Originally Posted by
AvidLegend
Dear Samhayne,
This post is going to be an accumulation of my ideas for Pocket Legends future and responses to your very much appreciated thread post.
First off it is good to finally get a better picture of what you and your staff are dealing with. 35 people isnt a lot of people on staff to manage your many games. In our mind spacetime games has much more than 35 developers on staff and are just busy with other games. This gives a better idea of how spread thin you are. However, this still only proves that either your company is making bad choices if its not able to fully staff all of its games. Your revolutionary game providing a flawlessly worldwide synced MMO platform with in game purchase must have made you a lot of money during its booming years and the money wasn't spent properly. Have you thought of making your studio public, selling stocks of spacetime games. I looked and was unable to find any fiscal reports on your company to really gauge the accuracy of my accusations, but your response to this specific response will interest me. Do you have a financial sustainability representative in your company? Might need to hire one. I actually know someone with those exact qualifications looking for a job as well btw message me for contact information if interested.
Okay this is the sensitive issue. Many of your dedicated fans view this as your biggest mistake. You had three successful games that were created on platforms that couldn't produce the type of game Arcane Legends would become. Many players do enjoy Arcane Legends, but what if you would have simply focused on your already existing, and successful games and brought them to the new game engines offered by the newer mobile operating systems? You would still have all the dedicated players you have playing Pocket Legends daily still, all the players that abandoned Pocket Legends to play the new Arcane Legends would still be dedicated to Pocket Legends, and all the players that tried to stay loyal to Spacetime Games but have left over the past undeveloped year would still be here. You would have one-three super games instead of 5+ mediocre games praying for the success of one to keep the other online. You have discussed how you believe that bringing Pocket Legends up to the new platform would take so much work you mine as well make a new game, but you don't realize that you have created a reputation of little customer loyalty at this point. Even Arcane Legends players have the feeling that one of your new games will be a success and you will eventually abandon them as well. This isn't the kind of reputation a successful game developing company should have, but ultimately all choices are up to you the developement team not us the players. We won't always get what we want and we know that. But imagine this...
My solution: (Not 100% sure if this will work)
I went to school for and currently hold a degree in computer systems engineering and have dabbled in graphics design and game design during my studies. Your platform might limit you and prevent this from being a possibility but if you can I believe you will be very lucrative if you can successfully pull it off.
Yes, revamping all of Pocket Legends will be a huge endeavor. However, if you continue to spread your 35 members over more and more new games you will not survive as a company. Your thought process is correct that the release of a new game comes with a lot of hype and a lot of new players that pay the bills. However, you are shooting yourself in the foot if you already cant support all your games and you continue to focus on making more.
Solution: Completely upgrade Pocket Legends. This will be a very difficult and lengthy process but overall will pay off and here is why. If you upgrade the graphics, and bring back support you can release Pocket Legends on the app store again as lets say Pocket Legends 2.0 (name doesn't matter just saying). The hype from the release will give you the new player demand you desire, your already loyal players will of course be brought over, and your fans that abandoned Pocket Legends for Arcane Legends may very well come back and create the new money bags game you desire. With my game design background (though limited and not done professionally) this is possible. You can bring all maps, expansions, items, characters, achievements, quests, etc over to the new platform and reuse a ton of your old coding to make it easier on yourself. The point wouldn't be to make a new game but upgrade your old one. You can't deviate from the currently style of game play Pocket Legends offers because you will lose your dedicated members. By this I specifically mean making it Platinum Dependant like Arcane Legends. Basically a graphic overhaul and possibly an expansion soon after. Considering Pocket Legends is only at 76 cap right now as well there is still plenty of room for future expansions to make this effort worth it over the long run. Examples of this method working for another company would be Jagex's major success after releasing their first platform of runescape classic and upgrading to runescape and then again revamping to runescape combat evolve and now yet again they are releasing runescape 3. This is an example of a company staying dedicated to their player community and focussing on their single game keeping it competitive with other games by continually updating its graphics options. Learn from their success and your own successes and failures and please come back to glory.
I personally over my 3 years of playing this game have spent $1000 and a ridiculous amount of time leveling, questing, helping the community both in game and on the forums, and my greatest fear is that eventually this game will be dropped all together. And considering you felt it was necessary to post this thread many other players within this community feel exactly the same way. That should be your sign right there.
Please let me know what you think. Also do you take volunteer game developers? I have several hours I can dedicate a week.
Sincerely AvidLegend
Regarding your thoughts about manpower, I'll just say, "if only it was that easy" and just leave it at that. Love ya, mean it.
Bookmarks