Lets Be Honest

[Meph]

I appreciate you raising the question.

Its certainly a good conversation to be had; I just want to make sure it’s guided correctly— too many people blame the wrong parties.

I don’t think it’s fair to say ‘Administration doesn’t care’. I know for fact that Junz cares; and from what I can see, Hoyt and Jeff care — they’ve been cranking out updates fairly frequently these past couple months.

I’m confident that lower playercounts as of late are due to a dwindling attention to the market which the game is serving.

I wouldn’t pour money into advertising until the game offers something that we know would stick. That’s simply not the case right now.

We saw this in action a couple years back, when XXXTentacion gave Graal more exposure than thousands of dollars in advertising could have provided.

He simply posted to his social media, “this is a game I used to play”, and within hours, thousands of his followers poured onto iClassic. Within days however, the playercount was back to its normal numbers - it seems none of those players stayed.

As an accountant who studies business on a daily basis, I would have brought the team together and asked the question: “how did over a thousand people show up at our store, and not buy anything?”

The problem isn’t advertising; or lack of exposure - it’s that the market is not perceiving replay value.

This happens every day - we have players show up, play a little bit, and when they don’t see value, they leave. The XXX case study above just showcases it at scale.

Don’t get me wrong - I’ve played this game since 2002, and I can still spend hours playing it. I love how competitive it is, and more so how unique it is.

The gameplay is so unique, in fact, that Era literally has a monopoly on it. There’s no other online game on the face of this planet that victory can be had by honing the skill of bullet dodging.

Granted, the hitbox and movement could be improved— but it’s a near-perfect marriage of the ‘Bullet Hell’ genre, and MMO PvP. We could literally copy any game mode from popular FPS games, and it would be a totally different meta — solely because of bullet dodging.

The problem lies in the execution - the monopoly they have (bullet dodging) is not emphasized in the gameplay, and hence is not advertised in any of their teaser photos / descriptions on App Store / Play Store.

The untapped market is ridiculously lucrative; Era is sitting on so much opportunity to capture it; this 3k-5k playerbase they’re settling for is a fraction of what it could be.

I only hope the folks at Toonslab realize this and start executing before somebody else does — it pays to be first.