Marketing and advertising.

Discussion in 'Speakers‘ Corner' started by Isley, Feb 6, 2019.

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  1. Isley

    Isley Forum Apprentice

    Well earlier I opened a topic in the Development section of Creative Corner, creating a polling poll that asked public opinion of the forum on the idea of Drakensang Online going to Steam. I do not know if the subject I'm going to start exists on some topic already created, but I would not even mind this pimphic reason anyway, anyway ...

    The result of my previous topic was some questions that I was already anticipating is something typical and justified here in the forum, and which was proved in a clause of the forum member in a questioning in which I was interested to discuss here, and this specific question in which it was quoted, corresponds to the range of players playing the game Drakensang Online in the world, and in the interest in Drakensang Online on the internet. I observed in this test that he ordered that this range is focused on the Center of Europe, even having American servers in the game. In which he justified it would be useless for Drakesang Online to go to Steam with that level of interest.

    Here's the proof: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today 5-y&q=/m/0w32dmz

    And here a possible reference, it's silly that more I'll share anyway:

    [​IMG]

    We all know the game is not ''thousand-wonders'' but as I see it these past few months you are racing to improve the game, it is not 100% that the public expects, and that improvement is slow, but at least you are making this improvement. And I'm saying what everyone here has known for a long time who really plays the game, there are few players inside Drakensang Online, get out of this prison in this Europe and go to the rest of the World, it is necessary to really invest in the advertisement of the game, even having several defects still, but have to do anyway, otherwise the game is not going anywhere. And do not lie members of the forum, because I see that many question about this subject, it was not only in my previous topic, not these questions I see in other topics in this forum, and in social networks.

    The example is obviously to create a good propaganda of the game for the rest of the world, as the biggest focus of Drakensang Online players in the world is located more in the center of Europe as I explained earlier, commercials like YouTube commercials or in advertising windows in sites that allow this feature Markenting, or other advertising features that exist is a great idea, practicing a little more activities on social networks is also essential, do not want to deny that they do not have these activities, but the social networks of the game are used as I see it in only maintenance releases, events and path updates, use creativity to interact more with players.

    ''After the last reale released I noticed on the official facebook page of Drakensang Online that I was having quizzes of various themes within the universe of the game and some prize draws. This makes the atmosphere fun and the players get excited about it, and consequently this will attract other people to play, it's not a matter of giving free prizes because after all the prize draw is only for one player if you put those little heads to think they will understand what I am talking about.''

    And to complete this example of game advertisement I recommend creating an official game server on Discord. For those who do not know Discord is a Voip program like Team Speak, Skype, Raidcall, Ventrillo and etc ... And the Discord program has improved a lot and this activity has become a communication bridge between developers and players, and many distributors and game studios are doing this practice, there you can create written chats of discussions of topics of what you want to put and divulge, and voice chat. In short it would be a +1 medium of communication that you would use, but this is a good medium of communication.
     
  2. Rhysingstar

    Rhysingstar Forum Ambassador

    For years now players have suggested marketing this game to bring in new players, but let's look at this realistically.

    DSO is a relatively old game and it has very few character options compared to the newer games.

    However, let's ignore that part and look at the single most offered advice in this game.

    1. Level up as quickly as possible.
    A. There really is no point to this game before end game.

    2. Don't worry about gear until you reach end game.
    A. There really is no point in the gear before end game.

    3. Collect as much materi frags and gold as possible but don't use until end game.
    A. Again, there is no need to do anything until you reach end game.

    Now it does not take too terribly long to reach max level, but that is where the frustration really begins for new players.

    We all know that drops are bad, so you need to "buy" your gear and hope that the bought gear has decent stats. This is mainly accomplished by having other players carry you on the higher levels.

    They need to carry you because there really isn't a progression that will get you from new 55 to top tier 55 on your own.

    Then there is the waiting on certain events because of the sheer lack of diverse builds in this game.

    That leads to another problem. The lack of builds force players to wait for cores that can only be obtained in events which are getting pretty rare.

    So once you finally find the gear that you want, then comes the next problem, crafting. Unless you are one of the lucky ones, this process can lead many to quit in frustration.

    On top of all that, once you add in the lack of inventory space for new players, the pointless quests, the massive mind numbing grind, the occasional nerfs and the useless pvp, the best marketing in the world isn't going to help find and retain players.


    Edit to add:

    Look at this problem like business 101.


    Customers are leaving in droves and are not shy about telling you why, so that leaves you with two possible solutions.


    1. Fix the problems that make your customers leave.
    2. Attract entirely new customers.


    If you are going to fix the problem that drives your customers away, you have to listen to your customers. DSO has the system set up to do this. They have official feedback threads, they have moderators who pass along suggestions to the developers and for a while they even had a community manager.

    It is obvious that they ignore the vast majority of feedback threads.
    No one knows exactly what the mods pass along (except the mods of course).
    The community manager thing was simply phased out for all intents and purposes.

    Of course all feedback and suggestions are not good and some are just plain bad, but because players have no idea what, if anything is actually reaching the developers this leads many to stop bothering to suggest things or just assume that the dev's are going to do what they want regardless if players want it or not.



    If you are going to go with option two and attract new customers that are willing to put up with a game that drove the previous customers away, you need to find those new customers and market to them properly.

    It might be tough to find and market to new players who are willing to be ignored constantly, nerfed, and willing to put up with putting in more and more effort for less and less rewards, but who knows.


    Personally I believe it would be easier to fix the problems that have been driving your customers away, then once you have stabilized the current player base, attempt to attract new players. However that is not going to happen with DSO.

    This is why there are bad drop rates. This is why there are fewer events. This is why more grind is added with fewer rewards. This is why there is no diversity in builds or characters. This is why they replace rewards with selling you things. This is why everything before level doesn't matter. This is why most maps are played just long enough to get through them and never visited again. This is why crafting remains so random. This is why inventory space is limited.

    It is not now, nor has it ever been a secret why players leave this game.

    The question is why the developers go out of their way to speed up the exodus.
     
    Last edited: Feb 6, 2019
    Javah, MikeyMetro and Akageshi like this.
  3. Akageshi

    Akageshi Forum Duke

    Maybe they just ain't got the money to advertise...

    I remember that I actually found out DSO existed, when I was bored and looked through random youtube videos featuring lists of "top free to play MMORPGs". Back then DSO would be listed as such, not now though :/ because the market is full of free to play games, as this kind of monetization has proven to be very effective thanks to micro-transactions.
    Anyway, the point is, I haven't discovered DSO through banners or video ads. I found it in a random video that I actively searched for.

    Yes, they should push DSO to the world. How? One of the ways is payed social network promotion. These days you won't have your FB post clicked if you don't pay to FB to make your post more visible. I guess same goes for other such networks.

    The greatest way is imo to have people, like real streamers and let's players who would play DSO on twitch and youtube. DSO is pretty much non-existent on twitch, and 90% of DSO vids on youtube are vids with no voice, only music. That's just wrong. You need people who actually talk, in English of course, and who keep in touch with the audience. No one cares about vids where just some stupid music plays and guy shows of how much stuff he bought for real money. Like, that stuff immediately tuns everyone off.

    There's a problem with this, though, that Rhysingstar mentioned actually, and that is the fact that DSO is not diverse enough. Nobody is going to watch a streamer doing the same thing as every other streamer.
    The success of a certain blocky block based crafting mining game was exactly such that every single let's player had a different "story" in their blocky world. So each such let's player was unique to some extent.
    But in DSO? Everyone is pushed towards the same kind of build, and the whole road to level 55 is the exact same - same order of quests, pretty much same strategies, it's quite a boring video material :/

    Discord is the best free-to-use communication tool ever. As you said, it's being used by more and more video game developers to communicate directly with their fans and supporters. Of course this will quickly degenerate and will be misused and abused - like everything where business makes its way into - but so far it's a great platform.
    The issue is, and we've had this discussion before, that the DSO community is quite toxic. We sometimes fight on the forum, which has its boundaries, but DSO Facebook is a crapstorm mostly. It feels like only savage kids and dumb adults have a party in their comment section there. Demands, threats, stupid GIFs, posts with dozens of "?" marks and "!" marks, YELLING << LIKE THIS, and all in all the worst internet communication practices. No wonder the DSO community manager(s) are not very keen to go to Discord to be confronted directly, in a voice chat maybe, with this bullcrap.
     
    Last edited: Feb 6, 2019
    silverseas and MikeyMetro like this.
  4. silverseas

    silverseas Count Count

    DSO doesn't have a great community, which in turn means its reliance on word of mouth to get the word out there is pretty much a flop. I made a thread on a similar topic a few months ago and you can see where that has gone... nowhere. :D

    I would like to see advertising. There's a number of really old games that I'm not allowed to name because of the forum rules, but I see ads for them everywhere. And I suspect those ads must be working, otherwise those companies would not continue to dump money into places like FB and Youtube to promote their game. Just because a game is old doesn't mean it can't attract new players.
     
    Akageshi likes this.
  5. Rhysingstar

    Rhysingstar Forum Ambassador

    You've got me curious about what a promotion for DSO would look like.

    What would you build the ad campaign around to attract new players and make them stay?


    Would you talk about how great it is to be limited to four classes of characters?

    Would you talk about just how well balanced those characters are in both pve and pvp?

    Would you talk about how much fun and productive it is to play from level 1 through level 54?

    Would you talk about all of those great quests that propel your character development?

    Would you talk about the amazing maps that you'll never have to see again once you've finished the quests?

    Would you talk about all of the incredible unique items that are available in the game that players just can't wait to get?

    Would you talk about all the diverse builds that so many players are using?

    Would you talk about the wonderful amount of storage that new players get when they start the game?

    Would you talk about all of the amazing events that keep the players coming back for more?

    Would you talk about the incredible drop rates of uniques?

    Would you talk about all of the great mounts/emotes/costumes that you can get through quests or events?

    Would you talk about how short the amount of time it takes to fill out your wisdom tree?

    Would you talk about how utterly amazing all the randomness of the crafting bench is?

    Would you talk about how little gold players will have to spend trying to craft?

    Would you talk about just how few gops are needed to level up all of their gear?

    Would you talk about how quickly you can build up a set of speed runes?

    Would you talk about how all of the other runes available just drop like crazy?

    Would you talk about all of the wonderful game currencies and how they are just so easy to obtain and spend, especially the gilded clovers?

    Would you talk about how exciting each and every one of the nine parallel worlds are to play?

    Would you talk about just how great all of the pw sets are?

    Would you talk about how great pvp is and how so many just can't wait to play it?

    Would you talk about all of the stellar communication between developers and players?


    Edit to add:

    No promotion of the game would be complete without adding what a sheer joy it is for the player when the nerf hammer falls on their character class.

    I cannot think of anything that promotes more loyalty to a game than when a huge chunk of your time/effort and money goes away.



    I'm sure that I've left out some great potential aspects that could be used to promote DSO to new players.

    So I anxiously await what other great game features other players feel would entice people to sign up and more importantly stick with DSO.
     
    Last edited: Feb 7, 2019
    MikeyMetro likes this.
  6. MikeyMetro

    MikeyMetro Forum Overlooker

    Aren't you forgetting that we once had a great community on Tegan. Because word of mouth was good enuf when we had a great game...
    in point of fact, it was word of mouth that turned our server in a ghost town. Because the game was becoming not-so-great.
    just sayin ;)
     
  7. silverseas

    silverseas Count Count

    Since when does a game advertise its bad points? :p That's what you read the comments section of an ad for lol. It's not our job to come up with what points to market. That's BP's job, if they cared to do it. Usually game trailers and ads have very little connection to actual gameplay as far as I can tell anyways.

    Good enough? Lol no. DSO was always a little niche game that nobody knew anything about even at its peak player numbers to me. Every time I mentioned this game to fellow gaming peeps I knew from other games, I drew a blank look because this game never advertised its presence. In my eyes, word of mouth never worked.
     
  8. Rhysingstar

    Rhysingstar Forum Ambassador

    Very true, but what would be the point of spending advertising dollars if you're only going to open yourself up the a segment of the current and a massive amount of the past player base pointing out all the reasons as to why new players should avoid the game? Not to mention all the frustrations that new players will experience in just a matter of days of signing up.

    It would make far more sense to make the current players happier and that would also take away a lot of the past player complaints.

    There is no reason to advertise when your current player base is fleeing the game and are more than willing to share why.

    If they would fix the most glaring issues, then at least the current players would be more than likely be willing to contribute their positive feedback to any new advertising.
     
  9. trakilaki

    trakilaki Living Forum Legend

    It has brought me in the game ;)
    That is neither proof or evidence.
    No one believes Google and the other corporate enslavement media ... but put that aside ... what exactly is shown in the link you are referring to?
    It is a timeline with alleged Searches for the term "Drakensang".
    If we think logically ... when someone makes a search for something ... then they find what they are looking for ... it is more than logically to bookmark the place so they won't be doing searches again.
    Therefore googling the term is decreasing. Moreover ... when one doesn't know and never heard of the term Drakensang ... he doesn't have reason to search for it at all.
    Most of the players got into the game via direct links or via the referral system that the game used to have.

    For the rest of the marketing things I will write a more detailed post ... but I have no time now ... gotta scram.
     
  10. Isley

    Isley Forum Apprentice

    Wrong,

    That's why if you drag the name of the term it will show the poster, which the research mentions as (video game), then it is referred to the game yes, concluding that it is a possible proof. And there is only one Drakensang Online that is mentioned in Google Trends itself, and I do not see another existing with that name.

    About Google Trends, Google Trends is a report in which there is a proximal calculation on the amount of searches that is directed to: To the name of the search term or word that in the case we are referring to (Drakensang Online), and the amount of access to the official site in regions that have the highest percentage focus or decimal range in regions worldwide, the Google Trends system is organized like this. The data from Google Trends can be used instead as a reference on several issues.
     
  11. MikeyMetro

    MikeyMetro Forum Overlooker

    Word of mouth is not just your irl or online friends. It is stuff like gaming sites with the latest news and reviews. That's how I found this and every game I have ever played. (Well, ok, back in the day it was actual physical paper magazines :p)

    Word of mouth also happens before a google. I mean really, how do you google a name you've never heard of before? That is some serious psychic power if you could do that. :D

    If I was looking for a game today I would never find this one. That is because the devs do nothing to get the attention of the kind of sites I am talking about. That would be marketing.
     
  12. RekR4

    RekR4 Forum Greenhorn

    To be honest I just think that's too late.
    To go back to old gold times, where there were a lot of players, a lot of fun and the game was enjoyable, this game needs tons of changes.
    It needs a team working on the whole game from its base to the endgame.
    Everything is doing bad in this game, everything, every mechanism is wrong, almost every side of this game was a failure since its beginning or become a failure during the years.

    The only thing that can save this game in my opinion is this company to admit how bad they are and create a group of players to get infos, ideas and players needs.
    It's just incredible how far from players needs/ideas they are every time they implement something.
    I truly would be ashamed if I was one of them.
     
  13. Shine2

    Shine2 Board Administrator Team Drakensang Online

    Hello RekR4 and welcome to DSO EN Forums! Have a great time:)

    kind regards