Saturday, May 31, 2008

Making money ...

... is legitimate. I always get confused, when we are accused of making money. Why are people accusing us of being successful? Everybody wants to be successful in what he is doing. When you're in school, you wanna get good grades, when you meet a girl, you like to hear "You are a lovely guy". Well, when you do business, one of the key indicators is "sales". You're having a crappy product, you don't sell it. You listen to your customers and design the product according to their needs, you sell more. Is this kind of behaviour THAT condemnable?
No, we are not a students project anymore. We are a company. This basically means two things:
1. We are professionals
2. We have to earn money
The good comes with the bad. The bad part about it is that we have to think about success, and not only fun anymore. I have to admit that we evaluate projects.
The good part is that we can offer customer support, regular updates and not to forget a certain probability of not having to shut down your favourite game next week due to a shortage of funds.
So, to conclude my Saturday night rant: Whoever posts comments like "You only revamp Rookgard to make it more appealing to new customers and to make more money". Yes. You are right. Don't state the obvious. My advice to you is: Take marketing lessons. You obviously have a talent for it.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

out of all the good you put into something, of course something bad might happen. that's life.

from what cipsoft used to be, to what cipsoft now is, and now has [tibia], being successful seems fine to me. you need to live, and so do we.. some people just live off of tibia..

there will always be one person who doesn't like something, either to be different or they really don't like it. there are also the people who complain just to fit in.

from what i know, probably 75% of the people who really complain about how "bad" cipsoft really is, really don't feel that way.

keep on moving forward and keep on being successful

Anonymous said...

I wouldn't worry too much about it Merc, Peoples always wants a reason to complain and that "They just want to make money" excuse comes back too often. Either it is simply per lack of knowledge, either it is because they lack of valid arguements.

Once it comes to a compagny , YES making money is a reason. Like you said, you have peoples that depends on the compagny because it is their source of income.

Tibia as itself already holds several hunting grounds. It is merely a matter of using them and walking over the "i want a big spawn" ego. If you would only listen to your customers, you would end up with (exageration warning) 300 venore dragon lair, 12 orc forts, 15 towers of djinns, 36 PoH ... and i pass.

Several cities needed a new look and this is what you are giving. While some don't bother about looks (since their ways of playing simply consist in turning a bot on and going afk) others do care about how the game looks like.

You cannot please everyone because each players have their own reasons to play and their own desires/needs in the game.

But i do agree that it becomes angering to hear those kinds of complains... ~pats~

But like i said before, see it this way: Tibia is beating records over records. Getting more players, getting more of them to get premium accounts.

If you guys would be doing so "badly" (according to those that complains) , you wouldn't get more players as days goes by. So keep it up like you do, you are doing fine so far.

And as hard/harsh that this might sound, there is a thousand other game out there. If some players are not happy with what they get on tibia, why do they bother staying? Leave and go find better. It is as simple as that and it will leave me more hunting grounds <33333

Take care! ~hugs~

~Lulu

Anonymous said...

It seems that you think in the short term then..

Sure, CIP is about making money, but to make money, you need to make a quality product that attracts customers to invest in it, and to keep investing.

CIP's refusal to expand it's resources, to keep margins low and profit high, has meant that their product, Tibia has failed to keep up with the growth of the community.

Ok, CIP developed Rookguard and made the game more friendly to beginners, which is fine. But it is only a temporary solution.

You can't just focus on bringing people into the game and not developing the game further, because then it will be like a bucket with a hole scenario. You get lots of new customers, but you lose lots of old customers.

Someone like me has paid 5 yrs worth of premium account. CIP should be focusing on keeping the customers they have before they try to get more, because they obviously find it too hard to do both at the same time.

It is insulting to old customers that you ignore us and try to bring in new players. And you can argue that CIP is a business and needs to make money, but the fact is -I as a customer feel let down- and surely that is the most important thing? Without customers you wont make money, and with let down customers you wont make any more money.

There are 15yr old kids making OT servers which have more development than in a single update on Tibia.

But the biggest factor which drives people away is getting bored of Tibia or being bullied away from Tibia. And these are things CIP can address.

We don't want more map, monsters or quests, because we get bored of those after 2 weeks of an update and then we have to cope with killing monsters repetitively for 6months till the next update.

We want better customer service, ways to prevent a single guild on a server from bullying hundreds of others off it.

Even a simple proposal like changing exiva has been completely ignored by CIP, which would reduce powerabusing and bullying vastly.

Anonymous said...

Well they are giving older players something to do, did you read about the new high level quest? New "best" items are always nice!

Anonymous said...

I really hope that Cipsoft is getting bigger and bigger, with more money they can hire more employes to make the updates even bigger. That would be wonderfull

also CipSoft should consider power abusing a big threat, this week I made a level 51 elite knight quit tibia just because I power abused(he refused to give me his boots of haste so I killed him)

There has been so much power abusing on nova, many people have quited and random high levels are pking just because they are tired of tibia.

hopefully CipSoft will deal with this.