I don't think I compared it to WoW?? But, sense you brought it into it let's talk about it. Before WoW was release there was a massive marketing campaign.. sure, Blizzard had it's fan base, but it was a base that knew nothing about MMORPGs. It new RTS and Diablo, they had to educate their players on what WoW would bring them. They put out something like 3 to 5 videos online, commercials soon followed after release. Heck, if I remember correctly you would see a WoW preview when you went to the movies. Blizzards marketing brought in a massive amount of new players, many of which never played or had heard of Starcraft or Warcraft before. You put somebody like the Price of Darkness on tv, it's going to get attention.

In the mean time, DAOC was running web ads, on sites like this one where DAOC players who already was playing the freaking game would see. They were trying to get their current player base to buys the expansion. To this day I have never seen Mythic go after new players or build a new player base. They have always thought that word of mouth would be all they needed.

Like I said, there are pockets of people who play DAOC. Back in the day some universities had dorms playing DAOC, other universities had never heard of it. Mythic completely failed to get any mass attention for their game.

 

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G'day,
I guess I come from a different perspective. I'm not a game fan - I don't subscribe to game mags, I don't hang-out at gaming sites (except this one very occasionally), I rarely see the inside to a gaming shop, and I only play DAOC very casually (played a bit of EQ years ago).

However, one could not escape the banners and cut-outs of WoW that adorned most businesses that sold some tech gear - it was viral marketing at its best (or worst). I would have never played DAOC if it wasn't for a friend recommending it to me. I have never seen DAOC advertised. Yes, they should have sacked their marketing division a long time ago.

If they wanted to sell DAOC these days they need the sex-sell card. Digitize some porn tart - short skirt big sword plenty of cleavage - u get the gist .... and the numbers will rocket past 250k as every fat hairy desperate gaming guy will be drooling for an online peekshow ... only joking!!!!!

Cheers
Finglor

notice... you mentioned it first...

the rest of the BS you spilled is pointless... even if WoW never advertised it would of still had millions of subscribers...

Blizzard had the money to afford tv comercials, because it had a hugely popular franchise and a gianormous budget and over 1 million pre-orders before it even went into open beta...

it didnt need advertising..

Mythic on the otherhand was a tiny developer with no budget as they were already strapped for cash at release... no way to afford advertising...

 

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no ammount of advertising will help DAoC ... because for that to happen, the rate in new subscribers would have to be greater then the cost of the advertising in the first place.. and have you seen the price of TV comercials?

100k for 30 second spot for national coverage... thats just the cost of the air time, not the cost of producing the comercial video to be played...
(and thats also only 1 30 second spot, you'd want to run it at least 100 times in the month)
to recover the cost of that advertising mythic would need 700 thousand new players to subscribe the quarter the advertising runs... just to break even....

if it doesnt get 700k new subscribers at the end of the quarter its likely EA would see the quartarly expense report running at a loss, and close DAoC completely.

 

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"Blizzard had the money to afford tv comercials, because it had a hugely popular franchise and a gianormous budget and over 1 million pre-orders before it even went into open beta..."

Oh really, considering they had 500,000 in a free open beta.. I find it hard to believe that over a million people paid money to preorder. Stop pulling numbers out of your ass. When Blizzard released WoW it had no idea how successful it would be, they knew it would sell, but to have millions of subscribers? Nope, they had no idea and didn't plan for it.. hence all the problems they had at beginning of it all.

The fact of the matter is Blizzard marketed/invested their game, Mythic did not. WoW is the best selling MMORPG of all time making billions of dollars, DAOC is an after thought that is barely alive.

Let me make something clear to you, if you market something people will buy it.. period. Now if they stay or not is a different story but if you look at DAOC's retention numbers of the years then that tells you that they had a good product. If they marketed the game they would have sold many, many more copies than they did and it would have easily covered whatever marketing expense they had. You don't have to do commercials, but you need to have an approach that taps new people to the game.

The fact remains, Mythic's greatest mistake was not marketing it's game. Maybe it tried, but whoever was responsible failed and should have been fired early on. This game could easily still be alive and kicking if it wasn't for them.

 

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I really don't get why people are comparing Blizzard and Mythic, World of Warcraft and Dark Age of Camelot. These two things could not be more dissimilar.

Blizzard is a huge company, huge before even World of Warcraft launched. They had made a fortune off the Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo games, they were loaded.

Mythic is an independent developer, they had a few minor games that pretty much most DAOC players never even heard of. I imagine in DAOC's early days, just about everything being made was probably going right back into making the game better. They did some advertising, but it was very specific focused ads on the web and some magazines.


World of Warcraft is a PvE focused game. The game is designed for massive appeal. It is cartoony and campy. You have motorcycles in the game with license plates that read "PWNED" (or something). And NPCs with celebrity names like Paris Hilton and Indiana Jones (usually with some tiny variation).

DAOC is a PvP focused game, it's doesn't use much humor, and has a darker gritter feel. It's not even remotely designed for mass appeal.

Television advertising makes sense for WOW, it doesn't for DAOC. It's wasted on DAOC. DAOC needs to just focus on making itself a better game and people will come back.

it you market something people will buy it... so the log i just dropped in the toilet i can sell it if i market it? ..

no, that isnt true at all...

okay, lets have a look at mythics retention numbers in the past...

http://img200.imageshack.us/img200/586/subscriptions.jpg

there you go, there on that chart.... http://www.mmogchart.com/ its from that webpage...

lets see.. first year... players .. then it starts to fail.. expansion, it levels off for a short time.. expansion it goes up slightly and levels off for 10 months.. then wow release.. and game population completely plummets...

so your saying if mythic advertised, people would come to the game and see how good it is.. and continue to play..

but the evidence shows that even the 250k people that knew about and played the game.. have long sense left... mythics player retention is about as good as a coffee filter.

even daoc expansions that came after WoW's release couldnt even level off the loss of players... and the loss of players isnt due to lack of advertising...

 

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Interesting graph. WoW's market dominance is incredible if it really had 10,000,000 subscribers in 2008. Their investment into marketing their game outside the traditional gaming community can not be ignored as a reason for their success and continued growth. Blizzard obviously gambled big and won. They created subscription numbers not by taking current market share from the MMO market but by growing the market 10 times over. Perhaps the lack of success of other game companies to dent Blizzards numbers is down to their unwillingness to do the same.

On a side note I think the only hope for a new DAOC type game is if EA feel confident enough to do one after SW:TOR fails/succeeds (more likely fails imo... have you seen the animation =/ ). If anything the chances are it will be based on Dragon Age rather than DAOC. THQ are doing Warhammer 40k and fantasy pvp doesn't really fit with Sony or Microsoft at present.

Marketing (advertising) is always a factor but if the company serves cow patties as dinner, they can spend billions on advertising and it will not help the customer base grow.


The one thing that has contributed to the success of WoW, more than most other things, is the quality of the product. While many players that post on VN hate WoW and many players blast Blizzard as if Blizzard is the creator of all that is evil, based WoW’s market share it would seem that Blizzard has hit many of the correct buttons with their production of WoW.


No, WoW does not have DAoC’s unique RvR and WoW’s graphics are not as good as DAoC’s graphics but Blizzard built many player friendly features into WoW, features that DAoC players had/have been begging for (begging for years).


Again, if WoW were truly horrible then all the advertising in the world would not grow the subscriber base. If WoW were terrible then WoW’s subscription numbers would be in the dumpster.


I am not saying that Blizzard is perfect or that WoW is bug free but if you look at the WoW boards, with WoW having over 10 Million subs, on the WoW boards you find about the same number of posts whining, complaining and bitching as had been seen on the VN DAoC boards back when DAoC only had 250k subs. It almost seemed that Mythic took joy in pissing off their customers.


DAoC could have spent a few hundred million on advertising and the game (DAoC) would be dieing today. Mythic/DAoC has far too many cow patties dressed up as if it is fine dining. (Ever watch Kitchen Nightmares where Chief Ramsay tries to show some horrible cook how terrible the food/service is and the terrible cook/owner does not have a clue why the customers hate the restaurant? That clueless terrible cook is like Mythic and the terrible restaurant is DAoC.)


Over the years there have been millions who have tried out DAoC. Almost all of those millions found the game so horribly lacking, or those millions found Mythic so annoying, almost all of those DAoC customers left.


DAoC has some brilliant people working for them, but no one at Mythic seems to have a clue what the typical MMO customer needs. Mythic often does not even seem to care much about the customer.


War is a great example/proof of how advertising is not the only thing a game needs. WAR had a huge community to draw from and the game world was buzzing about WAR for a long time before WAR launched. The huge community base and all the hype that surrounded WAR did not propel WAR’s subscriptions into the millions. Today WAR is not doing so well and WAR's subscription numbers continue to shrink.


Advertising only helps if the product is what the customer wants and advertising only helps if the company does not tend to create anger among the customers. Mythic fails in both of those as most MMO customers find DAoC horribly lacking and most MMO customers quickly grow angry with Mythic’s silliness/lies/condescending attitude/pandering/stupidity/etc. . . .


Some may put the blame for DAoC’s dismal number onto WoW's launch but there is more to it than simply “WoW”.


As WoW has weathered the storm of many competitors launching many other games, and WoW’s subscription numbers have not dived because other games launched, WoW has proven that happy players do not exodus a game just because something new comes along. Happy players may try out other games but happy players will keep their subscriptions open.


When WoW was launched the DAoC players did not just go and try out WoW, DAoC players ran from DAoC and canceled their DAoC subscriptions.


The decline in DAoC’s subscription numbers coincided with the launch of WoW, because WoW gave unhappy DAoC players a place to go. Yes there were other games that unhappy DAoC players could have gone, but none that really had any appeal. WoW was the first game that actually had a bit of appeal to the angry DAoC players.


So, we are once again back to DAoC’s decline being more a factor of silly Mythic decisions and poor game design than advertising problems.

 

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I'm not saying that the game would have declined. What I'm saying is that if they marketing their game, it would have been much bigger than it was. Would it still have declined? Sure. But 2 years after it released it was one of the most exciting games out there, they should have been marketing their game and building their user base. Instead those choose to ignore that and came up with lame excuses as to why they couldn't get more players.

Look at AoC, it's a streaming pile of crap. But they marketed the game and at release they had a decent number of subs... same with WAR. I'm not saying that marketing is going to increase the longevity of the game, that is up to the quality of the game. What I'm saying is that marketing will bring new players to the game if you do it.. that's what Mythic did not do.

 

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