Wolcen Hype Release!

^People seem to forget this game has had seven years in the making of hype.

I think what we currently see is a crunch of all that anticipation.

I would also argue they utilized the "promotion machine" a lot more heavily then GGG ever dreamed of in its initial push to success.
I think people rightfully claim PoE wouldn't be what it is today if D3 wasn't a "failure" for the arpg deep dive crowd.

I literally had to search between dozen of streamer video's to find a few that werent bought promotional add video's.

I don't even think the infrastructure was solid enough to do this when GGG launched at least not to the extend it currently can and with the current reach. It has bassicaly become an oiled machine in the last five years to funnel and directly "attack" players attention.

I don't particularly disagree but i find the false equivalence comparisons sort of weird as if you can control for a single factor and pretend everything else is static.(i know your not attempting to do that, but the polarized and binary positions in threads like this naturally boil down to that)

I think if they play their cards right we have another solid game to look forward too which highly likely will receive expansions in the future.
Alternatively they will go the online route and attempt a competitive "raid" like ranking system as far as i can tell.
Or a mixture of both those angles.

I like choice and competition so as a consumer im glad either way.

Peace,

-Boem-

^ I dunno.

It's sort of sounds like you are saying their excellent marketing and promotion was a negative (which is kinda weird unless I misunderstood the point)

The reality is comparisons were going to happen. The similarities of Wolcen, D3, and PoE slap you in the face. It's not unreasonable to make those leaps imo.

Again, Wolcen had the far better start. PoE has set the bar extremely high with their live sevice commitment.

Let's see what Wolcen does.

And I totally agree. Competition, choice, and variety are great for industry, and consumers. Pushing devs to stay on top of their game, normally leads to better products.

Game is so good that it's Reddit is >50% of "WoLcEn FaShIoN".

They simply promised way,waaaay more than they could ever hope to deliver. This game reminds me of no man's sky. It could be good,in about 2 or so years,with constant patches and fixes.

The fact that so many jumped on the hype train should be also quite worrying to GGG, unless POE 2 will be the mother of all hack&slash looters, a lot of people will flee to other games of this genre.

But the right game has to appear,wolcen does not even come close to be considered as a contender,as something that those who play diablo and poe would actually consider in the long run.

I mean the game devs themselves do not understand the passive tree and what the skills should do in the passive tree. No joke on that, they simply can not give any explanation as to why certain skills act the way they do,because they do not understand what the skill is supposed to do in the first place.

They bit way more than they could ever hope to chew, and it shows. They should have kept it clean and simple,and add stuff as the months go by, instead they went overboard,released a completely broken game that can in the best circumstance be considered as an alpha.

"

DarthSki44 wrote:

^ I dunno.

It's sort of sounds like you are saying their excellent marketing and promotion was a negative (which is kinda weird unless I misunderstood the point)

The reality is comparisons were going to happen. The similarities of Wolcen, D3, and PoE slap you in the face. It's not unreasonable to make those leaps imo.

Again, Wolcen had the far better start. PoE has set the bar extremely high with their live sevice commitment.

Let's see what Wolcen does.

And I totally agree. Competition, choice, and variety are great for industry, and consumers. Pushing devs to stay on top of their game, normally leads to better products.

No i was pointing it out as a counterweight to your praise of their launch.

Different era, different developed tools for marketing etc

I think those are false comparisons similar to how people judge the past history by the standards of today.

I would be a lot more interested in how much both company's spend on PR and then comparing the results for example.

Peace,

-Boem-

"

Boem wrote:

"

DarthSki44 wrote:

^ I dunno.

It's sort of sounds like you are saying their excellent marketing and promotion was a negative (which is kinda weird unless I misunderstood the point)

The reality is comparisons were going to happen. The similarities of Wolcen, D3, and PoE slap you in the face. It's not unreasonable to make those leaps imo.

Again, Wolcen had the far better start. PoE has set the bar extremely high with their live sevice commitment.

Let's see what Wolcen does.

And I totally agree. Competition, choice, and variety are great for industry, and consumers. Pushing devs to stay on top of their game, normally leads to better products.

No i was pointing it out as a counterweight to your praise of their launch.

Different era, different developed tools for marketing etc

I think those are false comparisons similar to how people judge the past history by the standards of today.

I would be a lot more interested in how much both company's spend on PR and then comparing the results for example.

Peace,

-Boem-

To be fair, PoE still exists now, so I dont know how a "different era" applies (unless we are only talking about a singular launch event)

PoE league and expansion marketing & press tour hasnt produced results like Wolcen's launch. Perhaps GGG should grab some lessons here. Focus more on content creators & community, than article embargos with PC Gamer?

Idk this isnt my area of expertise, but I would imagine Chris and GGG were like "Really?" seeing the crazy numbers Wolcen was putting out on steam and twitch.

Again, perhaps this is fools gold, and a flash in the pan. Wolcen has to sustain to be on PoE's level, but I think there is no denying this was a good start (despite what you might read) overall.

Thats why i mentioned the 7 year run up to this launch. Your bassicaly crunching a lot of anticipation in this release event.

PoE's initial launch didn't have this anticipation level or build up, neither did it have this amount of visibility in the gaming community because of PR.

For example, how many people only became aware of PoE after the D3 failure and were totally oblivious to it's existence prior to this event.

As far as i recall they had one high profile streamer with market
relevance(kripp) advertising their platform, while wolcen has around 30 or so with similar or more viewcounts then kripp had at the time.

And the different era applies because you specifically stated "wolcens launch" so the comparison is with "poe's launch".

The real question will be if this is an elation spike as a result of the seven year build up or if its sustained relevance in the years to come.
It will be interesting to put the total participation counts next to one another in like five years time.

I agree with you that the launch was better then poe's launch as far as baseline numbers go, i simply think your comparing apples and oranges when doing that excercise.
I don't see a comparison thats viable at all when we consider context.

Peace,

-Boem-

"

Boem wrote:

Thats why i mentioned the 7 year run up to this launch. Your bassicaly crunching a lot of anticipation in this release event.

PoE's initial launch didn't have this anticipation level or build up, neither did it have this amount of visibility in the gaming community because of PR.

For example, how many people only became aware of PoE after the D3 failure and were totally oblivious to it's existence prior to this event.

As far as i recall they had one high profile streamer with market
relevance(kripp) advertising their platform, while wolcen has around 30 or so with similar or more viewcounts then kripp had at the time.

And the different era applies because you specifically stated "wolcens launch" so the comparison is with "poe's launch".

The real question will be if this is an elation spike as a result of the seven year build up or if its sustained relevance in the years to come.
It will be interesting to put the total participation counts next to one another in like five years time.

I agree with you that the launch was better then poe's launch as far as baseline numbers go, i simply think your comparing apples and oranges when doing that excercise.
I don't see a comparison thats viable at all when we consider context.

Peace,

-Boem-

I suppose what I was getting at is that obviously Wolcen developed "hype" and marketed organically more than PoE does with their content releases (and their launch). Clearly there is a market appetite that PoE is missing, for whatever reason.

Also I dont really buy into the 7 year hype concept. Wolcen wasnt on my radar in 2013, like at all. They did a very good job leading up to launch imo.

Anyways it's a moot point if Wolcen screws up, or doesnt service the game well. (I hope they do)

^My point about the seven year run up is that probably a lot of people returned for this initial launch that in the past seven years bought into the game emotionally and monetary.

For example, go over some wolcen add video's and see how many of them mention having played this game a few years ago and being suprised about the improvements etc

All the people they lost in the past seven years as time went on probably got triggered by this launch to all come back at the same time.
Thats why i think its a relevant factor when discussing this amount of player participation.

It's like having a seven year long "down-low" pr campaign and then signalling to everybody "if you left us in the past, now is the time to get back in".

Nothing wrong with that btw, im not particularly making a judgement call on their PR strategy. Just pointing out its entirely different to how PoE launched initially.

I think we roughly agree btw :p im simply not a fan of creating comparisons between PoE and wolcen to highlight the success of one or the other.
I think the positive arguments or negative ones can be made on their own merit without detracting from the other game and forcing a dichotomy.

We will get a better picture in roughly six months i think, i imagine by that time the players who came for the hype will have left leaving only the core.

Peace,

-Boem-

"

Boem wrote:

Thats why i mentioned the 7 year run up to this launch. Your bassicaly crunching a lot of anticipation in this release event.

PoE's initial launch didn't have this anticipation level or build up, neither did it have this amount of visibility in the gaming community because of PR.

For example, how many people only became aware of PoE after the D3 failure and were totally oblivious to it's existence prior to this event.

As far as i recall they had one high profile streamer with market
relevance(kripp) advertising their platform, while wolcen has around 30 or so with similar or more viewcounts then kripp had at the time.

And the different era applies because you specifically stated "wolcens launch" so the comparison is with "poe's launch".

The real question will be if this is an elation spike as a result of the seven year build up or if its sustained relevance in the years to come.
It will be interesting to put the total participation counts next to one another in like five years time.

I agree with you that the launch was better then poe's launch as far as baseline numbers go, i simply think your comparing apples and oranges when doing that excercise.
I don't see a comparison thats viable at all when we consider context.

Peace,

-Boem-

It did,believe me it did,the anticipation was there,there weren't that many hack&slash games out there. You had a few titles like sacred,titan quest,but nothing since diablo 2 that could offer you some "debth" so to speak. So the hype was there, maybe you don't remember,or you haven't played POE since the very beginning,but the hype was there.

But there were quite a few differences. 1. Expectations of a game of this genre were not THAT high. 2. The dev team did not promise you everything, like they did with wolcen. 3. The game actually delivered on the promises they did make, while the launch was not perfect,it was not even close to the shitsandwitch you had with wolcen. You had bugs,you had issues,but at least you could simply play and enjoy the game.

I have followed POE since I got the first hint back in 2009 about this game, and while it still has a lot of issues. You just can't compare wolcen's failed launch to POE, they are like worlds apart.