DaveMoeDee wrote: »

NewBlacksmurf wrote: »

When ppl realize this game has made more than what Destiny or COD sales, you begin to ask who is handling their finances. They should be in the black but with less than 30 key staff and a *** poor support, you begin to think it's just a money grab.

As I always say to ppl who argue they need our subs, they're making half of WoW money but their product won't last 10+ years.

You need more than $1 now to be in the black for $1 spent 5 years ago. You assume too much.

You are speaking way beyond what you have knowledge of. Kinda pointless. Go ahead and complain about poor support. But to pretend you have any clue about their finances is disingenuous.

@DaveMoeDee

Assuming you're trolling because we actually do have a very good understanding of how much money comes in.


We know prior to console release they were bringing in approx $10 mil/month from day 1 release
We know they made a min as of today of 120 mil on game sales
We know they make approx 15 mil on crown sales as of today

Those are based on what ZOS tells us on subscribers, ESO plus, accounts in use, and looking at the dlc released

Can you argue that this game cost them from start to current more than 200 mil?

Ch4mpTW wrote: »

WalksonGraves wrote: »

Ch4mpTW wrote: »

DaveMoeDee wrote: »

NewBlacksmurf wrote: »

When ppl realize this game has made more than what Destiny or COD sales, you begin to ask who is handling their finances. They should be in the black but with less than 30 key staff and a *** poor support, you begin to think it's just a money grab.

As I always say to ppl who argue they need our subs, they're making half of WoW money but their product won't last 10+ years.

You need more than $1 now to be in the black for $1 spent 5 years ago. You assume too much.

You are speaking way beyond what you have knowledge of. Kinda pointless. Go ahead and complain about poor support. But to pretend you have any clue about their finances is disingenuous.

So is there actually no way for us to possibly trace the backing of where the money is going instead of generally speaking investors? Like is there no paper trail, or any links we could follow/trace? Because I really do want to know where my money went, if not to bettering the product I purchased and spent so many hours of my life playing.

You bought a game, that doesn't make you an investor.

... What? What are you talking about? The sheer fact you placed money into something means you are an investor, because you invested in the said product. The only difference is the scale of money being invested and handled, as well as how. Actually to be even more simple about it, you can invest more than cash into something and still be an investor. For example. You play a game. You're doing what? Investing time into it. Investing energy into it. And so on. And that's by definition by the way.

Invest - verb (used with object)
1.
to put (money) to use, by purchase or expenditure, in something offering potential profitable returns, as interest, income, or appreciation in value.
2.
to use (money), as in accumulating something:

Ugh. I really need to stop reading your posts. I'm about the most laid back person you could ever meet, but your posts have a way of somehow irritating me behind words. So, high five for that. Also, you clearly have no clue about the difference between an investor and a purchaser. I mean, I bough a taco tonight. Guess what, that doesn't make me entitled to know what Taco Bell is gonna do with my cash. It didn't make me an investor in Taco Bell. Shocking, I know.

Providence Equity Partners owns about 25% of ZeniMax Media (the company that includes Bethesda, ZOS, etc), so a quarter of every dollar you spend goes toward the estimated $625 million stake in ZeniMax that Providence is considering selling off.

And if they decide to leverage their stake to sell off parts of the company, things could get really interesting.

That's an investment. The $4.5 million ZeniMax received in venture capital this year is an investment. Not a single box sale. Not even a few thousand blow in the crown store.

If you really want to get brutally specific, any revenue ZOS makes probably goes straight into a bank account that is reported monthly to ZeniMax, who then in turn allocates funding back to ZOS based on how well they are or aren't doing. The idea of the exact money you spend today helping the development of tomorrow is just idealistic crap on a corporate level.

i agree with everything and i can confirm that the support is absolute garbage. im waiting more than 3 weeks for them to give me my missing costume... still nothing

Ch4mpTW wrote: »

After doing some thinking for a bit while playing another game created by a somewhat similar size group of developers, I couldn't help but wonder where our money goes on ESO.

Where does our cash go...?

No seriously. Where does it go? The customer service has gone downhill incredibly fast. There's no more in-game GM's (Game Masters). The testing of ESO seems to have gone downhill, as every single patch there's a load of things that are either still not fixed or are newly broken. The overall online performance is pretty bad with lag having invaded PvE after at 1 point having been only a Cyrodiil thing (but even at 1 point there was no Cyrodiil lag). The combat team doesn't seem to have 'balance' too much of a concern, as patch after patch things seem to have been in favor of stamina-based builds. Not to mention constantly pushing out things that make stamina more and more appealing than magicka. And so on.

So where did it all go? I mean... ZOS apparently was rich enough to give away a boat load of cash to someone who supposedly doesn't even play the game regularly, as well as is doing another giveaway type of thing now. Meanwhile there are more and more complaints about the base of the game, and the game's overall performance. As I mentioned earlier, the game doesn't even have an adequate support team. So where is all of the cash going then? Anyone know? Where's my money?

Its not our cash once we give it to them. And as for the 1 million dollars, that wasnt ZOS money but rather Bethesdas. And yes theyre offering some money to send people on a trip to some far away lands as a publicity stunt. But its a drop in the bucket compared to what they make daily from digital sales. Its honestly the worst thing to get hung up on when it comes to complaining about the state of the game or customer service because its not money thats playing a factor, or at least not directly.

Customer Service is always a wishywashy thing when it comes to a Business - Customer/Consumer relationships. It could be anything from an inexperienced CSA to a poorly explained issue by the Customer/Consumer. It could also be just a very bad day for either CSA or Customer/Consumer and because of that the interaction is tainted by misplaced anger/frustration. Theres also the fact that CSAs have Company Policies to follow even when those policies seem silly or anti-consumer. Its never a black and white issue because theres always more to it than a simple "Customer Service didnt care to help me". As it might be out of that CSAs hands.

And when it comes to give-aways like the 1 million dollars or the exotic trips. What isnt being seen is the amount of player retention and conversion thats going on because of these events. A player might not think he'll win the give-away but theres no harm in trying especially when all thats asked of him is to sign up and play a game he already enjoys playing. And while hes in the game hes bombarded by Crown Store Advertisements. Advertisements that remind him to take a look in the store to see whats new or remind him of something hes been telling himself he wants to buy. Log in enough, have enough time standing around the bank or a crafting station and eventually that player might give in to his desire and purchase that hat or that mount that he told himself hed wait for because his allotment of Crowns was used up already. Suddenly that Sub player is spending more than his typical 15 dollars a month on the game.

As for the drop in quality in content. This is the inevitable outcome of placing an unrealistic goal on a small team of Developers. This happens in Corporations all the time. Some suit with lofty ideas of increasing profits and productivity overestimates the abilities of his employees. Or atleast has it in his head that with exuberant goals the team will work harder towards it for less. The employee will likely not hit the goal but will likely be more efficient than if he hadnt been motivated by the threat of "hit the goal or risk termination". Unfortunately this attitude does not always pan out in certain sectors of business. Especially in online video games that are perpetually running on millions upon millions of code that can all come crashing down with a single misplaced line or accidentally placed letter/number. And when youre adding huge DLCs to the game over the course of a year with far fewer patches meant to fix issues. Then yeah the games quality is going to start to decline. It seems with Update 10 the team at ZOS started to realize they couldnt keep going full steam ahead with their "A DLC every Quarter" promise. Unfortunately for them and us a living breathing video game like ESO will never be truely fixed or will never cease to have bugs big and small. That is always going to be the case. The only thing they can do is improve on their time management and work in more bug fixing. But who knows if the Suits will see it that way and agree.

Ch4mpTW wrote: »

WalksonGraves wrote: »

Ch4mpTW wrote: »

DaveMoeDee wrote: »

NewBlacksmurf wrote: »

When ppl realize this game has made more than what Destiny or COD sales, you begin to ask who is handling their finances. They should be in the black but with less than 30 key staff and a *** poor support, you begin to think it's just a money grab.

As I always say to ppl who argue they need our subs, they're making half of WoW money but their product won't last 10+ years.

You need more than $1 now to be in the black for $1 spent 5 years ago. You assume too much.

You are speaking way beyond what you have knowledge of. Kinda pointless. Go ahead and complain about poor support. But to pretend you have any clue about their finances is disingenuous.

So is there actually no way for us to possibly trace the backing of where the money is going instead of generally speaking investors? Like is there no paper trail, or any links we could follow/trace? Because I really do want to know where my money went, if not to bettering the product I purchased and spent so many hours of my life playing.

You bought a game, that doesn't make you an investor.

... What? What are you talking about? The sheer fact you placed money into something means you are an investor, because you invested in the said product. The only difference is the scale of money being invested and handled, as well as how. Actually to be even more simple about it, you can invest more than cash into something and still be an investor. For example. You play a game. You're doing what? Investing time into it. Investing energy into it. And so on. And that's by definition by the way.

Invest - verb (used with object)
1.
to put (money) to use, by purchase or expenditure, in something offering potential profitable returns, as interest, income, or appreciation in value.
2.
to use (money), as in accumulating something:

This would only apply in the stock market. Let me explain:
Bonds are debt, whereas stocks are equity. This is the important distinction between the two securities. By purchasing equity (stock) an investor becomes an owner in a corporation. Ownership comes with voting rights and the right to share in any future profits. By purchasing debt (bonds) an investor becomes a creditor to the corporation (or government). The primary advantage of being a creditor is that you have a higher claim on assets than shareholders do: that is, in the case of bankruptcy, a bondholder will get paid before a shareholder. However, the bondholder does not share in the profits if a company does well - he or she is entitled only to the principal plus interest.

By buying a video game, you sign a contract basically (when you made an account you remember those terms and conditions? yeah. they get you everytime) that states you agree to whatever the terms and conditions are. So unfortunately none of us have "invested" in the company even though we've all given them money at some point.

pacrooti's crown crates

Another thing to consider is even if they did release their financial reports it's not going to read like:
$10,000 - Bug fixing for Cyrodiil
$10,000 - Bug fixing for PvE
$20,000 - Next DLC
$15,000 - Planning future DLC
$20,000 - Crown store items
$??? - Profit
etc.

If you're lucky it may have some categories like "future content" or "Customer Support" which we can narrow down to a general area of their work, but trying to figure out how much money gets spent on each aspect of the game would take a lot of trawling through the whole report.

And even once you've done that it's not necessarily reflective of how important it is to ZOS or how much they want to get it done. It's very rare that you can solve a problem or make something better simply by throwing more money at it. I work in the charity sector (aka non-profit for the Americans) where we not only have to report what we do with our finances but also justify how we made that decision and one thing that comes up constantly is that the important question is not "are we spending the most money on the most important projects?" but "are we spending enough money on each project to make sure it gets what it needs?"

It might well be that ZOS spends far more on developing new content than the do on fixing bugs. But that might be because fixing bugs is a matter of assigning 10 very good programmers to work on it. Whereas making the main quest for a DLC requires 6 decent programmers, 1 lead programmer, 3 concept artists, 5 modellers/animators, 2 writers, a project manager and 5 voice actors. (That's a random example, I'm not claiming to know exactly how many people work on each aspect of the game.)

Wow. Just wow.

investors
zenimax media
bethesda softworks
developers pay checks

Mettaricana wrote: »

Do less give away contests. More player feed back listening and hire some bodies to dev I mean come on now I've played indie developed games with 1mil or less budget pushing better performance mechanics and gfx and content. Or games when expansions drop its actually expanding the game like one tamriel, thieves and dark bro hood and shadows of hist could have been put together all in one and equalled wrothgar in content because individually each was like a 3 hour dlc.

Naah the giveaway is much better than paying for commercials.
If we were all completely honest, we'd have no issue if there were 50% less bugs and normal support experiences even if nothing else changed we would never question where the money is going.

So many wall of comments... >.<

Solus wrote: »

Bethesda Game studios made the single player games, not ZOS, Beth Soft only published ESO, but also the single player games.

I strongly suggest checking your facts before you attempt another lengthy and embarassing 'correction' like that.

Both Bethesda and Zenimax Online are subsidiaries of Zenimax Media. That means - exactly as I said - that ESO is pretty safe. They're financially very comfortable and they would be loathe to risk any potential damage to the fantastically lucrative Elder Scrolls IP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZeniMax_Media

Fun fact I know courtesy of wikipedia, Azura / Wonder Woman is married to Zenimax's CEO!

Kamatsu wrote: »

Compare this to say NCSoft, which is a public company, where you can see their reported earnings, balance sheet, P&L statement, etc on a quarterly basis. Why? Because they are a public company, they are required by law to report their earnings, losses, etc in a public manner for everyone to see.

That is for the benefit of investors and potential investors but it can be helpful for customers.

Eg. about half a year before The Secret World's release, Funcom's entire board exercised and sold off about a third of their stock options. That was a fairly serious bet that the game was going to bomb and stock prices would drop. Exactly what happened. Oh and a criminal investigation into the board into the bargain.

As a publicly listed company they had to publicly report that sell off. People noticed. Though mainstream gaming media sites didn't touch on it.