Modest idea: distinct appearance for each server

RoverDaddy · Post by **RoverDaddy** » Thu Feb 24, 2005 3:50 am

Hi all, this is my first post, hopefully not the last. I see the 'game replay' idea has already been covered, so I'll mention my only other significant wish for Armagetron. It would be really nice if each server actually -looked- like a different arena, yet still compatible with the moviepack replacing most of the visuals. This could be as simple as a text banner that looks like it's hanging on the walls. More elaborate: perhaps the server could download a 'ceiling' image to the client. This could be done gradually over a few minutes to keep the loading minimal (or maybe only download between rounds). Once the image is completely downloaded the client could cache it for that server.

Hey, I got it. Billboards on the walls!

Wouldn't it be great to fry your opponents while whizzing by a dozen "Pepsi" logos

Sorta makes me think of watching ice skating on ABC Wide World of Sports - All those European product names! WTF is Piz Buin anyway?

n54 · Post by **n54** » Thu Feb 24, 2005 4:43 am

Hi & welcome

Piz Buin is a posh cosmetics/suntan lotion company which is kinda funny in a dorky way as "piss brun" would be "pee brown" in norwegian (it's a french or german company i think or maybe italian or spanish). what kind of colour would pee brown be? hmm a very dehydrated color i think, probably not too far from the very fakelooking tan they have in piz buin commercials....

anyway: custom graphics for server is an idea closely related to custom bikes/skins for server/players and yeah both would need some sort of caching. it's a good idea but i think it's going to be some time until we see it.

Post by **Tank Program** » Thu Feb 24, 2005 8:43 am

Simply changing the arena walls... Sounds like a good idea

. I wonder how that would be implemented though...

Website · Post by **Z-Man** » Thu Feb 24, 2005 9:56 am

But NO PEPSI/COKE/McSomething. Is it not enough they try to poison our bodies for profit? Do you want to let them poision your mind, too? Please excuse me, but I'm quite radical about this.
Besides, they'll sue us if we use their logos without permission

And I always thought Piz Buin to be a very stupid name, too. Nobody knows how to pronounce it. I wonder whether it makes sense in any language?

Post by **Lucifer** » Thu Feb 24, 2005 10:04 am

z-man wrote:But NO PEPSI/COKE/McSomething. Is it not enough they try to poison our bodies for profit? Do you want to let them poision your mind, too? Please excuse me, but I'm quite radical about this.
Besides, they'll sue us if we use their logos without permission

I've considered what advertising would look like, and if this were available I'd try to solicit advertisers. I don't know if the community is big enough to attract them, though...

(And no, I wouldn't put Pepsi/Coke/McSomething ads. I'm not as radical about it as you probably are, but I'd be more interested in friendly companies, more than likely open source or supporters thereof because I'm quite radical about that)

And I always thought Piz Buin to be a very stupid name, too. Nobody knows how to pronounce it. I wonder whether it makes sense in any language?

If you sound it out with French pronunciation, it sounds like the English words "Piss Brown".

Website · Post by **Z-Man** » Thu Feb 24, 2005 10:54 am

Lucifer wrote:I've considered what advertising would look like, and if this were available I'd try to solicit advertisers. I don't know if the community is big enough to attract them, though...

Probably not. And being OS has one big drawback here: anyone interested in using AA for advertising can just grab it, modify it, and put it for download as a free game on their website. There's no precedent for that, however, and it would probably be a bad idea anyway.
Ok, there almost was one precedent: one guy from a Coke subgroup ( I guess a local bottler or something ) once contacted me and wanted to do a branded version. He was sort of a fan and would have ran a server, so I let him do it despite my objections to the company, but he never got anywhere ( Well, I did not help him. And the graphics formats of AA are quite obscure, I'll admit

)

(And no, I wouldn't put Pepsi/Coke/McSomething ads. I'm not as radical about it as you probably are, but I'd be more interested in friendly companies, more than likely open source or supporters thereof because I'm quite radical about that)

I'd be with you there. Any company that obviously is doing something good in any way would be fine with me.

And I always thought Piz Buin to be a very stupid name, too. Nobody knows how to pronounce it. I wonder whether it makes sense in any language?
If you sound it out with French pronunciation, it sounds like the English words "Piss Brown".

Yes, but that is not exactly making sense, right? Probably they want exactly that. People talking about the silly name of the company. That etches the name deeply into the brain

Sabarai · Post by **Sabarai** » Thu Feb 24, 2005 11:44 am

welcome 2 the forms...

On your idea: wouldn't it be strange that all the players make free commercials for the companies? plus, every country has it's own companies; for example, do any of you guys know Calvé?

Website · Post by **Z-Man** » Thu Feb 24, 2005 12:29 pm

Where are my manners....

Welcome to the forum from me, too, of course.

RoverDaddy · Post by **RoverDaddy** » Thu Feb 24, 2005 1:30 pm

z-man wrote:Where are my manners....

Welcome to the forum from me, too, of course.

Thanks. By the way, I think ads would be bad, evil, obtrusive, evil, undesirable, evil, etc. On the other hand, if a server operator thought they could get ad revenue to pay the operating costs for a server, not sure what you could do about that as long they honor the GPL with their code changes. If the AA community was big enough, the fact that it's -hard- to do wouldn't stop it from happening.

The best way to discourage this kind of thing would be to stay away from their server. No eyeballs = no ad revenue. As long as there are more servers running than people to play on them, that's easy.

Fortunately, I can't imagine too many people being motivated to setup an ad-laden server just for the fun of it.

And as far as my mind being poisoned, some people would say it's too late

ishAdmin · Post by **ishAdmin** » Thu Feb 24, 2005 5:09 pm

Back before viruses got a lot of bad press, i had this idea to market a pepsi/coke virus. (Yes, I know, it's evil, shame on me

) It would populate itself around the various computers on the net, and then shoot up a special "commercial" on a certain day, and then delete itself.

I actually spoke to a rep (a relative works for one of these companies, I won't say which, and I got access to the right people through him) and I got a surprisingly good response. Since I didn't expect that, I backed off the idea, and told him it probably wouldn't get past their legal department. This was way before most people knew what a virus was, and it wasn't a tv buzzword, so the reps at unnamed corp. were clueless to what the fall out would be.

Anyway, I was just reminded of that with this discussion about advertising, and thought I would mention it. I used to have a lot of those kinds of wacky ideas. Unfortunately, I tried to do some of them. And worse, some of them I finished!

iceman · Post by **iceman** » Thu Feb 24, 2005 5:13 pm

this is an old tread but I thinks its funny

http://computercops.biz/article2061.html

n54 · Post by **n54** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 2:11 am

i must confess i've also though about whether or not advertising could be a solution for server operating costs and/or if it could enable developers to earn a living writing armagetron code.

Q. how many views would it need to generate any significant income (like 10 dollars a day lol) from an advertising company?
A. far more than let's say 1000 unique views per day on a server imo, and that's if you get a golden deal

Q. would it add anything directly to the game experience?
A. no, most likely the opposite - people are more and more fed up with any kind of commercials as it is (tivo, adblock etc.) and nothing would force them to use specific textures.

Q. how about sponsorship?
A. we already have a sponsorship: Sourceforge (OSDN). which is a "no-returns or favours expected" kind of sponsorship and only sponsorships of this kind (i.e. plain helpful) are good (or even practical) for armagetron imho. maybe in the future some group will decide to pay for a developer to work on armagetron code issues part-time or full-time but i don't think we should in any way base anything on such an assumption. Individual donations to developers are always possible.

there is one possibility though: when i was thinking of a cylindrical arena i was wondering if one could get a soft-drink company to pay for the development as well as using the game/setting up their own server with a custom download with graphics of their own choosing. everything except their textures would have to be GPL and property of armagetron/ad. this could be possible but frankly it's probably more work just setting up such a deal than it's worth to either the developer(s) or the community in general.

Post by **Lucifer** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 4:44 am

n54 wrote: Q. how many views would it need to generate any significant income (like 10 dollars a day lol) from an advertising company?
A. far more than let's say 1000 unique views per day on a server imo, and that's if you get a golden deal

This is a tad oversimplified, but I do think that getting players to directly pay server admins is more practicaly than advertising. In any case, you have to consider the ads. Do you think tampon ads would sell on one of these servers? Compare it to joysticks/gamepads. What do you think? The quality of the advertisements is most important. The thing is, it's about branding. Any on-grid advertising is a branding effort, and the advertiser will count his ROI for it the same way he counts it for TV.

Q. would it add anything directly to the game experience?
A. no, most likely the opposite - people are more and more fed up with any kind of commercials as it is (tivo, adblock etc.) and nothing would force them to use specific textures.

You make several assumptions.

1. Graphical advertising would be fairly intrusive. I'm somewhat opposed to this, actually. We could probably dream up a way to do it, but in the end, it will result in modified clients that block the advertising. We need only look at adblock software for browsers to learn that lesson.

2. Text ads work on the web, and I think they would work here. And we can do it with the game exactly like it is, and the client can't be modified to block it (not without loss of information).

3. You're assuming advertising is a big grpahic that says "My stuff is the greatest!". Advertising could be something as simple as "Electronic Arts sponsored this round, check out <insert latest EA game here>!" (Not that I'd take money from them, but you get the idea).

Q. how about sponsorship?
A. we already have a sponsorship: Sourceforge (OSDN). which is a "no-returns or favours expected" kind of sponsorship and only sponsorships of this kind (i.e. plain helpful) are good (or even practical) for armagetron imho. maybe in the future some group will decide to pay for a developer to work on armagetron code issues part-time or full-time but i don't think we should in any way base anything on such an assumption. Individual donations to developers are always possible.

What about other sponsorships? "OSTG (formerly OSDN) sponsors light cycle tournament, winner gets $500! Participants get T-shirts and verious other things!" OSDN puts up the prize and hosts the server, gets a good feeling for doing this thing.

All of this revolves around the size of the community. Swampy and I are looking at what we can do to continue building the community. The statsig was one such thing. Z-man reappearing (while we had nothing to do with it) is another such thing, hopefully that will inspire significant development efforts to the core game (or provide significant development). One reason the community loses players is because the game has improved so little for such a long time. People get frustrated with the same bugs, the same game, over and over. So we've got a lot of hard-core players, and a fairly consistent influx of new players, and a predictable total number of players at any point in time. The mailing list we've got is another thing, the website will hopefully grow to something resembling a valuable game resource and general resource for the community. These forums have been here for quite awhile already, and I suggest the community is the size it is because of these forums (great job, Tank and co.). More events (or rather, some events, since we have none now) will also help. It gives people a reason to come and play at specific times and with specific people.

So, like I say, if you guys want improvement, you're currently getting what you pay for. Actually, right htis minute you're getting more than you pay for if you think about it. The first set of quality servers (not that what we have sucks, but you know what I mean, high uptime, fast pings, lots of players, etc.) is going to have to be directly funded by the community. That will in turn enable the community to retain more players and whoever runs the server might be able to start marketing the game in general to a wider audience. When the community reaches a certain size, targetted advertising, sponsors for various events, and so forth will generate additional income so the community shouldn't have to bear the brunt of the costs involved.

n54 · Post by **n54** » Sat Feb 26, 2005 6:13 am

It's not oversimplified as an example of advertising from an advertising company, be it adclick or google, branding, graphics or text. You're missing the point that advertising is based on a lot of people seeing the ad, even if it's targeted at a specific group. Even google text-ads are based on a lot of people and then giving them ads hopefully somewhat relevant to what they searched for. So ask yourself:
- how many unique players does your server get during a day on average?
--- i'm surprised if it's more than three digits, more likely it's a high two digits isn't it?
- how many unique hits do you think this forum (the biggest armagetron forum) gets daily?
- is there any kind of group you could put most of either of those visitors in?
--- armagetron players do not easily fit any specific group imo, not even Open Source, we're a very diverse bunch of people, we're also very spread out internationally

do a google search for "armagetron" and see which text-ads you get.... none, and it isn't just because armagetron players is a small group of people it's because none of those advertising find that armagetron is close to the core of what they're advertising (which is the whole point of google text-ads in case you didn't know).

you used to have some google ads/public announcements on your site; do you still have them and are/were they generating any kind of revenue for you?

Post by **Lucifer** » Sat Feb 26, 2005 9:05 am

n54 wrote:It's not oversimplified as an example of advertising from an advertising company, be it adclick or google, branding, graphics or text. You're missing the point that advertising is based on a lot of people seeing the ad, even if it's targeted at a specific group.

Not missing the point. I didn't mean to ruffle your feathers, rather I was trying to show you a broader picture of advertising.

I said repeatedly that the community would have to fund the first leg. I can go into more details, but "community funding the first leg" means "no advertising because the community is too small".

Even google text-ads are based on a lot of people and then giving them ads hopefully somewhat relevant to what they searched for.

Google text ads are an automated system. Selling ads on a game server cannot be automated, or else you wind up with crap advertising and upset players on account of the advertising. So, hypothetically speaking, if I were selling advertising on my server, I'd look for companies that have something interesting to sell to arma players. So I'd be applying personal knowledge and experience, not some string-based automated method of generating links. (Although it would be cool if there were a text-based method that used instant chat. "Holy shit! I can't beleive you did that! How did you do it?" "Buy a new toilet today for $149.99 from Lowes Hardware Store")

So ask yourself:
- how many unique players does your server get during a day on average?
--- i'm surprised if it's more than three digits, more likely it's a high two digits isn't it?
- how many unique hits do you think this forum (the biggest armagetron forum) gets daily?

No idea about these forums, but I have noticed the same small core group of people actually posting regularly. About my server, I'd be surprised if I got more than 50 or so unique players a day that played regularly. No stats on that available right now, but the ladder does number over 300 iirc.

- is there any kind of group you could put most of either of those visitors in?
--- armagetron players do not easily fit any specific group imo, not even Open Source, we're a very diverse bunch of people, we're also very spread out internationally

ThinkGeek. That's the group I'd put arma players into, people who'd buy gadgets off of ThinkGeek. While we're a pretty diverse crowd, we're mostly geeks, so anything geeky.

do a google search for "armagetron" and see which text-ads you get.... none, and it isn't just because armagetron players is a small group of people it's because none of those advertising find that armagetron is close to the core of what they're advertising (which is the whole point of google text-ads in case you didn't know).

It's not the size of the group, it's the type of product. If someone sold a commercial moviepack for armagetron and they advertised on Google, they'd pick "armagetron" as a keyword. It's a nobrainer.

I'll bet it's more likely that advertisers don't know about armagetron. If I were going to manage a pay-per click campaign today for someone selling remote control cars, I'd stick "armagetron" in my keywords. But then, I know about armagetron. How many PPC pros know about it? They pick the lowest-hanging fruit, that's all.

you used to have some google ads/public announcements on your site; do you still have them and are/were they generating any kind of revenue for you?

I break even, about. Those ads are still there.

At $40/year for domain registration, and previously $70/year for webhosting, I broke even on Google ads using a little creative accounting (counting ad revenue I've earned but haven't received a check for yet).

Make no mistake about it, Google ads are the wrong type of ads to put on a server. I didn't even bother putting them on the breakfast website, I just assumed there wouldn't be enough traffic to make it worthwhile, but if it will satisfy you to collect some data along those lines, I will. Mind you, part of my agreement with Google is that I don't talk too much about how much money I make from it..... (Not that they'll come here looking, but you get the idea)

Keeping in mind always, viking dude, that I've maintained pretty steadily that the community has to put up the money until it's large enough that advertising becomes feasible.