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I'm bringing up those numbers to illustrate that you bringing them up is meaningless. You didn't really do a good job if that was your intention. Those are really low numbers based on how much marketing they have done already. As I said, ZS had higher numbers in those categories a few days after its announcement. BA should be at a level that is comparable to Stormgate based on how much money has been spent on presentation. It is at 1/10th of that impact at best.
A different style RTS, Tempest Rising also had much much better numbers. RTS games can create hype. RTS playerbase isn't that small. It is BA that is failing in that regard. Maybe it blows up all of a sudden but that rarely happens.
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You're making general conclusions based on less than a few days. There's not much marketing going on, a reveal and an interview as far as I've seen. It's really not much + it's not a sprint, marketing is something you do over time and when the beta is out, people will do further marketing for them.
They may not get all the casuals, everyone knows that. But I came back to SC because of this and StormGate after 10 years of not playing. There is a market for this, but if your only definition of success is a massive blowup, then yeah. They failed. Just like 90% of the games on those shows. Steady growth > single blowup. Give it time, the best marketing that the game will have is satisfied players.
The biggest problem I think, and deciding factor, will be the p2w elements in their monetization. StormGate has the biggest share and perhaps this is because they most heavily lean into the StarCraft legacy and their initial marketing was good.
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Using accumulation based metrics are really not useful here. If you are going to compare the game that just unstealthed versus a game that's been making false promises for 4 years you probably don't want to use follows. Its about who still pays attention to things, right? Even stuff like the single point of truth 'steam wishlists amount' is not so valuable as people's wishlist counts balloon to 200 games on average. An accumulation metric is only valuable when it actually reflects attention at an underlying level.
Also I'd say if you want to cite numbers for their hardness (despite wielding them out of context) I would probably actually cite them and not give a historical account of how you feel the numbers were probably bigger.
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Looking at Battle Aces and thinking about the possibilities of set based releases has got me bubbling. I'd invested in the idea that you could inject totally new feels across each set as every competent set-based card game manages to. I'd especially love to see more biological/humanoid type stuff, maybe drones that are more creatures run by psi-emitter/neural implants. By adding new 'manufacturers' or unit providers like this they could inject story as well. Card games have a lot of techniques in terms of applying storytelling alongside new set releases.
Right now they are profiling 1 unit per day on their twitter:
https://x.com/PlayBattleAces/status/1800196343664947652
https://x.com/PlayBattleAces/status/1800558955946713549
https://x.com/PlayBattleAces/status/1800921223331025361
(WITH MASSIVE ENGAGEMENT THAT MUST BE COMPARED TO THEIR COMPETITORS!)
One thing you can appreciate about the volume of units they are making is that they are going to generate a lot of concepts for general RTS. If they want to make money they have to keep making units and as set-based games go things tend to get weirder and weirder over time. These concepts could trickle over to the genre at large the same way DotA/League have pushed out new ideas through their sheer volume of heroes and abilities being made.
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Spartak going hard on this game is so funny to see LOL. Bro going so hard is almost cringe how he acts with stormgate. You are a mod for SG afterall man. I doubt the people behind SG want someone shitting on David Kim's game that is representing them on public forums..
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There's not much marketing going on, a reveal and an interview as far as I've seen. A NoClip documentary, an in-person summit with pretty much all SC2 content creators (who helped them spread the word with videos of their own), a very expensive trailer shown in an event watched by over a million people and a follow up segment where they had the chance to show gameplay + talk about the game. Not to mention previews in all major gaming outlets. That's as much marketing as an RTS is ever going to get.
If you are going to compare the game that just unstealthed versus a game that's been making false promises for 4 years you probably don't want to use follows. I suppose you mean Stormgate as the latter game. I am not really comparing it to Stormgate. It wouldn't even be close. I am comparing it ZeroSpace, an indie game with no marketing budget. Is that too much as well?
On June 13 2024 01:13 [sc1f]eonzerg wrote:
Spartak going hard on this game is so funny to see LOL. Bro going so hard is almost cringe how he acts with stormgate. You are a mod for SG afterall man. I doubt the people behind SG want someone shitting on David Kim that is representing them on public forums.. I am a community volunteer. I don't represent FG/SG in any shape or form. Pointing out that I disagreed with something David Kim said or that Battle Aces isn't doing too hot in terms of the attention it got so far is hardly "shitting on" anyone. It is incredibly mild by the standards set by certain people here.
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Northern Ireland27473 Posts
On June 13 2024 01:13 [sc1f]eonzerg wrote:
Spartak going hard on this game is so funny to see LOL. Bro going so hard is almost cringe how he acts with stormgate. You are a mod for SG afterall man. I doubt the people behind SG want someone shitting on David Kim that is representing them on public forums..
When was he shitting on David Kim? Did I miss something?
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Imagine if a comic book shop sent its least body-odour conscious loyal customer to stand in their competitor's store and engage in loud painful arguments about the minute details of comic sales. They blow up the spot by being so uncomfortable and such an assault on the senses that nobody wants to hang out in the other comic shop. Does it matter if they did it for free?
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Battle Aces doing well should be good for Stormgate and vice versa. Liking and wanting a game to succeed is not a zero-sum exercise, fortunately. You can like and play both.
There's no need to be negative towards Battle Aces or really compare it's popularity to other games. The fact of the matter is, before the games come out it doesn't matter a whole lot... after release then we'll see what happens. There are so many games coming out these days, it's not surprising games don't have as much hype as they used to.
Of course there are still AAA games that build hype, but I can't think of many other games ("indie" games) that successfully build significant hype? Or maybe I'm way off?
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On June 13 2024 02:47 _Spartak_ wrote:Show nested quote +There's not much marketing going on, a reveal and an interview as far as I've seen. A NoClip documentary, an in-person summit with pretty much all SC2 content creators (who helped them spread the word with videos of their own), a very expensive trailer shown in an event watched by over a million people and a follow up segment where they had the chance to show gameplay + talk about the game. Not to mention previews in all major gaming outlets. That's as much marketing as an RTS is ever going to get.
This isn't big money for marketing and this is to establish the game and introduce it to the most likely adapters - the established RTS community, especially StarCraft/Warcraft. This is not aimed to attract people who haven't played an RTS until now. The game shows is where you're introducing and creating news about the game, I don't expect much out of those for non-big hits, not in the short term. You get the publications writing about you, things spread out of that. It's not abnormal for your marketing budget to be close to 40-50% of your entire budget. It's too early to tell, the community is growing. And it will grow more with the beta access, after that it will be decided on the game's quality.
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On June 13 2024 02:51 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On June 13 2024 01:13 [sc1f]eonzerg wrote:
Spartak going hard on this game is so funny to see LOL. Bro going so hard is almost cringe how he acts with stormgate. You are a mod for SG afterall man. I doubt the people behind SG want someone shitting on David Kim that is representing them on public forums.. When was he shitting on David Kim? Did I miss something?
I mean David Kim Game. For some weird reason is what i for sure thought in my head but didnt type the word in my text..
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Right so say you have a season with an expansion manufacturer like 'Groundbreakers Ltd.' and they make burrowing drones. So its a way of introducing burrow-movement mechanics where things move underground in a type of cloaking. Stuff like this kind of happens:
- you might want synergies within the burrow faction to encourage people to buy the whole set. Could be stuff like burrowing units across the different archetypes - tanks, fast and slow units, units that can hit air. If you just have the burrowing fast dps archetypal drone when it deploys it will struggle against splash-aoe type defenders. With a more rounded composition you would have a better effect. You can't really send non-burrow movement tanks with burrow-movement dps units so this pushes you towards purchasing the whole set.
- could also be spell-based synergies, burrowing medics types that move with your main units to increase their capability when they deploy above ground.
- beyond synergies you want units that are more capable of mixing in with other units — say space control things like lurkers, or something that burrows and gives scouting information. This also lets people dip a toe in the new set with their existing things they like, these are probably the most popular first unlocks for freemium users.
- the darkest pattern is that you monetize detectors, but most likely when you roll out a set like this you'd make the basic things you need to play versus it free or very easy to get. Maybe you modify some of the core units to also detect for that season.
So its easy to wrap your head around how each set could add a dimension to the game that dominates its feel, but also presents new challenges for compositions everyone already is playing with.
Another possibility is stuff that depends on map design — so you theme a season around powerful air units, make the maps all island-y, and give everybody a basic unit transport to enable even completely free players to use their existing unit decks.
If that works then you know what you do — its time for a naval unit season.
They could even throw in a hero slot for a season similar to how Planeswalkers showed up in magic.
When you consider these bits in symphony, all the sudden you could have the burrowers, the air units, the hero units all in play versus one another before they phase out and something new is added, and this is speaking in fairly general terms.
Its probably more likely they just accumulate units indefinitely since you have little precedence in terms of games like DotA/League taking things away, but the ever-changing complexion of the game is a really evocative idea. The alternative is the idea that things could indefinitely be added and balanced together, but feel is as much about what is in the game as what isn't in the game.
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Northern Ireland27473 Posts
On June 13 2024 03:41 MegaBuster wrote:
Imagine if a comic book shop sent its least body-odour conscious loyal customer to stand in their competitor's store and engage in loud painful arguments about the minute details of comic sales. They blow up the spot by being so uncomfortable and such an assault on the senses that nobody wants to hang out in the other comic shop. Does it matter if they did it for free?
That sounds remarkably like your posting on Stormgate so I’m confused why you’d put forward such a hypothetical
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On June 13 2024 08:15 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On June 13 2024 03:41 MegaBuster wrote:
Imagine if a comic book shop sent its least body-odour conscious loyal customer to stand in their competitor's store and engage in loud painful arguments about the minute details of comic sales. They blow up the spot by being so uncomfortable and such an assault on the senses that nobody wants to hang out in the other comic shop. Does it matter if they did it for free?
That sounds remarkably like your posting on Stormgate so I’m confused why you’d put forward such a hypothetical
I know right? I'm sort of glad both threads are active now so we can get a better sense of who is just being extremely "partisan" about this.
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Great ideas for the game guys, maybe they could divide the drone manufacturers into a kind of 'partisanship', similar to the color wheel in magic. That way if you pick a certain manufacturer you can not use drones from another one. I'm glad you guys are still fluttering with such creative energy at your old ages and don't see the word only through an idealogue's lens, thanks for talking! What other ideas you got?
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On June 13 2024 10:15 MegaBuster wrote:
Great ideas for the game guys, maybe they could divide the drone manufacturers into a kind of 'partisanship', similar to the color wheel in magic. That way if you pick a certain manufacturer you can not use drones from another one. I'm glad you guys are still fluttering with such creative energy at your old ages and don't see the word only through an idealogue's lens, thanks for talking! What other ideas you got?
Imagine if you hadn't filled the other thread with nonsense that's the exact opposite of constructive criticism and this actually meant something, lol
EDIT: I actually enjoyed some of the nonsense at first too, don't get me wrong. You used some inventive metaphor and wordplay, and it is genuinely useful for someone to bring up the questions about the other game and its funding.
But then you just. Kept. Going. And meanwhile here you're actually trying to spin positively a "pay for the game pieces" monetisation model.
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Closed beta starting end of this month. Super excited. Will also have our first look into the in-game currency side.
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United States33712 Posts
Recent dev update in the Discord about the upcoming beta and monetization:
Our first Closed Beta Test is starting soon at the end of this month so we just wanted to say a few things on our areas of focus.
Main goals for testing are:
Core gameplay: This is by far the most important thing to test.
New user starting experience: (This is called the Proving Grounds, and we want to ease especially new players into our game. Takes 10 wins to complete it.)
We’ll msg this elsewhere too, but just wanted to point out if you are an RTS player, please remember to go into gameplay options and Enable Focus Fire in order to be able to focus fire specific units.
TLDR on why it is disabled by default is due to our new user testing results from non RTS players.
Earning/Spending in game currency for new unit unlocks: You can unlock new units in any order you prefer, but they will be gated by in game currency that you earn as you play games.
This is the first time ever we are testing this area of the game, so we expect lots of feedback and iteration throughout the first phase of our closed beta.
We wanted to also point out this is the first big scale testing we’re doing. We want to iterate very closely with you throughout the beta test. Also, we strongly encourage honest, transparent, and respectful discussions (fun fact: we have 3 studio values that we work by day to day, this being one of the 3, and we hope to apply them when working together with you as well.)
Having to disable focus fire by default due to testing sounds hilarious. I wonder how 'bad' the open play sessions at Summer Games Fest were. Honestly, that's just an RTS thing in general—anyone who's tried to teach a more casual friend how to play BW/SC2/yourgamehere can relate to how watching them play is an excruciating experience. Also, makes me wonder what % of SC2 players ever turned off the 'can't select enemy units' default setting.
Also, interested to see what unlock speed they start at in beta. How can beta players collude their behavior to ensure it's the fastest possible  ?
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I am teaching my partner to play sc2 and she lost a lot of games because misclicking a unit instead of the ground.
Actually quite impressed they are aware of it.
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Yeah i agree, it isn't very intuitive or discoverable to know that you can A move the ground.
Almost all players new to RTS will attack just 1 unit.
I think it makes sense and is a good change!
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So what happens if I have focus fire disabled and I right-clicked on a unit?
It's interpreted as attack ground / A-move?
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EPT![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/Gk3HzXa.png)
![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/JiRtY0I.png)
