State of Battle Bay

Don't worry it's not another defender balancing thread to be merged and ignored! What is it? Why, it's the 2018 Q2 financial results!

Hmm... feeling really worried... looks like 50% of BB revenue went poof in the last quarter... ruh roh

 

Here come the doomsayers.

(Anyone get that reference?)

 

Full H1/18 report: http://hugin.info/174482/R/2211461/861514.pdf

 

@Sifa ,what can we do now?Nice Statistics.
Where did u get this one?I wanna see this too.

 

Sadly it looks like Rovio still wants to be a one brand company. Basically the report says that they have shifted focus of user acquisition investments back to their AB games and Battle Bay will have to manage with the existing player base.

I believe it's now expected that Battle Bay gross bookings will remain somewhat the same in the next quarter or two but very unlikely that it would grow higher anymore. Still, considering the small team and small investments behind the game, I believe two million euro sales per quarter is enough for Rovio to keep the game running. Slowly Battle Bay would probably fall into "others" category but it would still be running with a small budget so I believe it's likely that nothing will change, at least in the next two or three years.

 

This report is from the Rovio investors page: http://www.rovio.com/investors/releases-and-publications?language=en

 

They just have a tiny team compared to the team that works on Angry Birds. And with a small team, developers can’t communicate as much as they’d like to, since there’s more workload per person. And with vacation, there’s basically two whole months where not a lot gets done.



Knowing this, I just play other better developed games like No Man’s Sky or Rocket League after completing the daily quests. Because once a problem becomes apparent, it takes quite some time to fix and that just lowers my incentive to play this game beyond the minimum.

 

Yep, the B.B. devs are cool, I think Rovio is dumb for not investing more into B.B. around the time of global release, they game itself is great, but couldve been a lot better with more players and more devs. Just how I feel about it. This thread makes me sad, but I still can’t wait for new items or ships!

 

Where is that post?

 

https://forum.battlebay.net/threads/no-more-monthly-updates.12359/#post-47477

 

Don't blame the devs, blame the small amount of devs

 

The report also heavily implies that the regular update needs of a MOBA are a problem. So I don't know how people can be talking about 2 or 3 years left here...

 

I don't see why we couldn't have 2-3 years or even more left. According to their report Rovio is still running smaller games (under the "others" category), just with less maintenance. As long as the game is making profit - which I believe it is - there's not really a reason to shut it down. That would just piss off their players and build a bad reputation.

While the profits obviously aren't as high as Rovio HQ would've hoped it's just likely that the investments behind the game will be put to minimum and game will have to run with the small team (like it has been so far). So I believe things here will continue pretty much how it used to be unless the game stops making profit. It's hard to tell exactly how much all the staff and infrastructure behind this game costs but even with the most recent quarter rate this game is still earning more than 9 million euros a year and I believe that's (significantly) more than the costs.

 

But Rovio is publicly traded now, how can they justify to shareholders that they should be spending capital on employees and servers for this rapidly declining game when that capital could be earning more on an Angry Bird game? It's not simply about making a profit and being satisfied, the thing for Rovio now is to maximize profit.

 

The running cost of having a dev in the nordics is around 120k euro for a company (could be slightly less for games). I believe the BB team is about 13 people.

Server (and related services) costs is kinda hard to guess, but a 1000k yearly bill at AWS ought to provide more than enough megaooomphf (yes, that is the technical term ;p) for running this game (with prod servers, staging/test servers, databases, etc..).

B.B. seems to make enough to cover this yearly operational cost in a single quarter.

I’ve no idea how much they need to spend on advertisements to keep player base at a equilibrium though. Without a base inflow of new players this game would grind to a halt in no time. This could be a big cost.

(I wouldn’t be that worried until they start to shift development away from the original team to a smaller new team located in a lower cost country - then we’ll know B.B. has truely been put on the back burner to die by rovio)

 

Well, you are totally right there. I'm a casual investor myself so I understand what you're saying. But one thing: can we really know that Battle Bay is rapidly declining when we take their investments into account. Basically the sales could very mucy correlate with the investments so when they increase investments also sales will grow higher - and when they decrease investments, sales will go down as seen in the recent report. So my theory is, now that the investments are already cut to minimum they can't be decreased any longer - so maybe the sales will also now stabilise.

 

I'm a big fan of the game .. and I've spent more than my fair share of time trying to come up with solutions to improve things, help people out, and correct incorrect or misleading information.



But ... I'm not at all surprised with the decline in revenue numbers.



The game's big spenders have run out of things to buy - meaning less epic crates and less VIP subs. The skill tree prevents you from playing all 5 ships and all 35 Items (unless you want to spend $50 a night to switch talents back and forth). Likewise, it's too labor intensive to expand training tiers or add captain levels - and too difficult to make proper balance changes (giving other items the chance to become meta). With the same content (other than perks), the same metas, the same maxed captain, the same ship and items over and over, things get stale.

The Skill Tree locking people into one ship/one set of items makes it harder for streamers to keep an audience, and makes them less knowledgeable about different setups other than their main - so it's harder for people to learn about the game. Events are helping here .. but it's not the same level of excitement as 5k infamy matches.

The game's microtransactions are probably down as well. As much as I've loved events, they're probably part of the reason. Newer players are getting beat on by slightly older and veteran players alike in events, so they're quitting. Players are scrapping all of their uncommons and rares way too early in favor of their T1 legendaries - so they have no need to buy crates, expand their inventories, or farm gold for parts to upgrade (i.e., no reason to watch ads or pay for a VIP sub).



I still think the devs did a great job -- but there are definitely some lessons to be learned ..

 

Honestly -- it may not fix things at this point but these changes would be a good test model for future games of this type - should rovio decide to make them.

1) Standardize and Unlock the Skill Tree - so players have the ability to play every ship and item at its full potential. So they'll have more to do, more to work on, and more variation (... and more to buy). And, it's easy to expand or add items to the Tree without having to rework every bonus and fit new ones in.

2) Keep items scaling in power together - Every rarity should have 4 perk slots and keep the same power relationship with other items throughout the game, so balance changes are easier to make. Shifting metas keeps things interesting and keep players busy with building new items.

((By "power relationship," I mean things like the tesla shield ... it's underpowered in the early game and extremely dominant late game. It's too difficult to predict how a balance change would affect that item and other items in relation to it at each stage of the game.))

3) Scale the Event Rewards - Encourage people to spend pearls to speed up their training to get to higher ship levels; encourage people to play their best ships rather than seal club; encourage players to level their uncommons, rares and epics (BB gun, handgun, and bazookas) before giving them legendaries (nukes) so they have to collect resources again (and watch ads and spend pearls on inventory space/crates) to build up those items.

 

Unfortunately, it doesn't quite work like that. Declining sales don't bottom out because they've stopped cutting investment. If investment is at its minimum, then sales will continue to decline as more people Bron be fed up with the game. The domino effect is then other people will quit simply because their friends that they always play with have quit. Then the game will die.

 

Omg, made too many typos. Can't keep editing. Lol