Theryon Wars: Another Planet Partner bites the dust ?

There's tons of publishing options available to push your small game to. Steam is an obvious one, and doing things properly means you will also have the option to push your game to different platforms (consoles/mobile, etc.). The upcoming PS4 as well as the XBone (XBox One) are heavily pushing for self-publishing for indies on their new consoles.

Signing up with MA greatly reduces your options, as your work will only be available on whatever MA decides it can run on. After 10 years of "proving" their model, MA managed to have a player-base that's so small that the MA corporate numbers for the last few years have shown nothing but red.

At the beginning of the year, there were less than 25k active accounts in EU. A lot of money, time, and effort has been spent on advertising, and I somehow do not see any major improvements.

The platform simply fails to "stick" with users, for whatever reason. New graphics, missions, vehicles, achievements, and pretty much everything else MA tried failed to make a large lasting impact.

That really something you'd want to sign yourself up for? Especially knowing that he contract you'll sign is ridiculously one-sides, and basically gives MA the ability to shit all over you and your project while they at the same time compete with you (Calypso is *still* run by a MA daughter company, and Jan's son Kim is responsible for design/development of it)?

 

Which claims are you talking about?

The 25k active users? That was brought up during a PP meeting earlier this year. I cannot reveal how this reached my ear (It s *not* Lykke; she did not attend that meeting, and if she did, or would attend such meetings, she'd not reveal information released in it to me) for obvious reasons.

Edit: Actually, the number quoted at the meeting was 18k active accounts, where an active account is defined as an account with activity in the last 30 days (activity meaning anything where PEDs are transfered) if my memory serves me well. I upped the number somewhat to account for the ad sense campaign MA is running.

The contract being ridiculously one-sided? Try and obtain a copy of a contract, and read it yourself. It essentially means the PP places themselves at the mercy of MA, depending on MA to implement the systems designed by the PP, and hoping that they don't fuck up the design to such an extent it becomes unusable. At the same time, MA will sneak in every possible fee they can and deduct it from the PP payout, and will leave the PP to ward off any results of MA fucking up a release.

 

Just the fact that a PP contract is under NDA should show these contracts are odd beasts.

 

active account = performing at least one microtransaction whithin the last 30 days

Which means a 10 minutes old player firing a given weapon once in a tutorial area such as Crystalline Cavern would be counted as an active account.

Of course we could be completely wrong here but maybe someone can correct/confirm? Jan (Welter Timkrans)? David (Simmonds)?

 

Quoting you but not neccessarily addressing you specifically.

There's definitely no contract or any kind of agreement with anyone.

The Project Ion article is the first EP created frontpage article dealing with another game in EP's history. The option to discuss other games besides EU is imo a plus.

And over the years EP has sure done a lot to promote EU in various ways. Certainly EP staff has accumulated 1000+ hours of promoting EU.

People are opinionated or even biased and that's good. A forum is ultimately made by the people voicing their opinions, no matter how ridiculous, biased, dumb or whatever other people may find them. A broad variety of opinions is what EP should promote. Imo ;) So please keep going and point out facts where they are missing.

You sure find a significant amount of posts critisizing MindArk but that might have reasons, for example:

• not every place allows people to critisize so they come to EP to do it while keeping their non-critisizing posts elsewhere, which is a little unfortunate
• from the beginning EntropiaPlanets was embracing the idea of multiple themed planets so there still might be more of a planets focus than a platform focus remaining
• MindArk might indeed suck, people might be given a glimpse of inside info from planet partner & MA (ex-) employees and other insiders from time to time which suggests blatant injustice, nepotism, broken promises and a misarable performance from MA's side, so from time to time there might be incidents causing them not being able to stand it (injustice, favouritism, broken promises, ...) any longer and they might vent a little bit...

However, most important, like said: A forum is the people voicing their opinions, bring them. If you have suggestions how EP can be improved or what EP should focus on please let us know (http://www.entropiaplanets.com/forums/about-entropiaplanets.2/).

 

Let me add:

If someone has an appropriate (quality, lengths, actuality) fact-based pro-MA pro-Caly pro-whatever article please bring it. We'll put it on the frontpage and promote it as good as we can.

Personally I'd be happy to read an extensive review of the Cyclops Depths instance, missions, creatures, ...

 

I think you hit the nail right on the head there. We as EP and I think all of the staff in person have been trying to contact MA for years now and as far as I know the only communication we got from them was telling us we were wrong about the fall-down of Theryon Wars about 1,5 years ago (link).

We are more then willing to work with MindArk the same way we do with the PP's, but because of their policy to not work with anyone other then Jason Peterson there is hardly any news to publish about them and even less positive news (makes you wonder if he might have one of those special contract Tass was mistakenly talking about).


Tass, Airboy said contact not contRact

In which case he is right, we have contacts with the PP's, not sure if they are that special though, unless he means the contact between Lykke and Peter, which is very special I'm sure ;)

 

Yeah we know about the buzz and the annual report, but it has happened more then once that Kim posted important info about EU on the Calypso forum and we, the players that do not go there, had to find out by word of mouth.

Sure they can not post their stuff on all the forums, but why post Entropia Universe related stuff ONLY on the forum of one PP (Calypso) I know it is MA's forum, but what about the players on other players that do not go to PCF?

It seems that MA has only 2 options in communications most of the time, trough PCF or not at all. I mean, why not use Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or a newsletter for EU related stuff so everyone is able to see it. Isn't it the job of the community manager to spread the news. Oh wait there is none at MA, because we, the community are not MA's customers, the PP's are.

The communication has become somewhat better compared to the past, but if you ask hard questions on the forum, you either get ignored, banned or the post removed, where other PP have the balls to do interviews or even talk to us on live radio.

 

Sure. My company (Unity) has an NDA prohibiting alpha testers (a select group of customers invited to test-check releases before they go-live) from disclosing the specific features in these builds.

When I was a consultant, I had to sign numerous NDAs for customers when I touched sensitive data (which was a lot, considering my line of work was database administration/consultancy and business intelligence).

An NDA typically is meant to ensure that the other party will not disclose any trade secrets, or sensitive customer data (in my case, financial or health records, mostly).

But an NDA prohibiting you to discuss a contract? I never ever heard of that. There must be some mighty trade secrets in there, as apparently even people who never signed the contract are apparently not allowed to disclose the contents.