Forums » General
So... where is the advertising for this game?
MMO, open world, somewhat sandboxy, space sim, 4x, VR, cross platform, not p2w, the list goes on. Great game, but why is this game so empty in any searches, and not incredibly popular?
Youd think with so much packed onto a mobile platform youd get tons of people here
Youd think with so much packed onto a mobile platform youd get tons of people here
Glad you appreciate the game and can see the potential. The developers feel that there are still a number of significant items on the "to do" list before they roll out the red carpet and searchlights. It would be a waste of money to advertise heavily and then fail to deliver when people come. You often only get one chance to make a first impression.
Not all users agree with this thinking, but the game has been running for many years. I'll wager the devs know what they're doing.
Not all users agree with this thinking, but the game has been running for many years. I'll wager the devs know what they're doing.
Yeah they may wanna buy a new red carpet. The one that's been sitting in storage for 15 years prolly has holes in it by now.
There are a variety of factors that impact this. "User Acquisition" ("UA"), aka advertising, can be quite expensive. We were bootstrapped and never had a lot of capital for that kind of thing. For comparison, EVE probably spends six figures per month. It also means they're going to be bidding on all the same search terms and keywords.
We are working towards some goals that we hope to coordinate with a larger marketing push. We're also actively experimenting with small marketing campaigns, to see what has traction, and what cohorts of new users tend to stick around or monetize best.
Part of the challenge of game marketing is, if you spend your money bringing in the "wrong" set of people (they play, but don't like the game enough), or not enough people in general, and you don't make enough money back from it, then you can't sustain continued marketing.
This is what makes the process very analytics-driven and fairly complex, which is another challenge for a small studio with limited resources. Bigger studios have large teams dedicated solely to User Acquisition, with data scientists that comb through all available information, and people constantly A/B testing different promotions and campaigns against one another, measuring outcomes and optimizing their costs.
Of course, there are also many organic and "free" things one can do, but with varied success. We intend to continue pushing these areas as well, but time and resource limits are still a factor. Plus, there has been a trend, recently, for organic search to be "tweaked" towards those who yield the best monetized return for the given search engine or platform company, which tends to further drive things towards the biggest players (who spend the most on UA).
We also pursue co-marketing partnerships with other companies; famously with Verizon in their TV commercials, some years ago. But these can also be hit or miss. We had a big partner project fall apart earlier this year and be arbitrarily cancelled, through no fault of ours, after six months of effort on our part. You can't really predict that, stuff happens.
Anyway, that's all just a bit of a window into the reality of running a game as a smaller studio. We've been a bit "quiet" for the last year. But, we do have strong plans for a major marketing campaign in the not-too-distant future, synchronized with content updates and launches and the like, to try and maximize our return on investment. There should also be some newsletter content being pushed to existing players, along with (hopefully) some content drops to help engage and excite them.
It's a lot of stuff to juggle, work to do, timing to synchronize, and time/money resources to spend very carefully. But, we do our best.
Glad you like the game :).
We are working towards some goals that we hope to coordinate with a larger marketing push. We're also actively experimenting with small marketing campaigns, to see what has traction, and what cohorts of new users tend to stick around or monetize best.
Part of the challenge of game marketing is, if you spend your money bringing in the "wrong" set of people (they play, but don't like the game enough), or not enough people in general, and you don't make enough money back from it, then you can't sustain continued marketing.
This is what makes the process very analytics-driven and fairly complex, which is another challenge for a small studio with limited resources. Bigger studios have large teams dedicated solely to User Acquisition, with data scientists that comb through all available information, and people constantly A/B testing different promotions and campaigns against one another, measuring outcomes and optimizing their costs.
Of course, there are also many organic and "free" things one can do, but with varied success. We intend to continue pushing these areas as well, but time and resource limits are still a factor. Plus, there has been a trend, recently, for organic search to be "tweaked" towards those who yield the best monetized return for the given search engine or platform company, which tends to further drive things towards the biggest players (who spend the most on UA).
We also pursue co-marketing partnerships with other companies; famously with Verizon in their TV commercials, some years ago. But these can also be hit or miss. We had a big partner project fall apart earlier this year and be arbitrarily cancelled, through no fault of ours, after six months of effort on our part. You can't really predict that, stuff happens.
Anyway, that's all just a bit of a window into the reality of running a game as a smaller studio. We've been a bit "quiet" for the last year. But, we do have strong plans for a major marketing campaign in the not-too-distant future, synchronized with content updates and launches and the like, to try and maximize our return on investment. There should also be some newsletter content being pushed to existing players, along with (hopefully) some content drops to help engage and excite them.
It's a lot of stuff to juggle, work to do, timing to synchronize, and time/money resources to spend very carefully. But, we do our best.
Glad you like the game :).
Aka money is tight and need to be used at the right time on the right thing, support the devs with your form of advertising
I always tell people about the game. Discord is a good place to self advertise
One of the reason that VO is not incredibly popular is the small existing player base. If the game was more popular, it would be more more popular. If the game was more more popular, it would be more more more popular. etc...
@Roda Slane you are so right.
It is almost unbelievable that it's not always full of players after so long.
I have to believe that the purpose of logging in and being in space gets lots without many players.
I often thought there should be something in addition to what the game has now but a sector that you could login to for capture the flag battles only. This would encourage more number of free players with free ships, to eventually sub to access full space world and to grind in the big world for higher class ships and weapons.
They could still play the capture the flag style game for free but higher tier battles would only be accessible after subscription grinding, or whatever other long term grinding they could offer for non-subscribers. So there would be further reason to be in the galaxy in order to also play higher tier capture battles.
Just seems logical to me that many don't really want the emergence galaxy part but like to space duals. However, you could encourage them to do so if the goal is more equipment for higher tier capture battles.
Best of both worlds and encouraging more player base at the same time.
No advertising needed word of mouth gets out pretty quick when the game is good as it should be.
It is almost unbelievable that it's not always full of players after so long.
I have to believe that the purpose of logging in and being in space gets lots without many players.
I often thought there should be something in addition to what the game has now but a sector that you could login to for capture the flag battles only. This would encourage more number of free players with free ships, to eventually sub to access full space world and to grind in the big world for higher class ships and weapons.
They could still play the capture the flag style game for free but higher tier battles would only be accessible after subscription grinding, or whatever other long term grinding they could offer for non-subscribers. So there would be further reason to be in the galaxy in order to also play higher tier capture battles.
Just seems logical to me that many don't really want the emergence galaxy part but like to space duals. However, you could encourage them to do so if the goal is more equipment for higher tier capture battles.
Best of both worlds and encouraging more player base at the same time.
No advertising needed word of mouth gets out pretty quick when the game is good as it should be.
To all that has been said, I have to add the "message of death" there was on Android devices until recently. I found VO in the Google Play Store 2 years ago, but as soon as I installed it on my Samsung Galaxy S8, I got a message talking about a graphics driver bug on the Mali G71 devices which made the game prone to crash, so I uninstalled it directly. I had been playing it on a secondary device I had, but I wanted to play on my main device. Therefore, it wasn't until September's update this year that the message was removed (even though to my knowledge the bug was fixed months ago), so I didn't begin to really play it thoroughly until two weeks ago.
I can now say it works like charm on my phone, but all the people who read the message must have been upset for sure and that's not a good advertisement. The problem is that people who, like me, were set apart because of the crash risk of the driver bug, will have to check the game again to see that it's been fixed. Reviews from 15 years ago don't help either. The game is fantastic IMO, and being fully cross-platform and optimized for each and every device/OS is a big plus. I hope the game takes off as it should, because once you get past the learning curve and get how everything goes, it's an amazing game you can pick for minutes or hours :)
I can now say it works like charm on my phone, but all the people who read the message must have been upset for sure and that's not a good advertisement. The problem is that people who, like me, were set apart because of the crash risk of the driver bug, will have to check the game again to see that it's been fixed. Reviews from 15 years ago don't help either. The game is fantastic IMO, and being fully cross-platform and optimized for each and every device/OS is a big plus. I hope the game takes off as it should, because once you get past the learning curve and get how everything goes, it's an amazing game you can pick for minutes or hours :)
Unfortunately, situations like the Mali G71 bug are all too common.
They're completely out of our control.. ARM has a GPU driver bug, and releases it to Samsung for their latest phone(s). We report the bug to ARM, and they fix it in their code, but maybe Samsung doesn't want to bother updating their phones OS. Or, maybe Samsung does offer an update, but AT&T and Verizon go "Meh" and choose not to push it to their customers. Or some carriers do, and others don't.
We do what we can to work around issues; but when we can't, we pop up warnings, because it's the "least-bad" thing we can do. Sometimes those warnings legitimately need to be there for years, because most Android hardware does not enable device owners to control their own operating system software.
So that's the irony. The bug itself was not really "fixed" months ago. I'm sure there are devices out there that still have the origina, buggyl G71 GPU code, in production, in the "wild". Because there are like 30,000 different Android device models out there. We just removed the warning and.. hoped for the best, and that guessing game is a lot of what developers like ourselves have to do.
Many of the "big" mobile studios are much more militant.. if they detect a crash on a particular device, they simply ban it from their game entirely. No warning, no optional settings, you just don't see the game in the store. It's the simplest way of preventing bad reviews from owners of that device. But, they also have large teams of people constantly watching play statistics to see if crash trends emerge on particular hardware.
They're completely out of our control.. ARM has a GPU driver bug, and releases it to Samsung for their latest phone(s). We report the bug to ARM, and they fix it in their code, but maybe Samsung doesn't want to bother updating their phones OS. Or, maybe Samsung does offer an update, but AT&T and Verizon go "Meh" and choose not to push it to their customers. Or some carriers do, and others don't.
We do what we can to work around issues; but when we can't, we pop up warnings, because it's the "least-bad" thing we can do. Sometimes those warnings legitimately need to be there for years, because most Android hardware does not enable device owners to control their own operating system software.
So that's the irony. The bug itself was not really "fixed" months ago. I'm sure there are devices out there that still have the origina, buggyl G71 GPU code, in production, in the "wild". Because there are like 30,000 different Android device models out there. We just removed the warning and.. hoped for the best, and that guessing game is a lot of what developers like ourselves have to do.
Many of the "big" mobile studios are much more militant.. if they detect a crash on a particular device, they simply ban it from their game entirely. No warning, no optional settings, you just don't see the game in the store. It's the simplest way of preventing bad reviews from owners of that device. But, they also have large teams of people constantly watching play statistics to see if crash trends emerge on particular hardware.
I understand your point, and thanks a lot for the explanation. I haven't been too long around here, but I like the game a lot and I feel there's a great support from you devs.
In my case, it's working great on my S8. I also read somewhere that the bug fix was deployed some months ago, but as you say, it depends on each phone/system manufacturer to upgrade their devices.
In my humble opinion, what you really need is an updated review of the game in popular game sites with all that's been done in all these years.
In my case, it's working great on my S8. I also read somewhere that the bug fix was deployed some months ago, but as you say, it depends on each phone/system manufacturer to upgrade their devices.
In my humble opinion, what you really need is an updated review of the game in popular game sites with all that's been done in all these years.