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Operation: Make KAG Great Again

Discussion in 'Suggestions & Ideas' started by Duplolas, May 25, 2018.

Mods: Rainbows
  1. Duplolas

    Duplolas So Sad

    Messages:
    917
    Why am I still here? Just to suffer? Every night, I can feel my leg… and my arm… even my fingers. The game I’ve lost… the comrades I’ve lost… won’t stop hurting… It’s like they’re all still there. You feel it, too, don’t you.

    First off I would like to just say hello to everyone who somehow still remembers me! I used to play KAG a long time ago and it was all I thought about for the longest of time. I was arguably the best player in the game for a while, while also being the most annoying on the forums lol. I was around all the time trying to suggest balance changes and other additions to the game. I remember like 3 of them actually made it in along with a few custom heads from the show Gurren Lagann. I was such a huge weeb in high school lol.

    Anyways, KAG was genuinely one of the best gaming experiences I had growing up. What THD did with this game will be remembered by few, but never forgotten. It is incredible how much I yearn for a game like KAG nowadays.

    I wish that experience could be revived somehow. I looked at the Steamcharts and it looks like you guys keep enough people on to play on like, one server. That's great and it is all you all really need since this game never really had that big of a following to begin with, I just wish there was more.

    I don't know. Maybe it is nostalgia talking or something, but I think KAG deserves better than just old fans keeping a small flame burning.

    That's why I think THD should make KAG free. You guys should slap together some low effort, bullshit update with lots of emotes and skins and shit in honor of it now being free, and also set up a streamer tournament for a cash prize.

    Streamers will play any game tournament nowadays that both 1. has a money payout and 2. has other streamers playing it. I mean, for fucks sake, Radical Heights had one that had an insane turn out. I mean, I get it. It is a battle royale game, but it was shit. Everyone knew it was shit. Yet they still played because of reasons 1 and 2.

    Radical Heights has 300 people playing it on average daily, just because of the 10k streamer tournament marketing they did. In this over saturated market and with how bad that game is that is absolutely insane. Just get some sponsors like they did and maybe you all will only pay a few hundred out of pocket.

    Now look. I know you're thinking it is crazy to do any of this. KAG is old. Let it die. Etc Etc. But come on. Sure you might be out a few hundred for the tournament, but think of the exposure bucks, and the money you will make from those exposure bucks. Think of the flood of players coming back to the servers and how good that will feel as devs. Even if they all eventually leave and that $1k only gets you a couple of months with active players before things are reset. It would have to feel amazing.

    If you all decide to take what will very likely be my last suggestion, let me know if you need volunteers for anything. My friends and I gotchu. <3

    Anyways, thank you all again for the amazing memories and friends I got to make thanks to your game. Seriously, without you guys I wouldn't have met my best friend of 6 years. You all are incredible devs and I wish you all the best.
     
    Last edited: May 25, 2018
    FG, Pineapple, bunnie and 3 others like this.
  2. epsilon

    epsilon Assonist THD Team Forum Moderator Donator Tester
    1. Gather Oceania
    2. KAG World Cup 2018

    Messages:
    506
    Although I don’t know anything about the streamer tournament, it’s clear that these livestreamers participated because it was another one of the many battle royals games out there. It has the same mechanics as most other games of the same genre and it is easy to get used to (and is free!). KAG, however, is a unique game which has a somewhat steep learning curve. It’s not the sort of game a person can adapt skills from other games they’ve played because there’s none like it. To add to this, if you want to attract these large streamers you’ll have to wave a fair bit of money in their faces to make it worth their while considering what they make from streaming popular games. This is the furthest from the ideal solution considering the current state of things. I do agree that something ‘crazy’ has to be done in hopes of gaining a larger player base, but this is definitely out of range.
     
    Last edited: May 26, 2018
    Koveltskiis and Cruxiat like this.
  3. Duplolas

    Duplolas So Sad

    Messages:
    917
    After double checking, they actually pumped $120k into that tournament. Ridiculous considering they didn't even use private servers and stream snipers ruined the tournament lmfao.

    So maybe a streamer tournament won't work. It should still be tried though. There is no harm in reaching out to these guys and seeing if there is any interest at all. It is one of very few options there are to get the word out about this game.

    As of writing this post, I also thought up another idea. Get KAG on the Twitch Prime platform. They give out free games every so often, but you have to download them through their app. Every single person with Twitch Prime will get the game for free, as well as get a notification that they have it as a new reward.

    Then THD could offer KAG as a limited sale / for free on Steam for a couple of weeks to get the new players even more interested in staying by the player count being so high. Free as in you download it once during a certain time period and you get it free forever, but eventually that time period ends.

    With that all said, simply making KAG free could bring in a lot of new players. Yes, they won't make any money off it, but at this point the exposure bucks are worth more than the possible money THD loses out on by making it free. I mean, I don't know if that is true. I am just assuming. However, I think it is pretty safe to assume that this is the case.
     
    Last edited: May 25, 2018
  4. epsilon

    epsilon Assonist THD Team Forum Moderator Donator Tester
    1. Gather Oceania
    2. KAG World Cup 2018

    Messages:
    506
    Have you read through other threads on the same topic, specifically the devs responses? Don't you think the devs have thought through all the possible solutions yet? The devs don't just sit back confused wondering why their game doesn't have many players. I agree something needs to happen but it should be a long-term solution rather than the occasional sale every so often which brings short surges of players.
     
  5. bunnie

    bunnie Haxor Tester

    Messages:
    1,319
  6. Asu

    Asu THD Team THD Team Forum Moderator

    Messages:
    1,580
    If KAG was made free, income would be near-zero, even taking DLCs into account. I don't have the stats but DLCs didn't seem to be a huge win, a little help at best, especially as THD has costs other than investing money into KAG development (i.e. server hosting, etc). That would kill the available development time, besides having to deal with new problems, i.e. widespread hacking and griefing.
    Besides that game is battle royale which is a very trending genre. KAG's genre isn't anymore.
    Yes, we definitively all want to have more players. I doubt it'll be easy if possible to reverse the curve, but if anything, making KAG free is probably not the solution.
     
    mcrifel and AgentHightower like this.
  7. Geti

    Geti Please avoid PMing me (poke a mod instead) THD Team Administrator Global Moderator

    Messages:
    3,730
    Hey, Duplolas is back. You're welcome for the game :thumbs_up:

    We're exploring all options for the game's viability, as has been mentioned a few times above.

    Our main concern with any "f2p" model is that we need sustained income to offset server hosting in what is ultimately a multiplayer game, and we don't attract a lot of long-term players currently. As it is, people buy in, and short term players support the game in monetary terms just as much as long term players (if not more, as they don't really "cost" much). If that was removed, we would definitely see a marked increase in the amount of people playing, but we're not sure if we can actually safely offset the increased cost associated with that, even with the current decreased dev budget (in terms of hours).

    The DLC so far has definitely hardly paid for itself, let alone come close to covering the game costs. We'll see if that changes with a more attractive cosmetic DLC in the works, but I'm only so optimistic. It'd literally have to do between 30 and 60 times better (depending on the week) than the previous dlc to be on par with current sales, and ongoing DLC in general would have to do better than that to sustain the associated development costs.

    Either way, the game starting to make a loss is a sure-fire way to "kill" it in terms of us having to pull hosting, and if we went "free" there's certainly no way the gaming community at large would accept us going back to a paid-only model.

    There's close to zero chance of a paid streamer tournament with prizes. It's simply not a sensible budget move at any scale, certainly not at the >$100k range, and the game is not in any "hot" genre. There might be a shitload of competition in the battle royale space, but there's also a lot of players and media interest.

    That said, MM is definitely talking about changing the funding model, and once we have more to say about that the forums and discord will be the first to know.
     
    Clev, bunnie and mcrifel like this.
  8. Element_Paladin

    Element_Paladin Bison Rider Tester
    1. Aphelion's Roleplay

    Messages:
    64
    if anything ever works, i might like... come back again

    but in all seriousness, most of the devs -or all of them- are working contracts by now, since kag already isn't giving enough sales. come on, it wasn't ever really a titan of a game (despite having many ardent devotees), and why have it drain even more money than it probably already is, considering the costs to keep up official servers in three different regions for several different game modes. putting in a cash prize is a big bargain, and my bets are that the devs aren't getting the biggest profits from freelance work. above stated, there are plenty of ardent devotees that would be willing to hold something similar, and as long as they have proof that the creators of the game support the fund and agree with the stream, it's possible. but like i said, geti isn't a colossus that can just hold up an entire game on his own, so asking him to pool in a bunch of slow-earned money just for you -while not denouncing your worth- is not at all worth it.

    however, i do agree with the whole 'update' thing. i left mainly because i realized that there's so much of the game that players need to go into the files to access. server hosting and emote bindings being much more easily accessible would be tremendous help for improving the community (emphasis of the ease of private server hosting, rather than having a bunch of cheap-skate servers with half-lives on the master list), giving people an option to simply invite their friends via steam for small hosting, because no one really buys from native anymore in my opinion.

    in the end, my general statement is to not make the devs pay for what you want from a game that's on life support.
     
Mods: Rainbows