DoDe wrote:
This means that the interest is very small... It's a disaster for Novalogic...
Well I cant comment on the actual figures because I havent bought it either but I guess the only way to judge is by the number of people actually playing online. Does anyone know the answer to that?
If it has bombed though there is no surprise there. Novalogic no longer has an independent online community to push the product for them. They could never see just how important that community was to their success and I can assure them it was very important. Wether it was one of the larger sites or a site as small as a squad site they all had a very important role to play simply by keeping the customers interested and Novalogic fractured the whole community and let it slide into oblivion. The community was the major factor in the success of BHD for instance as it was a major factor as to why Joint Operations bombed. You all remember the fight with JO but the idiots wouldnt listen. F*ck it seemed we the community sites and our members knew what the public wanted more than Novalogic and that is a shocking comment to make but it is true. JO was such an abortion of a game from beginning to end that it was the catalyst that made me close down DFMax etc. I got sick of banging my head off a brick wall with the prats at Calabasas. It frustrated me so much that they had no inkling as to what they should have been doing. As a result I fell out with the assholes and shut it all down. I had had enough of them by this stage.
What is even crazier is we all did this promotion for free. We the community were all the best PR outlet Novalogic had but they could not see it. Instead of employing over paid useless PR managers they should have saved their money on those salaries and given as much support as possible to the community sites instead. They should have had a PR person whose role was dedicated to working with the community sites as I believe the community was the most important PR tool Novalogic had but the wankers in the suits couldnt see how important the community sites were.
In the end the community went for too long without any support from Novalogic and it simply all faded away. The PR gurus put far more importance on the likes of IGN etc and regarded the supporting community as a nuisance that they judged should be treated with contempt. It was the community that built up the interest in their games but they could not see it.
To review a game at time of launch for instance I had to obtain a pirate version to allow us to review it. Due to the regional lottery regarding distribution us Euro's often had to wait weeks before we could buy a Retail Copy and it looked a poor show if the larger community sites could not even comment or review a game even though its visitors were already playing it. It made the community site look bad hence I had to go down the piracy route. I brought this up with more than one PR manager and not one could see my point. Only Marcus in the end tried to address it slightly.
Novalogic were pretty shocking with their cooperation with community sites and if and when they do finally close the doors for the last time it might finally sink in but their heads are so far up their own arses even then I doubt it.
