143 replies to this topic

[Wil McCullough]

standards of advertising and content is pretty low here.

there's nothing stopping pgi from doing a "general motors" type webpage to launch the upcoming hellspawn for example. other than giving a rat's arse.

they could even make a high value powerpoint or keynote "academy 101" that in lore would be used as a presentation to new pilots or something.

not hard, not time-consuming, not expensive. we need to stop giving pgi stupid excuses.

[Bishop Steiner]

Carl Vickers, on 18 September 2017 - 08:43 PM, said:

Players definitely arent winning, all they are doing is buying more ships to fill Chris's wallet. Ive not invested and im really not interested until it is playable.

On the flip side, Im having a ball in Elite Dangerous atm. Started development at the same time and Elite is up and running.

lot of people complained about the cost of ED initially... though oddly compared to SC I don't see how. What's the buy in these days for ED, and how much specialized gear (hotas, etc)do you need to have a realistic chance of success?

Wil McCullough, on 18 September 2017 - 08:43 PM, said:

standards of advertising and content is pretty low here.

there's nothing stopping pgi from doing a "general motors" type webpage to launch the upcoming hellspawn for example. other than giving a rat's arse.

they could even make a high value powerpoint or keynote "academy 101" that in lore would be used as a presentation to new pilots or something.

not hard, not time-consuming, not expensive. we need to stop giving pgi stupid excuses.

Yeah I'm sure time and dollar investment, along with man hours have no impact on that. If they were charging 300 bucks a mech, I'm sure they could give us a spiffy brochure to go with it.

[Y E O N N E]

Bishop Steiner, on 18 September 2017 - 08:51 PM, said:

how much specialized gear (hotas, etc)do you need to have a realistic chance of success?

None. Elite is best played with a mouse because turret weapons are OP.

Same as SC, honestly.

Edited by Yeonne Greene, 18 September 2017 - 08:52 PM.

[Bombast]

Yeonne Greene, on 18 September 2017 - 08:52 PM, said:

None. Elite is best played with a mouse because turret weapons are OP.

I don't know about that. I found Elite Dangerous to be essentially unplayable with mouse and keyboard.

That may have something to do with my lack of spacial awareness, though.

Edited by Bombast, 18 September 2017 - 08:54 PM.

[Bishop Steiner]

Yeonne Greene, on 18 September 2017 - 08:52 PM, said:

None. Elite is best played with a mouse because turret weapons are OP.

Same as SC, honestly.

your typical 250 button gaming sewer rat.... er mouse... I presume?

Bombast, on 18 September 2017 - 08:53 PM, said:

I don't know about that. I found Elite Dangerous to be essentially unplayable with mouse and keyboard.

That may have something to do with my lack of spacial awareness, though.

I find I have the same problem with forums and such do to my lack of social awareness.......

[Carl Vickers]

Is definitely playable with mouse and board.

I have it on Pc and had quite a bit of fun, got a Ps4 recently and hotas, much more fun imo.

All you really need to succeed in the game is a bit of time and some knoweldge garnered from people. It does have a lot of layers but you can ignore some or most of it or you can get right into it. Thargoid aliens invade in a week or so, so should get real interesting then.

You can pick it up on steam quite cheaply or grab a key for steam from g2a for even cheaper.

Edited by Carl Vickers, 18 September 2017 - 09:01 PM.

[Wil McCullough]

Bishop Steiner, on 18 September 2017 - 08:51 PM, said:

Yeah I'm sure time and dollar investment, along with man hours have no impact on that. If they were charging 300 bucks a mech, I'm sure they could give us a spiffy brochure to go with it.

you need to sell a product at $300 a pop to do a funky powerpoint or put some effort into marketing?

someone better call macdonalds and starbucks.

*rolls eyes*

[Bombast]

Carl Vickers, on 18 September 2017 - 08:58 PM, said:

You can pick it up on steam quite cheaply or grab a key for steam from g2a for even cheaper.

And then get the game deleted off your Steam account because the code was fraudulently generated for free!

ED does go on sale a lot though. 30 bucks for base, 30 bucks for the non-mandatory expansion pre-sale.

[Bishop Steiner]

Wil McCullough, on 18 September 2017 - 09:14 PM, said:

you need to sell a product at $300 a pop to do a funky powerpoint or put some effort into marketing?

someone better call macdonalds and starbucks.

*rolls eyes*

Yes because we're obviously talking about similar quantity of sales...... (McDonald's for instance, sells more than 75 hamburgers per second and feeds 68 million people per day)

Because Starbucks and McDonald's don't sell by several orders of magnitude more...... Oh wait a tick....

You really don't get how marketing and retail pricing works, do you? The more you sell of something the cheaper each individual unit can afford to be. Oh and um, those companies invest tons of money.... 983 million or so for McDonalds in 2011 alone.

I'd considering rolling my eyes, but why mimic ignorance?

Edited by Bishop Steiner, 18 September 2017 - 09:35 PM.

[Bombast]

Bishop Steiner, on 18 September 2017 - 09:28 PM, said:

(McDonald's for instance, sells more than 75 hamburgers per second...)

Can I measure my burger consumption in mbps (McDonalds Burgers per second) now?

[Bishop Steiner]

Bombast, on 18 September 2017 - 09:37 PM, said:

Can I measure my burger consumption in mbps (McDonalds Burgers per second) now?

I hear it is the preferred universal measurement for Quantity over Quality. I read that on one of PGI's fiscal year budget reports....

[Wil McCullough]

Bishop Steiner, on 18 September 2017 - 09:28 PM, said:

Yes because we're obviously talking about similar quantity of sales...... (McDonald's for instance, sells more than 75 hamburgers per second and feeds 68 million people per day)

Because Starbucks and McDonald's don't sell by several orders of magnitude more...... Oh wait a tick....

You really don't get how marketing and retail pricing works, do you? The more you sell of something the cheaper each individual unit can afford to be. Oh and um, those companies invest tons of money.... 983 million or so for McDonalds in 2011 alone.

I'd considering rolling my eyes, but why mimic ignorance?

and you think them being able to sell 68 million servings a day isn't because of them putting some effort into marketing?

you're the one who brought up unit price in a discussion of marketing, now suddenly you want to talk about quantity. typical bishop, moving the goal posts when he puts his foot in his mouth.

don't bother with the eye rolling. i'm already doing enough for the both of us.

[o0m9]

Wil McCullough, on 18 September 2017 - 09:14 PM, said:

you need to sell a product at $300 a pop to do a funky powerpoint or put some effort into marketing?

someone better call macdonalds and starbucks.

*rolls eyes*

Because wildly popular low margin, high volume products distributed through gargantuan franchises will obviously follow the same business model and spending pattern of a niche product which struggles to draw an audience of a dozen thousand people. Of course.

[Wil McCullough]

o0m9, on 18 September 2017 - 10:26 PM, said:

Because wildly popular low margin, high volume products distributed through gargantuan franchises will obviously follow the same business model and spending pattern of a niche product which struggles to draw an audience of a dozen thousand people. Of course.

i'm not the one who tried to start an argument based on unit price comparison.

my initial statement was for PGI to increase marketing efforts.

bishop was the one who responded by bringing up SC's $300 per ship. anyone with half a brain and in marketing will laugh at that response.

keep up.

Edited by Wil McCullough, 18 September 2017 - 10:39 PM.

[o0m9]

Wil McCullough, on 18 September 2017 - 10:35 PM, said:

i'm not the one who tried to start an argument based on unit price comparison.

my initial statement was for PGI to increase marketing efforts.

bishop was the one who responded by bringing up SC's $300 per ship. anyone with half a brain and in marketing will laugh at that response.

keep up.

Bishop's point is that Star Citizen has an order of magnitude more funding over a similar period of time than MWO. Even if Star Citizen spent the same portion of its budget on web design that PGI did, that would still leave them with something like 10-20 times the amount of money to throw at the problem. Part of this is that they have a customer base that will gladly spend over one hundred dollars per ship while MWO's audience needs to be needled to spend $30-$70 on a pack of three to five mechs.

"Why doesn't (company with a shoestring budget and niche audience) do just as well at this thing that (AAA funded dev)?" is a useless argument because the explanation is obvious. The smaller dev team has less money. It's not even like PGI doesn't advertise the game; you can go to just about any Battletech discussion forum and they know about it. Battletech is just a horribly niche product right now.

Edited by o0m9, 18 September 2017 - 11:02 PM.

[Wil McCullough]

o0m9, on 18 September 2017 - 10:59 PM, said:

Bishop's point is that Star Citizen has an order of magnitude more funding over a similar period of time than MWO. Even if Star Citizen spent the same portion of its budget on web design that PGI did, that would still leave them with something like 10-20 times the amount of money to throw at the problem. Part of this is that they have a customer base that will gladly spend over one hundred dollars per ship while MWO's audience needs to be needled to spend $30-$70 on a pack of three to five mechs.

"Why doesn't (company with a shoestring budget and niche audience) do just as well at this thing that (AAA funded dev)?" is a useless argument because the explanation is obvious. The smaller dev team has less money. It's not even like PGI doesn't advertise the game; you can go to just about any Battletech discussion forum and they know about it. Battletech is just a horribly niche product right now.

really?

you got all that from this?

Bishop Steiner, on 18 September 2017 - 08:51 PM, said:

If they were charging 300 bucks a mech, I'm sure they could give us a spiffy brochure to go with it.

you sure you're not over reading anything? doing some mental gymnastics? no?

ok

[Monster Ultra Zero]

LOL. Star Citizen.

[o0m9]

Wil McCullough, on 18 September 2017 - 11:06 PM, said:

really?

you got all that from this?

The entire thread is about Star Citizen. Do you even read?

[Wil McCullough]

o0m9, on 18 September 2017 - 11:46 PM, said:

The entire thread is about Star Citizen. Do you even read?

and bishop steiner's response to me was specifically about its $300 space ships.

do YOU even read?

i wrote something, he quoted and replied, i quoted and replied back etc. we're talking to each other, not making commentary on the entire star citizen. you're grasping at straws, really.

[Vellron2005]

So.. I'm seeing a lot of people talking about how much more money RSI has over PGI..I guess that's reasonable.. more money = more / better stuff..

But my point, (and the entire point of this topic for that matter) is that if PGI had RSI's money, we would only get double the amount of mechs, but not double the amount of quality. And if RSI had PGI's money, we would get the same SC quality, but in less volume.

It's this difference in approach that I would like PGI to acknowledge and work on.

If you provide a quality product, people will beg you to sell it to them, and money will come. If you are content on just getting by with the minimal, you will never go big.

Case in point - MW5:Merc, currently in development.

Same engine as SC. And same possibilities. Alas, no mech customization.

Right off the bat, PGI elects to provide only the minimal. Instead of going all out, hyping the shait out of it, and actually providing us with a complete product that will be so awesome that it will make us beg our bank for a loan so we could buy it.

That's just bad business.

Also, people say, Mechwarrior / Battletech is a niche franchise. Sure. Keep thinking that.

And then remember that it's been around for 30-ish years, and people still love it. Also, it's currently going through a rebirth, as multiple games and new manuals are coming out.

So if you want to go from a niche to a global phenomenon, what do you do?

Advertise.

Marketing is key.

And a single picture and a headline on facebook (for those who already know about it and follow the page) or twitter does not cut it..

A 10-page, immersive, luxury quality brochure does.

If PGI approached development of ANYTHING in this game (or MW5 for that matter) with the attention that simple brochure has gotten, It would be a AAA game and it would have millions of dollars to invest.

Edited by Vellron2005, 19 September 2017 - 02:03 AM.