I believe you guys think online advertising costs more then it actually does. I wasn’t around for below 3.0 that you guys always talk about so idk what would make it so bad. I think the game is incredible now. I personally haven’t seen to many things broken with the game that I sometimes read about on these forums. Really except for the integration that took place a long time ago that had a few bugs and were resolved really quick I haven’t seen any problems. That’s just my opinion as a new user.

How do you guys know it’s mostly only run by one guy? Did they hire another programmer? Just curious on how or where you find this information cause that’s something not all of us know about.

Seble, the lone wolf of WIS, recently did an interview about the GD game http://gdreports.com/interview/index.htm

Hats off to this Seble fella who has a passion and saved this game for all of us who love it too. Pretty incredible.

Posted by Tiptop00 on 4/25/2019 5:23:00 PM (view original):
Hats off to this Seble fella who has a passion and saved this game for all of us who love it too. Pretty incredible.

Hahaha I wouldn't go that far. He is getting paid for this.

Agree this game is so much fun. J doesn't get old for me.

Posted by zagsrulez on 4/25/2019 2:00:00 PM (view original):
anyone willing to pitch in a mil or two to start our own WIS marketing campaign? Ill throw in 5 if there's any interest.

If we raised $1M, we could start our own sim and fix most of the problems in HD. I'd definitely donate $5 for that. Kickstarter anyone?

Tiptop, there's quite a few users who have been here a long time and watched the game through the stages. Some have been here 10+ years. When 3.0 was implemented, rather than listen to the people who play the game and know the primary issues, they listened to people who had no clue or minimal experience.

In 2.0, DIII and DII were actually pretty solid with a few minor tweaks that needed to be made (carryover cash, conference cash, pulldowns/dropdowns). DI needed some work. They geared the game towards DI in 3.0 and opened up recruiting so you could recruit any player from any division. People who couldn't succeed in the prior version believed if the caps were gone, they could recruit the same players and would be even with the top coaches. In reality, recruiting is a learning curve. Opening the cap has added complexity to the recruiting learning curve and has made things much less competitive at the lower levels. The rich dominate those still learning using DI players instead of DIII and low end DII players which makes the mountain that much higher.

Once 3.0 released we saw about a 40% reduction of user population. I shouldn't have to tell you that for a game that already doesn't market and has low user retention, that's bad.

If WIS doesn't want to spend marketing dollars they should leverage those who love the game most by placing huge incentives to recruit new players. A recruiting bonus like getting 1 season free for every 2 seasons a new person that you recruit buys (limited to the first 30 or 60 days of when they sign up) or a 50% off code that is good for 60 days if someone you recruit purchases 3 (or 5) seasons.

I'm pretty sure they already do that

Posted by Benis on 4/24/2019 6:59:00 PM (view original):
The game is doing so poorly they can't even afford to hire another programmer. Marketing is a pipe dream.

Hiring another programmer has no direct ROI - running a few broad marketing campaigns would. They could hire a digital agency to run search and social campaigns for them for 10% of the marketing spend and get a 4x ROI (probably larger because they'd basically be introducing the product to the market) without having to do more than make a few phone calls.

I don't think the problem is the resources. I think the problem is that they just don't really care. SportsHub can use WIS engines to run simulations whenever they're needed, and the money that we keep paying covers the hosting and Seble's salary for upkeep. Any money they could make off WIS is dwarfed in comparison to LeagueSafe, Fanball, NFBC, etc. though; this site is not a priority.

"They could hire a digital agency to run search and social campaigns for them for 10% of the marketing spend and get a 4x ROI"

Can you share where this is coming from? You're saying if they spend $5,000 on marketing that they will make $25,000? Meaning they will need to get 2,000 seasons at full price.

I have been a coach since season 3 of knight. While I am not up to the coaching level of most of you, I do love this game. I took a several year break apparently right before 3.0 came out because I was getting tired of the "haves" getting all the leverage, bonus money, and then up and coming coaches not really having much of a chance at decent players. When I saw 3.0 came out with the recruiting changes, I actually liked them. They tried to even the playing field a little more plus fpr lower levels having internationals even in d3 was fun. I work in technology so I am very aware of the market for applications. Yes the game has issues - but still is fun to play. A lot of people left because they had a "system" that simply didnt work with the new version of the game.

I think we are forgetting one thing - the flexible dollar market itself. When WIS started the ideas of facebook and social media had just sprouted - but since then not only has social media grown but alternatives for peoples attention and their money have too. This game, while fun, isnt cheap and compare to your average google play app it can be a very hard sell to tell someone to spend their money here instead of a billion apps which didnt exist in the mid 2000s. So if I have money to spend it - theres a million options out there so the market for a game like this isnt as easy either.

So IMO I think the answer isnt as easy as "add marketing" or "fix the game" because given the limited resources you have to attract new users yet at the same time keep the stalwarts happy. You dont have the resouces to do both effectively - not at the current prices.

Thats just my view on things - thanks for reading.

Posted by Benis on 5/1/2019 3:37:00 PM (view original):
"They could hire a digital agency to run search and social campaigns for them for 10% of the marketing spend and get a 4x ROI"

Can you share where this is coming from? You're saying if they spend $5,000 on marketing that they will make $25,000? Meaning they will need to get 2,000 seasons at full price.

I've worked for a digital agency running search and social campaigns for several years - these are pretty standard benchmarks.

You're right, given the amount of available teams and the new user discount the actual ROI would be measured across a longer period of time rather than a one-time purchase. Campaign flighting would be contingent upon world openings and season schedules.

That being said, split the $5,000 investment and do $2,500 in each channel.

On social, assuming you're targeting a male sports-oriented audience age 20+, I'd say (pretty conservatively) that you can reach over 200,000 people on social and hit over a 1% clickthrough rate. Of those 2,000 people who clicked through, how many do you think would be willing to at least try the game for $4.95?

Search is a demand-driven channel, so you're operating on cost-per-click - if they can get a CPC anywhere between $2.50 and $4.00 (which isn't all that difficult assuming SEO issues aren't wrecking your quality score) then a $2,500 spend will net between 1,000 and 625 clicks. Conversion rate on search referrals is generally more-than-double what you see out of mobile display and social ad units (again, demand-driven channel, people are actively looking for things), so they may actually see more new users out of it than social despite the lower click count.

There are 321 job openings in Allen DIII right now. Just saying. If they invest $5,000 to fill that world they immediately get over $1,500 return, and then collect payments for more than twice the discounted amount fo any retained customer every 30 days moving forward.

Take all of this with a large grain of salt as I didn't use any campaign planning tools or keyword planners for this, but all of this is to say that they could make WIS popular again with a small investment. They just don't want to.

Posted by mbriese on 5/2/2019 3:40:00 PM (view original):

Posted by Benis on 5/1/2019 3:37:00 PM (view original):
"They could hire a digital agency to run search and social campaigns for them for 10% of the marketing spend and get a 4x ROI"

Can you share where this is coming from? You're saying if they spend $5,000 on marketing that they will make $25,000? Meaning they will need to get 2,000 seasons at full price.

I've worked for a digital agency running search and social campaigns for several years - these are pretty standard benchmarks.

You're right, given the amount of available teams and the new user discount the actual ROI would be measured across a longer period of time rather than a one-time purchase. Campaign flighting would be contingent upon world openings and season schedules.

That being said, split the $5,000 investment and do $2,500 in each channel.

On social, assuming you're targeting a male sports-oriented audience age 20+, I'd say (pretty conservatively) that you can reach over 200,000 people on social and hit over a 1% clickthrough rate. Of those 2,000 people who clicked through, how many do you think would be willing to at least try the game for $4.95?

Search is a demand-driven channel, so you're operating on cost-per-click - if they can get a CPC anywhere between $2.50 and $4.00 (which isn't all that difficult assuming SEO issues aren't wrecking your quality score) then a $2,500 spend will net between 1,000 and 625 clicks. Conversion rate on search referrals is generally more-than-double what you see out of mobile display and social ad units (again, demand-driven channel, people are actively looking for things), so they may actually see more new users out of it than social despite the lower click count.

There are 321 job openings in Allen DIII right now. Just saying. If they invest $5,000 to fill that world they immediately get over $1,500 return, and then collect payments for more than twice the discounted amount fo any retained customer every 30 days moving forward.

Take all of this with a large grain of salt as I didn't use any campaign planning tools or keyword planners for this, but all of this is to say that they could make WIS popular again with a small investment. They just don't want to.

Exactly what I was saying. I’ve worked in a few digital marketing agencies and if they would just do some Google Ads I think you would get some people to try the game out, because the people who the ads appear to is people who were searching for something like this. This game would just appear before anything else in the search engines. You would definitely gain money from Digital Marketing whether it’s SportsHub top priority or not you would think they would want to benefit off of what they got. They don’t have to put a lot of money into the marketing efforts just some and I think the results would be really good.

Just a random “little-guy-who-is-not-good-at-this” point of view. For a game that is less than 2 months per season (in the one a day schedule), if you get knocked out in the first round of the conference tournament (and didn’t do well enough for a tournament), you have just over 2 weeks of very little to do.

Again, maybe not a problem with the game to some. But it’s hard to keep new people when they pay what they do for 7 weeks and really only play for half). I know there has to be time for things, but wouldn’t personally mind if some things overlapped a little better (signing up new coaches and coaching changes for one).

And I only mention because I did see some talk about retention.