How to get us youngsters to play

[800nate800]

a commercial lured me in at 5 years old....

[Connery]

It's far easier for the player base to affect conversion (which is the important issue) than it is for the player base to affect advertising (which is not the important issue anyway).

Conversion is the meat, folks.

Advertising -- as it turns out -- is the parsley.

Think of it this way.

You have a race car.  You want it to go faster.  It is fouling plugs like crazy, causing misfires and loss of horsepower.

Probably not an effective choice to focus on the paint job. 

don't fully agree I get what you guys are saying about people to stay, but it's not all about conversion rate.

Lets say you have 1% Conversion rate but you're reaching 100 people. Thats obviously 1 person staying around, but if you reach 1000 people it's 10 people.

So imo it's a balance between both.   First and foremost you gotta reach people, once you get them in, you need to address the reason why they don't stick around.

[CptTrips]

don't fully agree I get what you guys are saying about people to stay, but it's not all about conversion rate.

Lets say you have 1% Conversion rate but you're reaching 100 people. Thats obviously 1 person staying around, but if you reach 1000 people it's 10 people.

So imo it's a balance between both.   First and foremost you gotta reach people, once you get them in, you need to address the reason why they don't stick around.

But what about cost?  Sure, without cost, advertise to million!  Get 0.05% conversion and and laugh your way to the bank. 

At some level of advertising cost, it becomes prohibitively expensive to acquire players that way.

You can find cheaper advertising mediums (which often [not always] suck that's why their are cheap), or increase your conversion rate so your cost per convert is reduced. 

The higher the player acquisition cost, the longer they have to keep an account before HTC breaks even on the cost it took to acquire them.  If they quit before their subscription has paid back the acquisition cost, HTC gets stuck with a net loss.

If you don't have good conversion rate, you could advertise yourself into bankruptcy.

 

[CptTrips]

opps edit flub.

I meant to say:

If you don't have good conversion and retention rate, you could advertise yourself into bankruptcy.

 

[Ciaphas]

opps edit flub.

I meant to say:

If you don't have good conversion and retention rate, you could advertise yourself into bankruptcy.

 

very true, back in the day this game advertised itself.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Connery]

opps edit flub.

I meant to say:

If you don't have good conversion and retention rate, you could advertise yourself into bankruptcy.

 

Or watch subs falling and bleed out slowly ending in bankruptcy anyway.

Doesn't seem theres any easy fix.

[TequilaChaser]

Since AH is full of ugly old men, it's gonna have to be shootemup....

ROFLMAO


TC

[CptTrips]

Doesn't seem theres any easy fix.

Nope.  If it were easy, we'd all own a MMOG.   

[TequilaChaser]

Hmm....

I think "communication" is a real problem across multiple generations and the further we age away from the history of WWII and how it all played out....

This game, itself, is approaching 20 years of existence fast..... How many other games can lay claim to this?



TC

[Vinkman]

  I used to show it to kids and their folks, but do to the adult content of the chat and cyber bullying. the folks decided that that was not the type of arena they want  their kids exposed to.

lol 

De-tuning 200 would have avoided that issue for both the demo and their game play.  But of course then you wouldn't have been able to take that pot shot at the community.

[Vinkman]

A re-post of a reply in a different thread but more appropriate here

 The game is basically the same game it has always been:
-Giant multi-player 3-way battle of air sea and land vehicles.
-objectives and action is determined only by the desires of the players in the arena.

But people come and go due to a variety of reasons...

1) health reasons
2) financial reasons
3) life priority reasons

The reason they are not quickly back filled with new players is a matter of conjecture. Coming from a house of gamers I feel the biggest factors are:
1) it takes a good gaming rig to play. by contrast a PS4 or XBOX is $400.
2) the competition for MMOs is much larger than it was when AH started and is growing everyday.
3) The game really required peripheries [stick, pedals, throttle, TrackIr or Oculus] to enjoy fully. this adds extra hundreds of dollars to the investment to play.
4) The game is very difficult.  To not get slaughtered on must learn the game, plane controls, flight, the view system, gunnery, and ACM.  This takes hundreds of hours and will only be attempted by die hard fans of the genre who come in with desire to master WWII air combat.
5) Fans of the genre are a shrinking demographic.  Fighter pilot news reports ended 40 years ago. kids want to be a virtual LeBron James now, not a virtual Chuck Yeager.  When was the last time you heard a "squeaker" in the arena? It's pretty rare. No it isn't because of 200 channel rants. it's because they have different idols now and the computer world allows everyone to put on the their virtual persona. This new generation doesn't know what a fighter pilot is.

So if you want the arena full you have to make the following changes (in my opinion):
1) Make a version for XBOX users that allows then to use an XBOX controller.
2) Allow cross platform play in the arena so XBOX players can play with PC players.
3) add an off-line story to play through that acts a training class so new players can learn the game, controls, and the skill set to play in the arena.

 

[Puma44]

Self motivation and determination goes a long way. 

[Spikes]

I think a lot of it has to do with interest in the genre. Sure, you can say World of Tanks, Ships, Planes, WT all have millions of players. However, each game has a different scenario:
Aces High attracts people who have an interest in WWII.
Other games generate possible interest in WWII based on the game itself.

[Shuffler]

Self motivation and determination goes a long way. 

This!

[turt21]

I opened up "Aces High Radio" on facebook last year and posted bits and pieces of "news" going on live time in the game.


Aces High Radio is hiding on FB. Is it still there somewhere?