First up, I was at last years mechcon. It was one of the single coolest experiences of my life. Now while I have been to comic-cons and geekfests here in south africa, the excuse to also visit Canada was awesome and I would absolutely love for another excuse to go. Give me a confirmed date and I will be there a week before for bar hopping with other Mechwarriors.
Secondly... It's been 7 months but I can recall some comments and talk about some things while I was at the con and there is a lot of misinformation and/or just plain wrong info in the thread, mostly spread by people who are just a little bit too salty. I get that you are angry and lashing out but you are an adult, you are responsible for your actions, not anyone else.
Again, this is from memory but this is accurate to the best of my recollection (I could be wrong but not with malicious intent).
I heard the Con cost around 200k, including the prize money/WC, catering and construction of the pods. From the ticket sales (just over 1k attendees + virtual tickets) they got in about 100k. You might jump on this saying that could have been spent on MWO but I address that later on. Also that's like half of a month's running costs btw. or like, half a new map.
Now if they manage to get similar numbers and cut out the WC/Catering stuff, and the pods are already built, then they can cover the con with little to no monetary input from PGI. Also, with no WC, the con will probably be back to only 1 day, meaning reduced venue costs as well.
As for time investment, while a small number of PGI staff will be involved with the con, very few of PGI's... 70? 90? dev staff involved in the actual development of MWO/MW5 would necessarily be involved past maybe attending over a weekend. So very little to no impact on Development, as Tina said. I believe this is a true statement. Anyone thinking otherwise is maybe a little delusional. I know it's a convenient thing to be salty about but no, it's just not realistic.
Now for some guessing/common sense stuff.
On the matter of HBS/CGL I would have to say that they didn't contribute much if anything to the con (monetarily). If someone has concrete evidence to counter this, please do share, would love to be
proven wrong.
The reason why I say this is because while the exposure is nice, it's not tens of thousands of people, it was just one thousand with maybe a few thousand on stream. That said for CGL that's probably a big part of their core audience but for HBS it wouldn't have been a big impact as Battletech Game is a crowdfunded game. Everyone that would know about Mechcon, knows about BTG. Most of their sales would come from steam / paradox / crowdfunding and very few from the con. If CGL wanted to grow their playerbase, they would pay for a spot at a comic or general gaming con as they do.
Also, keep in mind that with PC games the numbers of players and sales are orders of magnitude larger than boardgames will ever be, especially for your more niche stuff. It's probably not as bad as Comicbooks are these days but it's not that big.
If PGI asked HBS or CGL to contribute sizeable amounts to the con (again, possible, but doubtful) then they might have just said, sorry, they simply can't afford it for the return on investment and that would be perfectly understandable. No shade there.
End of the day HBS and CGL participation was effectively 'publicity' PGI 'bought' (not really, more like lost revenue?) as part of MW5 advertisement and to give something back, buying some good will I guess, to the fans attending and watching on stream and to make HBS and TT players aware of MW5. As it's a single player game and not a difficult to get into F2P MMO-lite game it can find an audience with many BTG players.
Advertisement is expensive AF and I can not stress that enough. I doubt PGI would have gotten the same level of exposure from the 100K they spent on MechCon for MW5 if they had spent it straight into traditional advertisement. We are talking about AAA game titles having advertisement campaigns costing tens of millions of dollars, maybe even a hundred million. Usually it outstrips the development cost of most AAA games. The best you can hope for a smaller game/studio is it going viral, but that partly requires a community not up to its eyeballs in salt.
So yes, MechCon did cost them a bit, but in terms of exposure and advertisement for MW5 after the con, it probably helped with things like Articles, Footage, Buzz and pre-orders and even the licensing discussion with MS. It was technically planned as a launch party for MW5 but I think they made the best out of the situation and the (correct) decision to delay the launch.
Edited by ForceUser, 05 June 2019 - 03:54 PM.
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Khobai, on 05 June 2019 - 01:19 AM, said:
