31 replies to this topic

[Chuckie]

Bryan Ekman, on 08 February 2012 - 12:11 PM, said:

To answer the start time - pre-production started in July, full productoin started in October.

Chuckie, on 08 February 2012 - 09:38 AM, said:

I base that on Infinite Game Publishing only registered its domain on July 11 2011. So that gives a rough idea of the time frame the whole MMO thing had been conceived, papers signed and given a green light.

BOYAH !!! Nailed it.. I love when my statistical analysis (and random SWAG) skills kill it..

Anyway, I think the reason some have issues with the launch seemingly so early, is that they worked with groups that were not as talented and driven as you guys. I mean it will be less than a year from initial launch to Beta.. thats amazing.. !

[Aidan]

Bryan Ekman, on 08 February 2012 - 12:11 PM, said:

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. To be perfectly honest, most of the games I have worked on, had marketing schedules that started well before pre-alpha/alpha. We have a very carefully planned strategy to start our marketing my telling people about MWO, then move to showing them MWO. This is all happening in a very compressed timeline, which we are smack dab in the middle of.

I've been estactic about how we've rolled our our PR/Marketing program, as it represents and reflects the style of game we are making.

To answer the start time - pre-production started in July, full productoin started in October.

Thanks Bryan for your authoritative answer on the project start time. IMHO, you and your entire team are doing a great job and are creating one for the ages!!!

Good Luck !

[Gorith]

Yes EA, ActiBlizz, and other do use that marketing... Thats also why people are losing faith in them they want to grind that hype engine aslong as possible rather than following the "build it and they will come" ideals. They spend YEARS grinding that engine hyping it up only to release something that isn't honestly that breat... I would love to see waht the marketing budget compared to production budget of something like D3 is and also a timeline of how much actual work was finished on the game. I am willing to bet the game is finished they are just spending their tiem to hype it more and work on a console port...

sorry rant off

[John Clavell]

First off. Is this a stealth indictment of Mitchpate and Netbattletech? If so, it's seriously lame.

Regarding the actual content, and not the context. Again I understand it's frustrating for everyone here to have gone without an official MechWarrior game for many many years. You could argue that Piranha's primary marketing campaign has yet to even start. Pre-GDC might be construed as almost fan-service or certainly a community based campaign, with the double positive of viral based marketing from said community. Outside of the primary MechWarrior and Battletech communities, I'd surmise that large portions of Piranha's target audience is even unaware of the the game at this time.

There is no way anyone can deny that Piranha as been anything other than agile. We don't know what the quality of the product will be until we see it and play it, however that not what were talking about here. We're talking about marketing. The final factor which should be considered is; look what happened in 2009. Piranha came to the table with in game footage of MechWarrior 3015 and big ideas. In the end, due to reasons outside of their control it was not to be. I don't think Piranha wanted to build a hype machine. I think they wanted to put an end to the 2 years of silence. They wanted to communicate with the fan base and say "look guys, we're going to make this happen". I followed Bryan's blog for the years between 2009 and the launch of MWO. There was a lot of people hoping, and begging for a sign, and it was obvious, to me at least, Bryan certainly wanted to share more than he was able to with the community.

[MaddMaxx]

Quote

"I'd surmise that large portions of Piranha's target audience is even unaware of the the game at this time."

If you mean like the summation that Mitchpate made about the marketing scheme of PGI?

If so, his was also lame by default.

We will just have to assume that you have some hard data to back up the quoted assumption?

Edited by MaddMaxx, 08 February 2012 - 01:41 PM.

[Helmer]

"the #1 rule with game development, you don't announce the game and release date before you have a fully functioning alpha."


THAT'S the number 1 rule in game DEVELOPMENT? Wow, I'm really outta touch for the development side of things. Personally, I figured that was a marketing rule......

Although I'd agree that, historically and as an industry rule, companies normally have things a bit further long than what we are GUESSING PGI has them. However, there's always room for innovation and change. If they individuals putting up the money are confident enough to invest in the project with this form of Marketing in place, then good on them.

I'm going to steal something Julian 'Rabbit" Murdoch just said this week... "Highly respected companies like Valve, Blizzard, and Bioware all have a few things in common, and one thing is the ability to let release dates slip. And will continue to do so until their product is right. Those companies unwilling to do so risk the ire of their communities. Look at Games based on movies. They always seem to hit their release dates..... and they universally suck" ( I'm paraphrasing there)

Setting a hard release date or even yearly quarter time frame is risky. Very risky. Development is , by and large, a creative process.
You can set milestones, but you cannot rush creativity. If you've done enough preplanning, which it sounds like they've been thinking about this for a few years, you go into actual developement with a solid game plan and a good idea of how long it will take. But , like any plan, it never survives contact wth the enemy.

PGI has big plans. And I am sure they will have a good portion of it implimented by the time the release date rolls around. It ought to be a fun game... but the beauty of the F2P model is they can continue to roll out updates on a weekly basis. Growing the game, and hopefully keeping a large player base.

[Opus]

Bryan Ekman, on 08 February 2012 - 12:11 PM, said:

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. To be perfectly honest, most of the games I have worked on, had marketing schedules that started well before pre-alpha/alpha. We have a very carefully planned strategy to start our marketing my telling people about MWO, then move to showing them MWO. This is all happening in a very compressed timeline, which we are smack dab in the middle of.

I've been estactic about how we've rolled our our PR/Marketing program, as it represents and reflects the style of game we are making.

To answer the start time - pre-production started in July, full productoin started in October.

As a former Marine 2336, I here-by induct Bryan into tough guy hall of fame; on Merit.
Addressing this topic is tough for a developer; Don't over Promise, always Perform better than Expectations, and Kill the damn subject on the spot...

[Aegis Kleais]

Aidan, on 08 February 2012 - 09:19 AM, said:

Here is a quote from the MWLL forums. This is a response by CoffiNail to a post by Mitchpate. As you will read, Mitchpate, an Administrator on the NetBattleTech league support team, suggests that PGI is wrongly marketing the MechWarrior Online game. What do you think MWO community and MWO Developers?

---------------------------------------

CoffiNail ---- PGI started working on actual development in late October. What do you want them to do, toss out ****** screenshots that have little polish and have half the gaming community go, holy **** those suck, why would i bother even playing this game those shots suck so much, oh look there goes what could have been a good game.
Mitchpate ---- PGI's problem is they broke the #1 rule with game development, you don't announce the game and release date before you have a fully functioning alpha. They were in such a rush to start "building hype" that they forgot there are rules and protocols to this process. You announce the game and release ingame screenshots or a teaser trailer. People don't care that it's early-alpha, by the time you announce it's assumed the game is polished enough to produce images representative of the game. Then you release more and more screenshots and teaser videos leading up to the open beta and/or pre-order stage. THEN you start releasing concept art as a filler to show off assets and features that people haven't seen yet. Only at that point is concept art actually useful for hype building because players can take a poorly drawn asset and imagine how good it'll look in the actual game. You hold some of the best assets for this stage and people get really excited because you're hinting at what's to come but aren't actually showing them. Valve, Blizzard, EA, Activision, they all do this and force their contracted development studios to do it as well. PGI *significantly* deviated from this model and that alone should be raising red flags but the problem is far too many give the benefit of the doubt on this and that's only encouraging them to continue NOT behaving like a normal game development company. The excuse given is that it's free-to-play and while that may excuse some of it, it does not excuse all of it.

-------------------------

To my knowledge, so far, PGI really hasn't done any marketing for MWO.

They have made an announcement that we'll begin to see something around early-mid March, and with a tentative release date of "Summer 2012" (which when taken literally means no later than September 1st in the US), it would be WAY too early to release content that is usually done 2-3 months out from game release.

Dragging a community on by doing so, I feel, would be counter-intuitive to both sides.

If, however, instead they bring us to a point where we can participate in a Beta, get tangible experience with the product near the end of its development cycle, that would work well as a catalyst for launching the game in it's last handful of months in development. A lot hangs on the information that's coming in March, and til then, PGI is holding to it's "Content every Wednesday" method in hopes to sate our anticipation in the meantime.

[Hanyit Greyhame]

I'm going to argue the negative on this one. It seems a little bit off that there is only "one" way to market anything. I personally think the way PGI is doing this is the right way to do it, even though it is not the established way to it. I find it very there is only one way to do things, just because the big companies do it. The best part of what they are doing is that the community is in pseduo-contact as the game is being built.

Regards,

Hanyit Greyhame

[Chuckie]

John Clavell, on 08 February 2012 - 12:57 PM, said:

Again I understand it's frustrating for everyone here to have gone without an official MechWarrior game for many many years.

You have no idea..

Since around I think 2005, I have had a new alert for all things Mechwarrior at Google. Thats how I found out about the reboot in 2009 and subsequent reboot to a MMO.

I have a feeling I am not the only one either..

[DarkTreader]

And keep in mind. From Bryan's statement earlier, pre-production started in July, full development started in October. Pre-prodution covers a whole lot of things as far as game design goes, from the technical aspects of 'What kind of machine do we want this to run on?' and 'What engine do we want to use?' all the way up to (depending on the company) a full GDD. Those 4 months were spent doing all of the basic legwork necessary to build the foundation of this game, so that when they had their engine training in October, everyone knew exactly what they were getting into.

On top of that, they're also using (based on the twitter snips posted earlier) the Agile/Scrum method for production, which is a damned efficient way of doing things. Lets say, give them the rest of October to iron any bugs out as far as integrating the production engine and getting final questions answered about the toolset, that'd put them at about 3.5-4 months of actual development.

For them to already be running internal playtests, and getting viable data from all of that? They've been busting their tails. If they're looking at giving their big premiere at the GDC... oi. I don't even want to consider the amount of overtime that's been put in to get this project this far along. I'd say they may be financed through earlier purchased shares of Red Bull, because there are likely days which that's the only thing keeping them at their desks. But if they can keep up the momentum they've showed so far... lets see, 16 weeks... going by standard Scrum, they've had 4 Releases, with 4 Sprints per (3 working, 1 review)... They'll be halfway through their next Sprint by the time GDC rolls around, so they'll probably take the stamp from the end of this week's work (barring any major FUBARs) to the conference. They have plenty of time before summer to get things put together - and as far as a beta test goes, I think that any or all of us would be more than happy if it was just freakin wireframes to begin with.

So the audacity of some ******* blowhard to say that PGI is 'doing it wrong' because they're going with a grassroots, community-involved game? Sounds like he's a) a tool, and b ) a bit jealous that PGI is doing something WAY better, and with WAY more support than he's getting.

tl;dr: PGI knows what's what, and no d-bag knowitall is going to have an effect on them.

Edit: ... though the board censors are a bit batty, what with it having this weird vendetta against Yiddish insults...

Edited by DarkTreader, 08 February 2012 - 06:04 PM.

[Makaveli]

Helmer, on 08 February 2012 - 01:50 PM, said:

"the #1 rule with game development, you don't announce the game and release date before you have a fully functioning alpha."


THAT'S the number 1 rule in game DEVELOPMENT? Wow, I'm really outta touch for the development side of things. Personally, I figured that was a marketing rule......

Who made these rules for game developement? They suck. I hope they start with concept, that woudl be a much better #1!