Vainglory interest via google trends

the real irony in this is that the venture capitalist are making sure that they will never get a return on investment.
vg would need to clean up the app, reduce the ingame currencies make up a real plan on what players can get for free, what will be money only, how player progression will work, develop at least a concept to battle toxicity and then give them more time. that is the only chance for vg to get traction again and make that money for the vc back in the future.

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Pretty certain that $19M funding round a year ago was intended to “give them more time” – to finish 5v5, expand the player base and therefore their income, and start returning some profits to their investors.

Not sure that worked out the way they expected …

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It’s obvious that they failed and now the game is in the “milking” phase, and mind you - not for an investors profit, but to minimise their loses.

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they had big dreams. maybe they still do. They attempted something no other company has ever achieved. A free to play platform with no advertising? that can somehow also earn money? unheard of. A company that puts the community first? and still somehow earn a profit? unheard of.

They put too much faith in the community to buy into the game. The Esports scene remains their biggest mistake. Their big dream comes crashing down hard and now, they’re resorting to keeping the dream alive by monetisation.

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I’m calling dibs on big boi Phinn and Lyra

I don’t think that’s true. The problem is that they failed to figure out a way to monetize the game early on – some way that didn’t hamper the growth of the game, which was their primary goal in the early days. If I were them, I would have created a subscription system – “VG Prime” or something. Price it low enough and include attractive rewards (exclusive skins, market discounts, sub-only perks like special avatar frames, etc.) and they’d have gotten plenty of subscribers, I’d bet. Plus, it’s an honest approach: you spend this, you get this in return.

Instead, when increased monetization became necessary, they turned to the godawful RNG chests. Those are inherently terrible, because they are DESIGNED to exploit most people’s poor grasp of statistics and probability. When people realize they’re being taken advantage of, it destroys trust and creates suspicion and ill-will. And to no one’s surprise, that’s exactly where SEMC stands today.

It’s right up there, that’s for sure.

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right now vg is number 56 in top free appstore game

they obviously decline, but a game that still in [top100 appstore free game] is not gonna fall soon…

That may be true in some regional stores, but it’s certainly not the case worldwide. It’s not even in the top 200 in the US store, for example.

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Ever heard of Warframe bro? A free to play game with all the content unlocked and no p2w. Even the cosmetics can be acquired for free. And negligible toxicity in community towards anyone.

Edit: I know this is off topic

Today was the first time I told someone how awesome VG is but recommended him not to play because of the uncertain future the game has at the moment.

Same in EU (124 if you search by free and strategic games, below games I have never heard about)

I’m adopting anka. Probably the only good thing that came out of post 5v5

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Silvernail was good (interesting).

SN is pretty unique, just not my style.

Yea he’s cool too

Adopting Glaive, Adagio and Kensei :blush:

well, that is also true. what i meant is, they expected exponential growth and players buying skins, heroes and whatever else you could spend ice on. These expectations are largely due to their gamble on the community being generous enough to spend their money. If you think about how they set up the game, The only real worthwhile purchases in the game was heroes and skins, which in order to keep a CASH FLOW, would require almost all players to buy in at a regular pace.

Thus, they gambled on the majority of their target to have the “i want it now” mentality and have a love of skins. (this is all pre - talents).

This is what i meant when they put faith into their community, or “target audience”. They stick with RNG chests because they know how annoying they are. " % level of annoyance = % chance of buying ice with real money" is the formula they’re relying on.

When they created this game, they targeted a very specific audience and never considered the wider gaming community. if you consider they way they opened their Esports scene, that was also a gamble. A gamble on what exactly? the exact same heart strings they hoped to pull with their skins - the “i want it now” generation.

They gambled that when they eventually pulled funding to those teams, they would be “addicted” to the scene and keep playing “for the fans” that was suppose to be generated from all those years.

How is it they could blindly gamble on so much? they’re in love with themselves. They love their graphics. they love the incredible game tap touch mechanics. They gambled on these 2 things to be good enough to keep players and pull players in.

Because of these 2 loves, they kept ignoring all the other flaws in the game, well, maybe not “ignore”… more like neglect. Just like that little ballerina boy who tries so hard to show how much he loves to dance and his parents keep pushing him towards boxing - which he hates - his growth is hindered.

The game is hindered much in the same way when they keep neglecting things that effect the core gaming experience, like bugs, U.I improvements. and as you suggested -

For their platform to work, they would’ve needed to pump out those skins at a much, much faster rate and make heroes much more expensive, I would’ve set them at least 16k glory and go up from there. So why make heroes cheap? i suspect they have quite a long list of heroes waiting to be released and it’s their way of maintaining player interest.

I believe that they initially thought player interest - measured in daily active logins - could be maintained in this way, but when they start getting bombarded with bugs to fix, complaints and all the problems they have, their “release heroes at a steady pace to keep interest” strategy starts to fall short.

They simply can’t keep up. The work load is too much and the talent in their team just takes forever to fix any bug.

So what does a good business do? “focus on what we do well” and ignore the things we don’t do well (like bug fixes). To this day, they are still relying on their amazing graphic designers to WOW their target audience into spending money, not because they want to, because it is the ONLY thing they know how to do WELL.

its very much like the bright lights of Las vegas. Flood the optic nerve with so much stimuli that it is overwhelming and hopefully, enough to persuade those big spenders.

Their problem now is that this is no longer their strong point. The competition is ramping up their graphics game. So what now? that is the multi-million dollar question that hopefully they’ll find an answer to.

As many has drawn the conclusion that every decision recently made is not for growth, but more to cut losses and sustain long enough to see if this game has a future.

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yeah, i have. it’s a winning platform due to the core experience being player VS A.i. They don’t suffer as many bugs and lag issues. Also the developer spent many countless hours on making each skin customizable. they also have much more room to expand, due to it being a PC platform.

Again, i have said this before, but it really is unfair to compare mobile devices and PC. so i shall stop here.

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VG prime sounds great, also instead of lazy ways to earn money (rng, hats, etc) - they should had focused on cool things one would spend some ICE on, like different teleport animations for every hero, different sound packs - customising the hero further after the skin change and in a cooler way than hats (ofc the materials thing in them is gold :smiley: ). There are so many ways to give cool stuff that people will want, instead of lazy or exploiting tactics.

Ofc now it’s too late as what we think of, really needs dev power to make it happen and we know the situation now.

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Warframe is coming to the Switch soon, fyi.

The line between “PC” and “mobile” is less and less distinct every month. The newest mobile devices have more graphics power than your average PC (i.e., ones not built specifically for gaming) these days.

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Your average pc is probably an old Core 2 Duo small form factor system running Windows XP or Windows 7.

Comparing an S7 or the latest iphone to decade old technology is kind of weird.

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Well, I was going to say your initial statement was ludicrous, as it should have been rather obvious that I’m referring to average new PCs, but then you also shot it down quite effectively yourself. I don’t have anything to add. :haha:

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