Dark_Respite

Originally Posted by Captain-Electric

Hey Leandro could you make it so when we log in we see these slogans all over the game's various billboards? Would be great for pics.

Originally Posted by Arson_NA

Dw i ddim yn hoffi chi.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

Well let me put it this way. I spent hours yesterday writing a script that would create a demorecord that would show my main using power thrust to send a warhulk into orbit and quite a while afterward watching sequences of me knocking things miles into the sky while giggling to myself.

I don't think you had all that much to be worried about.

Originally Posted by Jack_NoMind

I think that Dark_Respite deserves a freakin' medal for her work with CoH, though. I regret not joining every gaming community I could've to spam her videos... and all of the other great videos created by our players, for that matter.

Oh, and Black Pebble, if you have any way to manage this at all, Leandro deserves at least VIP status 'till shutdown for that crowd tech video and the Paragon "hero crowd" logo. (I'm assuming you can't get him a new car.) I tried to give him a game code (GR:CC) a week and a half ago, but he already had it.

Originally Posted by Black Pebble

The main reason for it comes down to resources.

I am the marketing department. There are no legions of minions at my beck and call. It's a pretty lean operation.

Until 3 weeks ago, I spent 12+ hours each day at the studio. I could go into details, but there's a lot that needs to be done on a daily or weekly basis. Every screenshot I make means it's time spent away from doing this week's sales analysis, and truthfully, making screenshots and videos isn't really a great use of my time. It's fun, but they don't bring in a lot of revenue.

Why don't we hire someone to do that? Resources again. It's non-trivial to bring on additional marketing resources. We've all wanted additional internal resources for creative production and other projects, but that means that's one fewer designer, artist or engineer we can bring on. And Paragon is a studio that's led by the exceptional development team.

We have engaged in advertising throughout the years. We've done print ads, site takeovers, banner ads. We also regularly do less obvious things such as paid keyword searches. These all have varying degrees of effectiveness. At the end of the day though, it still comes down to a return on investment, because every expense needs to be justified.

If we spend $X producing a trailer, will it bring us $X+Y in new subscriptions and sales? If we spend $Z producing tv commercials, can we prove that those commercials bring us $Z+Y in revenues?

When you're launching a brand new game, you don't need to be as diligent about answering those questions. For an established game, however, there is far less flexibility.

Any perceived lack of advertising was never due to skepticism or a lack of desire on our part. If the resources were there, every Issue release would have been accompanied by full-age ads in every magazine and comic book. We'd have had multiple trailers and even TV buys. And there'd have been much more fanfare and hoopla.

Paragon Studio was a small studio, but we consistently produced incredible work that far larger studios couldn't even hope to match. I think an unintended consequence of that was that we gave the impression that we were much bigger than we actually were. We just managed to do a lot more with a lot less.

Originally Posted by Black Pebble

Pretty much every day for the past three weeks I've been yelling as John "Protean" Hegner, because I REALLY want to play out the story arcs he had planned for Tyrant's redemption.

Yesterday he told me, "You can play it out in your imagination."

My response?

"Do you not understand my imagination's not good enough?! I want to play the dang story arc!!!"

Originally Posted by Black Pebble

Shifting topics a bit.

I can't quite indulge an AMA, and there's a lot I cannot answer (which you guys can probably guess what those are), but if y'all have any business or marketing related questions for COH that you want to get off your chest, feel free to toss the, in this thread. I'll do my best to answer what I can.

Please be sensitive of the topics that can be addressed. I'd like to have an educational, interesting conversation with you guys. I don't want to have that colored with negativity, conspiracies, or chest-thumping.


Though I would like to point out that Sean "Dr. Aeon" McCann and I are competing for the most # of twitter followers.....and if I were ahead of him, it'd sure make it easier for me to remember things....


https://twitter.com/hosunl

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

Its also ironic that for the most part I left the machinima aspects City of Heroes to the real artists because there was plenty enough to do elsewhere and there was lots of time to eventually look at it. Now that there isn't a lot of time left there's so much potential I want to investigate in the system, and its taking up the bulk of my attention now. I may find myself actually spending more time with the game after November 30th when I can no longer long into it.

Its oddly exciting in a way that the sunset of the game has freed me to look at aspects of the game I've always been interested in but never had the time to explore.

Originally Posted by Second Measure

Operational answer on one of these: regarding the exploration badge lore, over the last few years that became kind of a palate cleanser task we gave a few people to let them have some fun. Tim Sweeney and Chris H wrote most of them and I believe Melissa as well, maybe Paul G wrote a few... IIRC the creative direction was explicitly to make the game world feel richer than the core lore allowed.

Originally Posted by Stunrunner

I remember the robot invasion on Justice, and how we decided to invade back with mimes.

I remember Virtue accepting the challenge of downing dropships during a Rikti weekend and in one day we downed...what, 35? D_R would know, she was recording it.

Those two are the first ones off the top of my head, but there are a lot of good memories from this game.

Originally Posted by Electric-Knight

And another question, BP... You are wonderful and gracious for telling us this now, but... were you going to be so evil so as to not tell us about this amazing feature when it would have gone live??

Originally Posted by Dark_Respite

Lir: "The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story."
Molly: "But what if there isn't a happy ending at all?"
Schmendrick: "There are no happy endings... because nothing ends."

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite