Gaia's Decision on zOMG!

[Scobre]

kandykahne

I'll be honest with you, I didn't read the entire thread... I don't have time at the moment but I think it's important to say something in case no one else has...
Swarf didn't lie. That seems to be the general consensus of a lot of these posts here... He may, however, have unintentionally overlooked some other key components to the equation. He is a developer and a die hard zOMG lover both the game and the players. He may know a lot of the financial data involved but perhaps not all. I think at this point we need to see Swarf's posts as another example of his dedication to this game and the community involved.
Someone mentioned that Swarf was disgruntled because his project was cut. I'm sure Swarf was upset but to jeopardize his job by posting false accusations of his employer would be illogical at the very least. It wouldn't serve him or his project well.

Here's what I think we can be quite certain of at this point:
~Swarf, JK, s2b2, and the rest of the dev team are and have always been dedicated to the zOMG community. They have always stood by us and stood up for us whenever they can.
~Gaia isn't going to give us full disclosure on their finances, and rightly so. I wish they would at least admit that they shamelessly pumped us for money when they had already decided the fate of the game however I don't see why they should divulge financial details to us.
~Unfortunately, as it stands, zOMG is in "maintenance mode" from here out.

Other than that it's all speculation really. I already put my two cents on the issue here. Feel free to read it and refute me as you see fit.

Both your posts seem really well thought out and yes I agree with you about how financial information needs privacy and numbers don't need to be posted for it. Thank you for including s2 in the list because he has done a lot to help zOMG! even though he is the new kid on the block. xd How gaia handles zOMG! will determine the fate of the entire site and just wish all of gaians would realize that. This site could easily be shut down with the rate of features and games being removed.

[Jayce Reinhardt]

Rya Dracosin

So how would I know that something's going on, if they don't make an announcement? How would I know what's going on, if I've already visited the forum, and don't intend to return for another month or so? My individual thinking is "If it's important, they'll make an announcement or dev alert notice about it".

Exactly

If they can make forced announcement about Moga crap I don't even play they can certainly do that for ZoMG.

Truth is they just didn't care enough to bother communicating it with anyone not already in the ZoMG forums. This also is true of other features and not limited to ZoMG. When they get serious about being a business, I will treat them as a business.

Until then, this place is a joke.

2009 I noticed the communication problem, it is now 2012. Gaia has had three years to correct the still constant communication issues.

[Prue]

Quote:

I'll be honest with you, I didn't read the entire thread... I don't have time at the moment but I think it's important to say something in case no one else has...
Swarf didn't lie. That seems to be the general consensus of a lot of these posts here... He may, however, have unintentionally overlooked some other key components to the equation. He is a developer and a die hard zOMG lover both the game and the players. He may know a lot of the financial data involved but perhaps not all. I think at this point we need to see Swarf's posts as another example of his dedication to this game and the community involved.
Someone mentioned that Swarf was disgruntled because his project was cut. I'm sure Swarf was upset but to jeopardize his job by posting false accusations of his employer would be illogical at the very least. It wouldn't serve him or his project well.

Here's what I think we can be quite certain of at this point:
~Swarf, JK, s2b2, and the rest of the dev team are and have always been dedicated to the zOMG community. They have always stood by us and stood up for us whenever they can.
~Gaia isn't going to give us full disclosure on their finances, and rightly so. I wish they would at least admit that they shamelessly pumped us for money when they had already decided the fate of the game however I don't see why they should divulge financial details to us.
~Unfortunately, as it stands, zOMG is in "maintenance mode" from here out.

Other than that it's all speculation really. I already put my two cents on the issue here. Feel free to read it and refute me as you see fit.

*sigh* If you haven't read my thread, then you shouldn't post in it and expect people to take your opinion seriously. Let alone redirect to another area where you feel you've justified your claim to the point where those who disagree with you clearly have no say in the matter.

If you had read my thread, you would have realized this; but let me humor you by saying it for the umpteeth time. Swarf lied by telling zOMG! users that zOMG! was sustainable if users kept spending money on it. This was clearly not true, seeing as it's no longer receiving any updates. If that's not a lie, would you just call it an untruth?

He even keeps backtracking about his posts now. His lying and riling up the userbase has damaged Gaia's credibility to a great degree. I understand you and others care about zOMG! a great deal, but the blind devotion to him and his actions is stunning and frustrating.

[Pilfer von Durem]

Madkool

If you had read my thread, you would have realized this; but let me humor you by saying it for the umpteeth time. Swarf lied by telling zOMG! users that zOMG! was sustainable if users kept spending money on it. This was clearly not true, seeing as it's no longer receiving any updates. If that's not a lie, would you just call it an untruth?

Neither. I would call into question your understanding of the word sustainable.

[Prue]

Pilfer von Durem

Madkool

If you had read my thread, you would have realized this; but let me humor you by saying it for the umpteeth time. Swarf lied by telling zOMG! users that zOMG! was sustainable if users kept spending money on it. This was clearly not true, seeing as it's no longer receiving any updates. If that's not a lie, would you just call it an untruth?

Neither. I would call into question your understanding of the word sustainable.

Uhh, why?

[Pilfer von Durem]

Madkool

Swarf lied by telling zOMG! users that zOMG! was sustainable if users kept spending money on it. This was clearly not true, seeing as it's no longer receiving any updates.

Quote:

Uhh, why?

Your logical fallacy for one. Being able to support the servers and pull in money has nothing to do with updates.

The reason for dumping zOMG! is due to a formula, that figures it will not make as much profit as Gaia HQ wishes.

[Prue]

Pilfer von Durem

Madkool

Swarf lied by telling zOMG! users that zOMG! was sustainable if users kept spending money on it. This was clearly not true, seeing as it's no longer receiving any updates.

Quote:

Uhh, why?

Your logical fallacy for one. Being able to support the servers and pull in money has nothing to do with updates.

LOL.

[l Chihiro-chan l]

Alright. I've been seeing a ton of people posting their opinions in regards to the current situation of zOMG, so here is my (very tl;dr) two cents.

People seem very distraught over the concept that "Gaia is lying" to them. Most zOMG users are very passionate about the little community they have, which is extremely understandable. However, all the passion in the world doesn't really amount to profit. Since zOMG was implemented, it's had scares of going under. This seems to be a concept that people are overlooking. In the grand scheme of things, zOMG is just one of many features on Gaia as a whole. It's very important to remember that Gaia is a company at heart; while they aim to please their users, they must set covering their expenses as their highest priority. They simply can not be expected to allocate resources into a feature that is not profitable. They've actually cut a few features in the past, such as Lotto, VJ, Cinemas and Frontier Skies. As a company, Gaia has to do what works for them. I find it very unlikely that if users were faced with the decision of letting a feature go under, or letting Gaia hemorrhage revenue and suffer just to keep that feature, they would opt to save the feature.

Gaia has tried to do other things to keep revenue coming in (e.g. Facebook games such as Moga, and Soul Crash) all of these have been received poorly by members of the zOMG community as well as some users outside of the zOMG community. Now don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying users don't have a right to feel upset when devs are being pulled off of a project that they use; it's completely understandable. However, I will restate what I said earlier; Gaia is a company. A company who's demographic is only composed of a small percentage of users who actively play zOMG, and pay for items related to it. Allow me to quote Pana here:

Panagrammic

zOMG is currently the second most popular Gaia-themed flash game on Gaia, just behind Towns but ahead of Rallies -- about 5% of the daily active users play zOMG sometime during the day, and the rates are similar when you look at the entire month. A significantly higher percentage of users have tried zOMG. International users make up a higher percentage of the zOMG user base than the site as a whole.

(Confounding these numbers: a) unknown number of players that are just bored with zOMG and will pick it up again if we have new content, b) a significantly higher percentage of mules in the daily numbers, mostly to bypass the gold curve, and c) a percentage of users that play zOMG mostly for the gold.)

This leads me to consider the following- is it really viable to keep dumping money into a feature that only 5% of the userbase uses? Should Gaia and the rest of it's community really be expected to suffer for 5% of users? Personally, I think they made a fair compromise by simply deciding to pull the plug for the time being. Like any MMO, zOMG requires servers to run; this in itself is pretty pricey. Now consider this; instead of shutting zOMG down, they are continuing to leave it up and just not add any new content. To the best of my knowledge, no one has actually said that this feature will be scrapped in the long run; case in point, DARKNRGY's post about the issue. Who's to say that if Gaia starts getting a decent amount of income from the FB games they won't pick zOMG back up?

I feel it's important to point out that this situation isn't new; it's been a long time coming, actually. If you were to review the posts made regarding zOMG for the past year or so, it's quite easy to see that zOMG was struggling. This can perhaps best be explained through a few posts made by our Devs:

Panagrammic

"Yeah, I wish that zOMG had been updating during the years after release.

But, aside from commercial time travel, I don't see what we can do about it.

So, at this point in time, what do we do?

People were saying, "zOMG needs new content." Well, we tried with Coliseum, but users said, "No, that isn't good enough." So, the zOMG development team had a meeting and decided that DMS was the best shot at that -- it had the most stuff created, was an opportunity to up the CL, so on and so forth. So, that's what we're trying.

Given the current situation, there are three things we, as a company, could be saying now:

• we're killing zOMG
  
• we're doing one update and then evaluating the situation
  
• we're guaranteeing three or four updates over the next two years
  

We're not doing the first. We can't commit to the third right now. So we're at the second.

This post was made on October 9th, 2011; it's quite apparent that Gaia was willing to admit they were having difficulties then, so I don't understand why it seems as if this is coming as a complete surprise to users.

To further my point, here are a few other posts regarding zOMG made by our Devs in the past.

swarf

Huh, wha?

What's the debate, whether zomg will get new updates? The answer is yes, but very slowly v.v

We didn't manage to monetize it as much as we needed. So instead of having the remaining devs working on zOMG they'll be partly working on other things partly working on zOMG. We should have new pets this week, but new areas are gonna be sparse.

><

This post was made back on February 14th, 2011.

swarf

Technically the last dev at gaia working on zOMG. JK is the last artist.

And i'm not often grumpy. I just get lots of attention when I am ;D

This one was made on September 13th, 2011 in regards to Bron stepping down as a dev.

Panagrammic

Well, the funding levels (even if below target) eventually led to us decided to do DMS, so it definitely helped the state of zOMG.

October 26th, 2011.

Panagrammic

zOMG Bloodstone Amulet
People asked for a clarification on the announcement, as it was a little unclear. We're going to raise the price for the zOMG Bloodstone Amulet at 5:00pm today. Now is the best item to get this fine, fine looking amulet that I'm wearing, as very soon it will either go up in price or be removed from the stores (we're close to the 5k limit).

This post was made on September 23rd, 2011. In my opinion, the fact that they released DMS and the Amulet, as well as the fact that they were willing to raise the price of it may have been a subtle indication of a last ditch effort on Gaia's part to salvage zOMG financially. Keep in mind, at that point Pana had already posted in regards to the status of zOMG. I'll go ahead and quote more of that content to better explain my reasoning:

Panagrammic

Q. Why all this talk recently of "monetization"?

Every business, in an ongoing fashion, needs to be evaluating different features and deciding if it makes sense going forward. It breaks down as features on Gaia, it may be menu items in a restaurant, product lines for a big corporation. It's an ordinary part of business.

One of the things that we've been concentrating on recently is how to change the zOMG model to be self-sustaining; that is, having it pay for itself in the costs of development.

Q. Why does it always seem like we have to buy more stuff to keep zOMG alive?

None of the official announcements that I looked at ever said "buy this or this feature gets it," but there certainly seems to be a strong undercurrent of that sentiment in the zOMG community; I'm not sure if it came from [JK] informally or has just been telephoned between users to that state. However, like any business, if we are doing something that doesn't make sense financially, we need to change what we are doing.

Last year we did set certain revenue targets for zOMG based on a presumed development team size, but we haven't hit them. Partly we've been experimenting with different models to see what works the best.

(If there's anything working in zOMG's favor here, it's the community's passion for the game. It has been difficult finding a good model. We've said we won't do pay-to-play, so subscriptions are out. The Gaia marketplace is extremely fluid, so there is less incentive to buy something when you can just play a few hours to earn the gold. Power-ups are not so critical that they're necessary for the game. Many younger players + many international players mean more players with no access to Gaia Cash. Many of the suggestions for monetization in the forums are good, but they won't have a dramatic effect on revenue because they don't fundamentally affect the model).

Q. Have any of our efforts made a difference?

Yes, very definitely. The community's financial and non-financial support contributed to us deciding to go ahead with DMS. The zOMG team's thought was that DMS was the best shot for trying to infuse some new life into the game.

Q. What is considered zOMG money?

Power ups, summons, gold potions, Bloodstone amulets, advertising in the zOMG frame (when we do it), and I'm probably forgetting other things but that is the main bulk.

Q. Where does it go?

Well, it doesn't go directly into the pockets of the people working on zOMG -- accounting doesn't work like that. It goes into the general pool from which operating expenses and salaries are paid. Currently, zOMG takes in less than it costs to maintain the ongoing development, so it can be fairly said that all zOMG funding is going into zOMG development.

(Feel free to read the full thread here)
Those points in themselves are crucial in understanding why Gaia would choose to halt production on zOMG. Gaia never once overlooked what a dedicated and passionate userbase zOMG had; if anything they were very appreciative of it as Pana expressed in the post above, and Swarf constantly echoed in his own posts.

swarf

I don't know what the staff size is at Nexon or Gpotato, but I do know that most MMORPG companies have a staff for the MMORPG properties that is larger than the entire staff for gaiaonline.com. Currently zOMG has 1 dev and 1 designer. We're doing our best here.

Also, BIG NOTE to those who claim that zOMG is primarily played for gold. This is demonstrably incorrect. The gold given out by zOMG has varied tremendously; the high and low points probably being 20x apart from each other. But the level of daily/monthly players has remained reasonably consistent in the last year and a half. For a while you could earn probably 10 times more gold with Booty Grab than zOMG, but we still had about the same number of players as now.

Thus, statistically, if you play zOMG only for gold you are in a VERY SMALL minority. Very active, perhaps. Very vocal, yes. But very small.

The overwhelming majority play zOMG for other reasons. Presumably because they enjoy the game or the community. Or they love bad puns.

Now I think it's important to ask yourself; why would Gaia ever decide to cut a project that users were so passionate about? Don't you think it was a well thought out decision on their part to halt production? Isn't it likely that they had a good reason for doing so? As it stands, they are leaving zOMG up. I know I mentioned this earlier, but I'd like to reiterate it in combination with what Swarf had posted- the majority of Zomg's userbase does not play for gold; they play for the experiences inside of it. Now ask yourself this; does a game really lose it's value simply because it's not being updated at the moment? How many of you have an old console game that you keep going back to just for the sheer enjoyment of it? In a sense, one could view zOMG in the same light. It still has a replay value; you can still play, craft new things, and meet new people. That perhaps is one of the biggest differences between an online game and an earlier console game; the community that composes it. I feel as if in their disappointment, users are failing to realize that the key component of zOMG is remaining untouched. By keeping the game up, Gaia has effectively preserved the most important aspect of the game. They could have taken it down and utilized the servers and budget for something else, but they didn't. This is an extremely crucial thing to keep in mind considering all of the cut features I had mentioned in the beginning of my post (e.g. Lotto, VJ, Cinemas and Frontier Skies) were all taken down.

I know at the moment, users are feeling hurt, mislead, and lost due do the discrepancies that have raised following ATA. This is completely understandable, and again; I do NOT fault anyone for feeling that way. Although, in the meantime, I feel all us users should try to cool off and look at the bigger picture. Gaia is who brought us zOMG in the first place, so we should be thankful for all of the experiences they have enabled us to have; and the ones we can continue to have. Give them time to try and resolve the disconnect going on, and then decide what you think. In the meantime, aiming hostility towards Gaia isn't going to solve anything; it's only going to make things tougher on them, as well as the staff members who are incredibly passionate about making Gaia such a great place for everyone.

[Prue]

l Chihiro-chan l

Alright. I've been seeing a ton of people posting their opinions in regards to the current situation of zOMG, so here is my (very tl;dr) two cents.

People seem very distraught over the concept that "Gaia is lying" to them. Most zOMG users are very passionate about the little community they have, which is extremely understandable. However, all the passion in the world doesn't really amount to profit. Since zOMG was implemented, it's had scares of going under. This seems to be a concept that people are overlooking. In the grand scheme of things, zOMG is just one of many features on Gaia as a whole. It's very important to remember that Gaia is a company at heart; while they aim to please their users, they must set covering their expenses as their highest priority. They simply can not be expected to allocate resources into a feature that is not profitable. They've actually cut a few features in the past, such as Lotto, VJ, Cinemas and Frontier Skies. As a company, Gaia has to do what works for them. I find it very unlikely that if users were faced with the decision of letting a feature go under, or letting Gaia hemorrhage revenue and suffer just to keep that feature, they would opt to save the feature.

Gaia has tried to do other things to keep revenue coming in (e.g. Facebook games such as Moga, and Soul Crash) all of these have been received poorly by members of the zOMG community as well as some users outside of the zOMG community. Now don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying users don't have a right to feel upset when devs are being pulled off of a project that they use; it's completely understandable. However, I will restate what I said earlier; Gaia is a company. A company who's demographic is only composed of a small percentage of users who actively play zOMG, and pay for items related to it. Allow me to quote Pana here:

Panagrammic

zOMG is currently the second most popular Gaia-themed flash game on Gaia, just behind Towns but ahead of Rallies -- about 5% of the daily active users play zOMG sometime during the day, and the rates are similar when you look at the entire month. A significantly higher percentage of users have tried zOMG. International users make up a higher percentage of the zOMG user base than the site as a whole.

(Confounding these numbers: a) unknown number of players that are just bored with zOMG and will pick it up again if we have new content, b) a significantly higher percentage of mules in the daily numbers, mostly to bypass the gold curve, and c) a percentage of users that play zOMG mostly for the gold.)

This leads me to consider the following- is it really viable to keep dumping money into a feature that only 5% of the userbase uses? Should Gaia and the rest of it's community really be expected to suffer for 5% of users? Personally, I think they made a fair compromise by simply deciding to pull the plug for the time being. Like any MMO, zOMG requires servers to run; this in itself is pretty pricey. Now consider this; instead of shutting zOMG down, they are continuing to leave it up and just not add any new content. To the best of my knowledge, no one has actually said that this feature will be scrapped in the long run; case in point, DARKNRGY's post about the issue. Who's to say that if Gaia starts getting a decent amount of income from the FB games they won't pick zOMG back up?

I feel it's important to point out that this situation isn't new; it's been a long time coming, actually. If you were to review the posts made regarding zOMG for the past year or so, it's quite easy to see that zOMG was struggling. This can perhaps best be explained through a few posts made by our Devs:

Panagrammic

"Yeah, I wish that zOMG had been updating during the years after release.

But, aside from commercial time travel, I don't see what we can do about it.

So, at this point in time, what do we do?

People were saying, "zOMG needs new content." Well, we tried with Coliseum, but users said, "No, that isn't good enough." So, the zOMG development team had a meeting and decided that DMS was the best shot at that -- it had the most stuff created, was an opportunity to up the CL, so on and so forth. So, that's what we're trying.

Given the current situation, there are three things we, as a company, could be saying now:

• we're killing zOMG
  
• we're doing one update and then evaluating the situation
  
• we're guaranteeing three or four updates over the next two years
  

We're not doing the first. We can't commit to the third right now. So we're at the second.

This post was made on October 9th, 2011; it's quite apparent that Gaia was willing to admit they were having difficulties then, so I don't understand why it seems as if this is coming as a complete surprise to users.

To further my point, here are a few other posts regarding zOMG made by our Devs in the past.

swarf

Huh, wha?

What's the debate, whether zomg will get new updates? The answer is yes, but very slowly v.v

We didn't manage to monetize it as much as we needed. So instead of having the remaining devs working on zOMG they'll be partly working on other things partly working on zOMG. We should have new pets this week, but new areas are gonna be sparse.

><

This post was made back on February 14th, 2011.

swarf

Technically the last dev at gaia working on zOMG. JK is the last artist.

And i'm not often grumpy. I just get lots of attention when I am ;D

This one was made on September 13th, 2011 in regards to Bron stepping down as a dev.

Panagrammic

Well, the funding levels (even if below target) eventually led to us decided to do DMS, so it definitely helped the state of zOMG.

October 26th, 2011.

Panagrammic

zOMG Bloodstone Amulet
People asked for a clarification on the announcement, as it was a little unclear. We're going to raise the price for the zOMG Bloodstone Amulet at 5:00pm today. Now is the best item to get this fine, fine looking amulet that I'm wearing, as very soon it will either go up in price or be removed from the stores (we're close to the 5k limit).

This post was made on September 23rd, 2011. In my opinion, the fact that they released DMS and the Amulet, as well as the fact that they were willing to raise the price of it may have been a subtle indication of a last ditch effort on Gaia's part to salvage zOMG financially. Keep in mind, at that point Pana had already posted in regards to the status of zOMG. I'll go ahead and quote more of that content to better explain my reasoning:

Panagrammic

Q. Why all this talk recently of "monetization"?

Every business, in an ongoing fashion, needs to be evaluating different features and deciding if it makes sense going forward. It breaks down as features on Gaia, it may be menu items in a restaurant, product lines for a big corporation. It's an ordinary part of business.

One of the things that we've been concentrating on recently is how to change the zOMG model to be self-sustaining; that is, having it pay for itself in the costs of development.

Q. Why does it always seem like we have to buy more stuff to keep zOMG alive?

None of the official announcements that I looked at ever said "buy this or this feature gets it," but there certainly seems to be a strong undercurrent of that sentiment in the zOMG community; I'm not sure if it came from [JK] informally or has just been telephoned between users to that state. However, like any business, if we are doing something that doesn't make sense financially, we need to change what we are doing.

Last year we did set certain revenue targets for zOMG based on a presumed development team size, but we haven't hit them. Partly we've been experimenting with different models to see what works the best.

(If there's anything working in zOMG's favor here, it's the community's passion for the game. It has been difficult finding a good model. We've said we won't do pay-to-play, so subscriptions are out. The Gaia marketplace is extremely fluid, so there is less incentive to buy something when you can just play a few hours to earn the gold. Power-ups are not so critical that they're necessary for the game. Many younger players + many international players mean more players with no access to Gaia Cash. Many of the suggestions for monetization in the forums are good, but they won't have a dramatic effect on revenue because they don't fundamentally affect the model).

Q. Have any of our efforts made a difference?

Yes, very definitely. The community's financial and non-financial support contributed to us deciding to go ahead with DMS. The zOMG team's thought was that DMS was the best shot for trying to infuse some new life into the game.

Q. What is considered zOMG money?

Power ups, summons, gold potions, Bloodstone amulets, advertising in the zOMG frame (when we do it), and I'm probably forgetting other things but that is the main bulk.

Q. Where does it go?

Well, it doesn't go directly into the pockets of the people working on zOMG -- accounting doesn't work like that. It goes into the general pool from which operating expenses and salaries are paid. Currently, zOMG takes in less than it costs to maintain the ongoing development, so it can be fairly said that all zOMG funding is going into zOMG development.

(Feel free to read the full thread here)
Those points in themselves are crucial in understanding why Gaia would choose to halt production on zOMG. Gaia never once overlooked what a dedicated and passionate userbase zOMG had; if anything they were very appreciative of it as Pana expressed in the post above, and Swarf constantly echoed in his own posts.

swarf

I don't know what the staff size is at Nexon or Gpotato, but I do know that most MMORPG companies have a staff for the MMORPG properties that is larger than the entire staff for gaiaonline.com. Currently zOMG has 1 dev and 1 designer. We're doing our best here.

Also, BIG NOTE to those who claim that zOMG is primarily played for gold. This is demonstrably incorrect. The gold given out by zOMG has varied tremendously; the high and low points probably being 20x apart from each other. But the level of daily/monthly players has remained reasonably consistent in the last year and a half. For a while you could earn probably 10 times more gold with Booty Grab than zOMG, but we still had about the same number of players as now.

Thus, statistically, if you play zOMG only for gold you are in a VERY SMALL minority. Very active, perhaps. Very vocal, yes. But very small.

The overwhelming majority play zOMG for other reasons. Presumably because they enjoy the game or the community. Or they love bad puns.

Now I think it's important to ask yourself; why would Gaia ever decide to cut a project that users were so passionate about? Don't you think it was a well thought out decision on their part to halt production? Isn't it likely that they had a good reason for doing so? As it stands, they are leaving zOMG up. I know I mentioned this earlier, but I'd like to reiterate it in combination with what Swarf had posted- the majority of Zomg's userbase does not play for gold; they play for the experiences inside of it. Now ask yourself this; does a game really lose it's value simply because it's not being updated at the moment? How many of you have an old console game that you keep going back to just for the sheer enjoyment of it? In a sense, one could view zOMG in the same light. It still has a replay value; you can still play, craft new things, and meet new people. That perhaps is one of the biggest differences between an online game and an earlier console game; the community that composes it. I feel as if in their disappointment, users are failing to realize that the key component of zOMG is remaining untouched. By keeping the game up, Gaia has effectively preserved the most important aspect of the game. They could have taken it down and utilized the servers and budget for something else, but they didn't. This is an extremely crucial thing to keep in mind considering all of the cut features I had mentioned in the beginning of my post (e.g. Lotto, VJ, Cinemas and Frontier Skies) were all taken down.

I know at the moment, users are feeling hurt, mislead, and lost due do the discrepancies that have raised following ATA. This is completely understandable, and again; I do NOT fault anyone for feeling that way. Although, in the meantime, I feel all us users should try to cool off and look at the bigger picture. Gaia is who brought us zOMG in the first place, so we should be thankful for all of the experiences they have enabled us to have; and the ones we can continue to have. Give them time to try and resolve the disconnect going on, and then decide what you think. In the meantime, aiming hostility towards Gaia isn't going to solve anything; it's only going to make things tougher on them, as well as the staff members who are incredibly passionate about making Gaia such a great place for everyone.

*slow claps* xd heart You have such a way with words, Chihiro.

[AKB0048]

Pilfer von Durem

Madkool

Swarf lied by telling zOMG! users that zOMG! was sustainable if users kept spending money on it. This was clearly not true, seeing as it's no longer receiving any updates.

Quote:

Uhh, why?

Your logical fallacy for one. Being able to support the servers and pull in money has nothing to do with updates.

The reason for dumping zOMG! is due to a formula, that figures it will not make as much profit as Gaia HQ wishes.

No. It's that zOMG will never pull into black. zOMG is not sustainable in any form of the definition. In order for the game to continue to pull in revenue, it needs updates. But the amount of revenue it can pull in does not justify the cost of those updates. Thus zOMG is shelved.

Swarf slanted things heavily by looking only at 2011. That year, it covered the cost of development for that year alone. But that does not make up for the large amount of debt zOMG has caused. Nor will it ever.

[Faptain America]

Jayce Reinhardt

Madkool

They've expanded in some ways like expanding into the social network arena, while consolidating in others (like in cutting staff).

Expanding into an area that just lost a few million users last month alone (According to several news websites) still makes me a lil worried.

But that does seem a clearer.

Edit- Just read that [JK] wasn't invited to this meeting either. (unconfirmed)

I keep wondering why people are confused about swarf and JK not being at the meeting. In any given retail business, when management holds a meeting, they generally do not invite their employees - it's a management meeting and then they relay what information is necessary down the line. With swarf and JK simply being developers on the game, it doesn't seem like it would be necessary to invite them in, particularly given that they have extremely strong emotional and community ties with the project, ties that I see as being far too tight to be beneficial.

[Jayce Reinhardt]

Faptain America

Jayce Reinhardt

Madkool

They've expanded in some ways like expanding into the social network arena, while consolidating in others (like in cutting staff).

Expanding into an area that just lost a few million users last month alone (According to several news websites) still makes me a lil worried.

But that does seem a clearer.

Edit- Just read that [JK] wasn't invited to this meeting either. (unconfirmed)

I keep wondering why people are confused about swarf and JK not being at the meeting. In any given retail business, when management holds a meeting, they generally do not invite their employees - it's a management meeting and then they relay what information is necessary down the line. With swarf and JK simply being developers on the game, it doesn't seem like it would be necessary to invite them in, particularly given that they have extremely strong emotional and community ties with the project, ties that I see as being far too tight to be beneficial.

Then why would swarf and possibly [JK] be upset at not being invited? just because they are immature emotionally? (I have no idea if they are or aren't)

Why would it even be brought up by them if in fact it was no big deal?

[Faptain America]

Jayce Reinhardt

Faptain America

Jayce Reinhardt

Madkool

They've expanded in some ways like expanding into the social network arena, while consolidating in others (like in cutting staff).

Expanding into an area that just lost a few million users last month alone (According to several news websites) still makes me a lil worried.

But that does seem a clearer.

Edit- Just read that [JK] wasn't invited to this meeting either. (unconfirmed)

I keep wondering why people are confused about swarf and JK not being at the meeting. In any given retail business, when management holds a meeting, they generally do not invite their employees - it's a management meeting and then they relay what information is necessary down the line. With swarf and JK simply being developers on the game, it doesn't seem like it would be necessary to invite them in, particularly given that they have extremely strong emotional and community ties with the project, ties that I see as being far too tight to be beneficial.

Then why would swarf and possibly [JK] be upset at not being invited? just because they are immature emotionally? (I have no idea if they are or aren't)

Why would it even be brought up by them if in fact it was no big deal?

I don't want to call them names or anything, and I don't think it would be emotionally immature to be hurt that a major decision was made about the game they were working on without them. That said, they're still the developers for the game, and they are not the management of it. "No big deal" is subjective, and I'm sure it was a huge deal for them. JK and swarf have put a great deal of time, effort, and emotional energy into the zOMG project, and are extremely attached to it - as I see it, to a fault.

[Catalyste]

l Chihiro-chan l

That was excellent in reasoning, tone, and how well thought out and understanding you put things.


Thank you so much!

emotion_brofist

[Rya Dracosin]

Faptain America

Jayce Reinhardt

Madkool

They've expanded in some ways like expanding into the social network arena, while consolidating in others (like in cutting staff).

Expanding into an area that just lost a few million users last month alone (According to several news websites) still makes me a lil worried.

But that does seem a clearer.

Edit- Just read that [JK] wasn't invited to this meeting either. (unconfirmed)

I keep wondering why people are confused about swarf and JK not being at the meeting. In any given retail business, when management holds a meeting, they generally do not invite their employees - it's a management meeting and then they relay what information is necessary down the line. With swarf and JK simply being developers on the game, it doesn't seem like it would be necessary to invite them in, particularly given that they have extremely strong emotional and community ties with the project, ties that I see as being far too tight to be beneficial.

While I can understand it from that point, It's more like, there's a meeting, and all the departments are likely invited, except everyone from the department that the meeting is about. They aren't allowed to plead a case. They aren't allowed to speak for the department. There is no real head of the zomg department, so they just decide not to invite anyone? That's shady...At least in my mind...