (not the annoying kind) about Wurm on sites like reddit, 9gag, some chans. Many of us have tried but if the actual devs or someone from the staff was to go in for a chat in these the success rate would go higher.

 

As to ad companies beefjack seems to be indie-oriented, I haven't found any info on their success rate but at the first sight they look at least a tad professional.

 

Please don't hate me for this thread, I just wanna help ;_;

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Just quickly, out of curiosity.

 

What would you estimate advertising costs to be?

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I learnt at the start a company course that around 20% of the revenue needs to go to ads, specially in the early days/when a company/product is still unknown.

My teacher flew in from Monaco, so I guss he had a clue what he talked about.

Edited by Cecci
revenue

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47 minutes ago, Sunstrike said:

Just quickly, out of curiosity.

 

What would you estimate advertising costs to be?

 

As it's not a big business I would suggest spending 5-10% of annual revenues. So if you're earning 200.000 euro a year 10-20 thousand of it should be spent on advertising and marketing. I have no idea how much revenue the devs generate annually but 5-10% should be enough. 20% as Cecci said could be a bit risky but in the early stage it may be worth the risk. It would be wise to reach out to different ad companies and send out some inquiries. After they'd valuate their services the staff could pick the best one. And keep in mind that cheap doesn't mean best, it's often better to pay a bit extra and get a lot better service.

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well way you do till now is not good...  

 

i wana see ads on facebook, youtube, twitter, everywhere...

 

 

it cost but belive me   everything will make profit.

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Think of advertising as upgrades in any idle game.

 

You click five times and have 5 dollars, for 5 dollars you buy an upgrade that generates 0.1 dollar a second and you click seven more times, for that you buy an upgrade that generates 0.2 dollar a second and so on and so forth. It's an investment that nearly always is returned if well done.

 

That said, there is an option to stand by idly (as the forementioned games' genre states) and wait for the revenue to generate, for which you buy more upgrades. It's an almost costless way of profitting. What I mean by this is - faithful fans would be happy to throw a post or two here and there about their favourite game. I'm sure of that. You just need to give them a pat on the shoulder and a "go-ahead".

Edited by Erevorn

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Now that I check public info, last years (broken year ended in june -16) revenue profit ebit for Codeclub AB was 3377k swedish crowns.

Thanks to WU it went from 816k the year before.

So there is way more room now to actually spend on ads.

So, all in all the year before 20% would have been good, now that would be overspending on this years revenue profit ebit.

Edited by Cecci
and well I suppose that is non of our bisnis even if public

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12 minutes ago, Cecci said:

Now that I check public info, last years (broken year ended in june -16) revenue for Codeclub AB was 3377k swedish crowns.

Thanks to WU it went from 816k the year before.

So there is way more room now to actually spend on ads.

So, all in all the year before 20% would have been good, now that would be overspending on this years revenue.

And how much profit?

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Do you mean WU lowered revenue to 816k or raised it by 816k?

 

Nevertheless, ~10% annual revenue would be optimal in this case to spend on ads. I suggest a two or three month long investmet. It should raise the player base by at least 50% considering there's 400 of us online on a daily basis.

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I mean the gain before tax. it went from 800k to over 3 millions in a year. Swedish crowns.

Well done Rolf.

 

This also means that the worth of the company and game now is much higher.

Considering the huge potential who knows what it can be worth in the future.

 

Edited the other post to profit instead of revenue, not a native english, sorry.

 

Revenue was over 8 millions swedish. 1 euro is around 10 swedish crowns.

Edited by Cecci

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1 hour ago, Erevorn said:

Nevertheless, ~10% annual revenue would be optimal in this case to spend on ads. I suggest a two or three month long investmet. It should raise the player base by at least 50% considering there's 400 of us online on a daily basis.

 

10% of annual revenue can buy us a lot of throwing potatoes, Retro needs some lessons on coordination and aiming though, so I think if we spend 30% of that on lessons for him, we'll manage to hit more people. Hitting 200 people should be doable in 3 months. Maybe we should actually switch up our tactics and throw potatoes out of a plane flying over a large crowd, like a stadium - then we wouldn't need the money for throwing lessons. Maybe catapults...

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As someone who has dealt in advertising in the past, it's not so clear cut.

 

1 hour ago, Erevorn said:

Do you mean WU lowered revenue to 816k or raised it by 816k?

 

Nevertheless, ~10% annual revenue would be optimal in this case to spend on ads. I suggest a two or three month long investmet. It should raise the player base by at least 50% considering there's 400 of us online on a daily basis.

That is.... On what basis?

 

lets create a budget of say 15k euros, that's huge right?

Now your average advertising sprint is 3-7 days, usually closer to the smaller side, and roughly costs about $500 a day. This means that the total of 15 thousand euros would net us just over 30 days of advertising, on one site.

 

So this leads to needing to bring back 15k euros at 8e per person who joins the game, tries it out, and plays.

 

In essence, 2000 people need to visit this site (because that's only advertising on one site) during this period, click an advertising link (how often do you?) try out a game that has a steep learning curve, and then decide to purchase premium.

 

It doesn't work like that, AAA games do blanket advertising because their focus is recognition, it's about being a known game, which is what we all want wurm to be, but expecting to pull random numbers out of the air based on no facts in a game that has an incredibly steep learning curve, and does actually see quite a lot of turnover is a bit far.

 

 

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some weren't around apparently when we had those "invasions" in wurm :P I mean new player invasions from certain sites...>.>

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Keep in mind also that CodeClub has both WO and WU.

The massive influx of income for the company comes from WU not WO.

Edited by Cecci

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Advertising is in the works, don't expect to see us plastered on billboards or on the side of a bus, but there are ongoing plans, but a few things need to be addressed first, this is why our next major focus will be on the user interface and the tutorial.

 

Until then our focus will be on improving relations with media companies, and some light advertising on sites to build up recognition.

 

This has been asked many times and there's only so often we can give the same answer. If you'd like to see Wurm get new people, talk to your friends or others you play games with, starting wurm alone can be extremely difficult and having someone you know helping makes it all the more enjoyable.

 

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Advertising is in the works.    The game has only been around for what 10 years, I think by works they mean *we will advertise this game when we have more players who have quit then playing*    I think this is thier 'oh sh.t' button.

 

but on the plus side... thanks for the cooking update

Edited by Deth

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Just

1 hour ago, Miretta said:

some weren't around apparently when we had those "invasions" in wurm :P I mean new player invasions from certain sites...>.>

 

A few people stayed after those invasions.. maybe we need another one.

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Just have Rolf publically says that he endorses Trump, let the media do the rest.

 

 

 

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Rehashing the tutorial again seems bonkers to me. The first three tutorials didn't work out. Do you guys think number four will be the charm? The best tutorials are ones that actually are a part of the game, rather than a precursor that has absolutely no value beyond text boxes, and going through the motions for the sake of learning, "Please click here to open this."

 

It might be best to instead focus your efforts on improving Wurm's in-game Wurmpedia and it's usability on the fly. Maybe fix it so the in-game Wurmpedia can actually read the templates, macros, see the images, use the categories and tables, etc...

 

Barring that; an actual in-game browser that opens Wurmpedia instead of that hideously ugly brown window that shows Tandy-esque text. Hell, you could even throw in some silly, addictive Wurm themed mini-games on that browser for people who're grinding on full-screen mode. (Not everybody has two monitors, or plays in windowed mode.)

 

Follow that up with a purge of old and outdated information, and a flood of new information and guides... you'd get a lot more bang for your buck than another tutorial that'll just be replaced a year from now. Most of Wurm's main userbase consists of individuals with at least a Grade School Education, so leverage the literacy of your playerbase. Continue to make it easier for them to find the guides they need, when they need it, rather than dumping it all at the very beginning with help text boxes or busy work that'll just be quickly ignored and turned off so players can get to the main game faster.

 

Unless you're creating a Tutorial where players actually get to play, build, grind, and craft things in a safe, temporary, Golden Valley like instance for a pre-set amount of time (Not Permanent like GV...), similar to how Horizons: Empire of Istaria's tutorial worked. Maybe even automatically throwing every new player into a "Newbie" alliance when they join a new server, where established players who want to create a tutorial village can add their villages to give new players different places to spawn beyond the presets.

 

If you manage to pull that off... Then yeah, have at it.

 

Edited by Dairuka
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