I'm no scientist, but one DLC seems like a rather small sample to base your assumptions on. You learn from your failures on the other hand. What did UWE learn and what does the future of NS2 development look like? Release an entire map pack and not just one map at a time in order to get attention from news sites? Or will we just see the community devs do small iterations that doesn't get noticed by anyone outside the community?
I can't say what drives the community devs and what they are working on, but in my thinking it would be optimal if they could improve the boring basics of the game so to speak (especially performance) while the maps currently in development are finished and perfected to be released all at the same time in the future for maximum publicity. Perhaps coinciding with another skin pack or something like that and an even split of some of the income to the mappers and key community developers. It should be a pure content update by the way; bugs and balance issues will affect individual maps, not the entire game.
From a community perspective I'd say it was a succes. From a bussiness perspective, well, not so much I suppose. The idea of cosmetic DLC to generate income is a good one, but like others have mentioned, the current NS2 playerbase just isn't large enough to make it profitable.
I was never a big fan of making NS2 f2p, but at this point one might as well go for the full measure.
Financially it was a failure, I wouldn't argue against that statement... but I think the video would have more value if you analysed how it failed and suggested ways on how we can have more successful launches in the future.
Regardless of NS2 being old news, the shift to community development is a wicked move by uwe, perhaps if you had spun the dlc news as the start of that it would of a lot more exposure. who knows?!
I would also assume the decrease in concurrent players has more to do with the start of summer/spring and less to do with peoples feelings on the dlc and map.
Everyone complains about the new maps right after they are released. Nobody likes getting lost on the map or losing to a strategy that they haven't seen before, and they will lose lifeforms because of not knowing the map layout yet.
the thing is, the price asked for the skins was objectively too much compared to microtransactions in other games. i feel like most of the people who purchased them in large part did it because they wanted an excuse to just give uwe more money, like a donation. i'm not sure what they were expecting to happen really. there's no way based on the active player base and the cost for one dlc unit that they could have made anywhere near $50k. were they hoping the new map or something would draw a bunch of people to the game and those new people would instantly buy the dlc? or that a bunch of inactive players would come back because of the new map and subsequently go ahead and buy the dlc? uwe makes some weird business decisions.
AsranielJoin Date: 2002-06-03Member: 724Members, Playtest Lead, Forum Moderators, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Shadow, Subnautica Playtester, Retired Community Developer
Now that the CDT took over NS2, remember that everybody in those forums is also a little bit part of the CDT. The CDT lacks PR people, officially or not, everybody can do his part. I also agree that the "failure" of kodiak is because of the lack of media response to it. Instead of arguing if there was enough communication on the part of UWE or not (i'm certain UWE did all they could and it was probably just bad luck/timing) we as a community can try to push further news about NS2 to news sites. That includes the Kodiak DLC, remember that part of the DLC money still goes to loki which is part of the CDT.
So go out, spread the news!
Oh, financial matters a great deal when running a company and needing to keep everyone employed. Unfortunately, when undertaking a large task that involves company time and money, such as the Kodiak update, it really has to be with the intention to make it profitable. A nice side effect is to generate good will among the community, etc., but at the end of the day we can't run a company on good will. An increase in sales and an increase in playerbase are the measures for success of any product we put out.
What about the fact that you now have a DLC system in place, which absorbed the set-up costs for future DLC's? Generally, when you set something up, you lose money due to the additional first time costs. Sometimes, you have to take a loss to enable profitability in the future. That was mainly my point.
It is an odd assumption to make that Hugh would not send out an email regarding the Kodiak update to the press. You really think he put all that effort into the trailer, into all the news writeups and overseeing the promotional assets, etc., and yet somehow neglected to send out emails to the press? Of course he blasted the Kodiak release out to whoever would listen. Unfortunately, we are no longer "sexy" news. NS2 has been out for over a year and a half, it doesn't have a huge gaming population, and there are a constant stream of new games coming out every day, so unfortunately the press are not going to be falling all over themselves to report on a DLC and map update.
Anyway, not singling you out Soul_Rider, just using your post as example of a lot of similar posts in this thread that seem to indicate that we didn't bother to do PR for the update or something.
I find it odd that RPS at the very least is not interested in an official community kodiak release, when 2 days before release, they picked up on the release of GorgeCraft, and later, picked up on the Community Dev update, without any contact from anyone. You can see why it is logical to believe no information was sent out. They seem to be desperate to pick up news about NS2 from the community.
I don't take it personally, but I am also at a loss to understand how this update was not covered.
Given the current size of the playerbase, Im amazed you managed to sell the number of DLC units you did.
Shouldnt have expected kodiak to grow the playerbase (frankly I saw it as a fanservice update in any case).
However if we CAN grow the playerbase (there are discussion on this here there and everywhere with many feasible ideas being thrown around), that will result in more DLC sales down the line.
Implementing features to keep the players we attract should be the utmost priority if you really want to make something (profit) of this new content pipeline.
*COUGH*Tutorials, gather / matchmaking system, performance (unlikely but it has to be said).*COUGH*
I find it odd that RPS at the very least is not interested in an official community kodiak release, when 2 days before release, they picked up on the release of GorgeCraft, and later, picked up on the Community Dev update, without any contact from anyone. You can see why it is logical to believe no information was sent out. They seem to be desperate to pick up news about NS2 from the community.
I don't take it personally, but I am also at a loss to understand how this update was not covered.
It happens. It can be really hard to predict what the news sites will and won't respond to. They're certainly not desperate for NS2 news, it's just that those stories happened to fill a particular gap on that particular day, or happened to be eye-catching in a particular way that is no longer relevant when it's time to promote the next item.
Stop self-deprecating and making excuses "I can't speak properly", "Running out of time" and for the love of God NEVER admit "I made this 5 mins before".
Prepare yourself, compose yourself, and sell it as if you really know your stuff. It looks really school boyish to be making excuses. Mistakes happen when you speak under pressure and it's common to run over time. These are forgiveable so just carry on with your presentation. I remember in Telford, Bonker's had a contact in the multiplay stage managing team who said that they don't mind if you run over time as long as they're in the bar by midnight, but the games were still cut down to bo3 instead of the intended bo5. For the most part, people are willing to extend their time for these things, so don't worry unless you either run overtime by 50% or someone explicitly asks you to stop.
If you need to make graphs and figures to go into a presentation don't do it 5 minutes before, and definitely don't admit it. It's makes you look completely unprofessional and somewhat incompetent.
These are mistakes you've made multiple times.
Otherwise it was a pretty good 8 minute video presentation wise.
*COUGH*Tutorials, gather / matchmaking system, performance (unlikely but it has to be said).*COUGH*
Frankly, I think it's too late for that in NS2; they should rather learn from this and keep it in mind when building NS3. Of course that's waaay down the line.
In terms of making money no i guess not. It was a rather large failure in that respect considering it fell so short of their goal.
In terms of game development I would say its a massive success. The community dev team I think is the best direction the game has gone in a while and the result of kodiak patch led towards that decision. It is a step in the right direction in order for NS2 to maintain its current playercount. The direction the game had taken over the last few patches before kodiak was absolutely terrible.
The biggest issue with the Kodiak update is the failure to bring in more players before the update was released. The basics of making money from dlc's is more players = more money.
When the players brought up this idea(in a similar fashion) in cologne it was mentioned that the key for this to succeed was to get a burst of new players first so it would pay off. Since the player issue has not been fixed yet there are simply not enough customers to make dlc worth it.
Another thing to mention is a half-worked test is not going to give you good numbers, you have to commit to the change otherwise it simply won't be worth it. I think most people that have spent few hours studying business in gaming - spotted right away this patch would not give positive revenue. You don't really have to know business either to see it
Before moving into dlc you have to increase your playerbase. There are tons of way to do it but it will take some work and commitment to do right. Instead of looking at these numbers as instant failure you should look at the income compared to your small playerbase. You will notice in that aspect it was a pretty decent income.
I still believe free to play would be the best way to go for ns2, even more so now with community run game. If the basic tools are create for people to set skins/maps/stuff on sale with increased player numbers it will pay off pretty fast. Free to play also makes it much easier for players to test the game (they can always lure their friends with them) and players will be more forgiving for the issues of performance and higher skill ceiling. Kodiak already was a good first step to f2p model.
Another thing to do is to is try bringing part of the players back that have stopped playing the game. Send them a message and try to give them some incentive. If performance is improved and you let them know that one of the key aspect why they didn't play the game is improved. If given a good enough bait there is a high chance at least 1/10 of them would give the game a try again. Considering ns2 sales that would be plenty of players to start with.
None of these things can happen over night, it would take some work to do so I can see why they would want to do tests first. But the key thing to remember what I mentioned to before, think of the Kodiak revenue in light of your very small playerbase.
personally, i felt a bit alienated learning that loki as a single person would get 50% of the cut.
while i'm aware that it's a LOT of work to create a quality map and it adds a fresh theme to the pool of maps, it never seemed very critical for the game; at least in contrast to earlier community contributions like summit, spectator mode, bug fixes, performance optimisations and so on. were these people paid nearly as much (after scaling it to the amount of work they had)?
don't get me wrong, it sounds like a great idea to reward people for successfull contributions as it will motivate others to come up with quality work as well. it just feels a bit intransparent and possibly unfair at the moment.
2100 units sold to a community with ~1000 daily active players - that sounds like a pretty reasonable win, considering. Agree with a previous post that a $50,000 target was a bit out of reach with the low player base.
The low player base seems to be the main issue. Let's face it, NS2 is a deep game, extremely rewarding and feature-rich, but the learning curve is not shallow. What games have the highest player base? The simple ones like CS:GO which you can get into quickly.
Perhaps the solution is to make a simpler version of the game (Combat standalone, anyone?) that can serve as a gateway for players who play that, enjoy it, and then want to play the advanced (current) version of NS2.
Wow Hugh, unlucky video to post on a channel with primarily NS2 fans. XD Ouch. Even with the intended audience it's hard to watch that video and not want to protest some of the content and conclusions. At least you come across as an eloquent and passionate speaker, so main goal achieved i guess?
Kodiak has instilled enough confidence for another patch, so that's a success at least! The content was solid. I would've loved to see the community leveraged for promotion of Kodiak, as to share some responsibility with that as well. Might have helped manage expectations a bit.
The low player base seems to be the main issue. Let's face it, NS2 is a deep game, extremely rewarding and feature-rich, but the learning curve is not shallow. What games have the highest player base? The simple ones like CS:GO which you can get into quickly.
And the ones that are hard to get into.. like MOBAs?
I don't buy that shit.
Granted, LoL and Dota2 etc have a huge amount of $$$ and marketing behind them.
It's Super Effective!Join Date: 2012-08-28Member: 156625Members, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow
Well, looking at a broader picture. The game's that we all perceive as constant commercial successes are typically developed by companies who probably have multiple games already released and/or probably employ people who are just as experienced and know how things go. I also find that these companies don't venture too far out of their comfort zone of a successful IP.
Blizzard started with making side scrolling and adventure adventure games for a long time, then took a leap into RTS for a good while before moving onto their first Action RPG.
Riot as far as I know employed people who made MOBA style WC3 Mods, and pretty much hasn't done anything past LoL, and I don't expect it to for a while.
Turtle Rock Studios have stayed within FPS's since CS:CZ are now working on Evolve which resembles their past work on L4D. While it seems promising, it could be a similar jump as UWE had with NS1 to NS2.
None of these companies can truly be compared to UWE in terms of finances and manpower, but their humble beginnings seem the same to me. Smaller companies have had just as much success if not more.
Dean Hall made Day Z the mod for Arma 2, and now is having his share of issues making his own stand alone, I'm sure it will have it's fan base just like NS1 did and who knows if it'll have more issues when/if it gets done.
While we all know that UWE's does also have Zen of Soduku under their belt. NS2 is a significantly larger venture, and with it there should be growing pains as both the company and it's people get better at understanding what sells and what's worth the time. Every game, not just NS2, should be seen as a stepping stone, not every game company can be a one hit wonder.
2100 units sold to a community with ~1000 daily active players - that sounds like a pretty reasonable win, considering.
1000 concurrent players. That's gonna be something like 10,000 unique players daily.
well, not exactly. the 1000 is a rather old number to begin with. the average for the past 4 months is around 550, with the peak for the previous 25 days being 900. 800 for the last week. a problem with the peak stats is that because of the constant flow of humble bundle $1 or steam $2.50 sales, they're higher than they should be those days.
NS2 was a great test for them, they learned from mistakes they made and learned from what they did right. They also had fun doing it (I assume) and that was also important.
This experience and knowledge will help them make even better games in the futures and I am looking forward to their future games.
I wouldn't consider Kodiak a failure, and I wouldn't consider UWE does either. It did however, fail to hit it's financial goals. Personally, given the size of the current playerbase, the pricing and the dlc content I'd argue that particular target was always going to be unobtainable but nevertheless, continuing to investing your time into a product that is no longer turning a profit is not good business sense.
Naturally I wish they'd got a little more polish on the game, resolving a couple of persistent bugs etc. but we've seen how wobbly the game can be when things get changed from previous patches and subsequent hotfixes which all has a cost both financially, and more importantly at this point, time.
UWE has a couple of released games, but at this point, the sales "may" not even be covering costs to keep the lights on and the snacks on the table, so the employees need to be spending their time working towards earning the next paycheck for the company or they're just eating into the savings account. NS2's peak has come and gone and the income stream will only continue to diminish so at some point they have to create a new revenue stream. *all financial predictions are purely speculation
On the other hand, Kodiak succeeded in rewarding a community member who spent a lot of time and effort on the map, but hasn't had the same exposure or opportunities as some of the household names. They all put in a ton of time creating content around NS2 and are deserving of some form of reward. I feel there's a number of other people who equally deserve something back for their work but that's just how it is, particularly for those who work on the background stuff so don't get the same screen time as others. But you do it for the passion of the game and your creations. I only hope that's reward enough
We also got a framework for displaying customisations, a new map and most importantly the Community Development Team.
Opening NS2 up to select members of the community and having a community driven game is the sort of thing the gaming media would definitely snap up with a bit of hype, and the first major update is likely to make a splash. Given reasonable targets and incentives for those working on NS2 and It's quite likely to bring in a profit and hopefully there's some work done on player retention as it's good for the longevity of the game, but it also increases the target audience for the Kodiak DLC, existing players.
I know you guys at UWE won't be able to resist checking in on NS2 from time to time and taking pride in your accomplishment, seeing that people are still playing it,and hopefully getting to experience some content for the first time as a player rather than a developer.
Comments
I can't say what drives the community devs and what they are working on, but in my thinking it would be optimal if they could improve the boring basics of the game so to speak (especially performance) while the maps currently in development are finished and perfected to be released all at the same time in the future for maximum publicity. Perhaps coinciding with another skin pack or something like that and an even split of some of the income to the mappers and key community developers. It should be a pure content update by the way; bugs and balance issues will affect individual maps, not the entire game.
I was never a big fan of making NS2 f2p, but at this point one might as well go for the full measure.
Regardless of NS2 being old news, the shift to community development is a wicked move by uwe, perhaps if you had spun the dlc news as the start of that it would of a lot more exposure. who knows?!
I would also assume the decrease in concurrent players has more to do with the start of summer/spring and less to do with peoples feelings on the dlc and map.
just let me buy the damn black armor plz.
So go out, spread the news!
What about the fact that you now have a DLC system in place, which absorbed the set-up costs for future DLC's? Generally, when you set something up, you lose money due to the additional first time costs. Sometimes, you have to take a loss to enable profitability in the future. That was mainly my point.
I find it odd that RPS at the very least is not interested in an official community kodiak release, when 2 days before release, they picked up on the release of GorgeCraft, and later, picked up on the Community Dev update, without any contact from anyone. You can see why it is logical to believe no information was sent out. They seem to be desperate to pick up news about NS2 from the community.
I don't take it personally, but I am also at a loss to understand how this update was not covered.
Shouldnt have expected kodiak to grow the playerbase (frankly I saw it as a fanservice update in any case).
However if we CAN grow the playerbase (there are discussion on this here there and everywhere with many feasible ideas being thrown around), that will result in more DLC sales down the line.
Implementing features to keep the players we attract should be the utmost priority if you really want to make something (profit) of this new content pipeline.
*COUGH*Tutorials, gather / matchmaking system, performance (unlikely but it has to be said).*COUGH*
It happens. It can be really hard to predict what the news sites will and won't respond to. They're certainly not desperate for NS2 news, it's just that those stories happened to fill a particular gap on that particular day, or happened to be eye-catching in a particular way that is no longer relevant when it's time to promote the next item.
Stop self-deprecating and making excuses "I can't speak properly", "Running out of time" and for the love of God NEVER admit "I made this 5 mins before".
Prepare yourself, compose yourself, and sell it as if you really know your stuff. It looks really school boyish to be making excuses. Mistakes happen when you speak under pressure and it's common to run over time. These are forgiveable so just carry on with your presentation. I remember in Telford, Bonker's had a contact in the multiplay stage managing team who said that they don't mind if you run over time as long as they're in the bar by midnight, but the games were still cut down to bo3 instead of the intended bo5. For the most part, people are willing to extend their time for these things, so don't worry unless you either run overtime by 50% or someone explicitly asks you to stop.
If you need to make graphs and figures to go into a presentation don't do it 5 minutes before, and definitely don't admit it. It's makes you look completely unprofessional and somewhat incompetent.
These are mistakes you've made multiple times.
Otherwise it was a pretty good 8 minute video presentation wise.
Frankly, I think it's too late for that in NS2; they should rather learn from this and keep it in mind when building NS3. Of course that's waaay down the line.
You may disagree of course.
Loving that 'generally'
In terms of game development I would say its a massive success. The community dev team I think is the best direction the game has gone in a while and the result of kodiak patch led towards that decision. It is a step in the right direction in order for NS2 to maintain its current playercount. The direction the game had taken over the last few patches before kodiak was absolutely terrible.
When the players brought up this idea(in a similar fashion) in cologne it was mentioned that the key for this to succeed was to get a burst of new players first so it would pay off. Since the player issue has not been fixed yet there are simply not enough customers to make dlc worth it.
Another thing to mention is a half-worked test is not going to give you good numbers, you have to commit to the change otherwise it simply won't be worth it. I think most people that have spent few hours studying business in gaming - spotted right away this patch would not give positive revenue. You don't really have to know business either to see it
Before moving into dlc you have to increase your playerbase. There are tons of way to do it but it will take some work and commitment to do right. Instead of looking at these numbers as instant failure you should look at the income compared to your small playerbase. You will notice in that aspect it was a pretty decent income.
I still believe free to play would be the best way to go for ns2, even more so now with community run game. If the basic tools are create for people to set skins/maps/stuff on sale with increased player numbers it will pay off pretty fast. Free to play also makes it much easier for players to test the game (they can always lure their friends with them) and players will be more forgiving for the issues of performance and higher skill ceiling. Kodiak already was a good first step to f2p model.
Another thing to do is to is try bringing part of the players back that have stopped playing the game. Send them a message and try to give them some incentive. If performance is improved and you let them know that one of the key aspect why they didn't play the game is improved. If given a good enough bait there is a high chance at least 1/10 of them would give the game a try again. Considering ns2 sales that would be plenty of players to start with.
None of these things can happen over night, it would take some work to do so I can see why they would want to do tests first. But the key thing to remember what I mentioned to before, think of the Kodiak revenue in light of your very small playerbase.
while i'm aware that it's a LOT of work to create a quality map and it adds a fresh theme to the pool of maps, it never seemed very critical for the game; at least in contrast to earlier community contributions like summit, spectator mode, bug fixes, performance optimisations and so on. were these people paid nearly as much (after scaling it to the amount of work they had)?
don't get me wrong, it sounds like a great idea to reward people for successfull contributions as it will motivate others to come up with quality work as well. it just feels a bit intransparent and possibly unfair at the moment.
The low player base seems to be the main issue. Let's face it, NS2 is a deep game, extremely rewarding and feature-rich, but the learning curve is not shallow. What games have the highest player base? The simple ones like CS:GO which you can get into quickly.
Perhaps the solution is to make a simpler version of the game (Combat standalone, anyone?) that can serve as a gateway for players who play that, enjoy it, and then want to play the advanced (current) version of NS2.
Kodiak has instilled enough confidence for another patch, so that's a success at least! The content was solid. I would've loved to see the community leveraged for promotion of Kodiak, as to share some responsibility with that as well. Might have helped manage expectations a bit.
And the ones that are hard to get into.. like MOBAs?
I don't buy that shit.
Granted, LoL and Dota2 etc have a huge amount of $$$ and marketing behind them.
1000 concurrent players. That's gonna be something like 10,000 unique players daily.
Blizzard started with making side scrolling and adventure adventure games for a long time, then took a leap into RTS for a good while before moving onto their first Action RPG.
Riot as far as I know employed people who made MOBA style WC3 Mods, and pretty much hasn't done anything past LoL, and I don't expect it to for a while.
Turtle Rock Studios have stayed within FPS's since CS:CZ are now working on Evolve which resembles their past work on L4D. While it seems promising, it could be a similar jump as UWE had with NS1 to NS2.
None of these companies can truly be compared to UWE in terms of finances and manpower, but their humble beginnings seem the same to me. Smaller companies have had just as much success if not more.
Dean Hall made Day Z the mod for Arma 2, and now is having his share of issues making his own stand alone, I'm sure it will have it's fan base just like NS1 did and who knows if it'll have more issues when/if it gets done.
While we all know that UWE's does also have Zen of Soduku under their belt. NS2 is a significantly larger venture, and with it there should be growing pains as both the company and it's people get better at understanding what sells and what's worth the time. Every game, not just NS2, should be seen as a stepping stone, not every game company can be a one hit wonder.
TL;DR;
Attempts were made, lessons were learned.
well, not exactly. the 1000 is a rather old number to begin with. the average for the past 4 months is around 550, with the peak for the previous 25 days being 900. 800 for the last week. a problem with the peak stats is that because of the constant flow of humble bundle $1 or steam $2.50 sales, they're higher than they should be those days.
This experience and knowledge will help them make even better games in the futures and I am looking forward to their future games.
Naturally I wish they'd got a little more polish on the game, resolving a couple of persistent bugs etc. but we've seen how wobbly the game can be when things get changed from previous patches and subsequent hotfixes which all has a cost both financially, and more importantly at this point, time.
UWE has a couple of released games, but at this point, the sales "may" not even be covering costs to keep the lights on and the snacks on the table, so the employees need to be spending their time working towards earning the next paycheck for the company or they're just eating into the savings account. NS2's peak has come and gone and the income stream will only continue to diminish so at some point they have to create a new revenue stream.
*all financial predictions are purely speculation
On the other hand, Kodiak succeeded in rewarding a community member who spent a lot of time and effort on the map, but hasn't had the same exposure or opportunities as some of the household names. They all put in a ton of time creating content around NS2 and are deserving of some form of reward. I feel there's a number of other people who equally deserve something back for their work but that's just how it is, particularly for those who work on the background stuff so don't get the same screen time as others. But you do it for the passion of the game and your creations. I only hope that's reward enough
We also got a framework for displaying customisations, a new map and most importantly the Community Development Team.
Opening NS2 up to select members of the community and having a community driven game is the sort of thing the gaming media would definitely snap up with a bit of hype, and the first major update is likely to make a splash. Given reasonable targets and incentives for those working on NS2 and It's quite likely to bring in a profit and hopefully there's some work done on player retention as it's good for the longevity of the game, but it also increases the target audience for the Kodiak DLC, existing players.
I know you guys at UWE won't be able to resist checking in on NS2 from time to time and taking pride in your accomplishment, seeing that people are still playing it,and hopefully getting to experience some content for the first time as a player rather than a developer.
opaque