Thank you Scott for replying to my question of your European view.
I can really understand that it is a lot more expensive to arrange something in Eu compared to more local stuff in the Us. My take on your reply is that AW has taken a corporate decision that you won't make an overall profit / gain (additional sales, increased marketing value, or expanded player pool) by making such trips / efforts / promotion. Correct? Becuaes if it would have it would have been a good investment, right?
I really hope you will revise this in the future when more funds are available. As I wrote in a post further up in this topic I'm not too imprest by the work done in this aspect by your partners over in Eu. AW would have done a much better job them self's with more passion. Hopefully you will have the opportunity to hire someone based in Eu to to this.
While I'm already writing I must also state my comment again regarding different translations. Too me I can't really see the gain doing this... This in my view could be money spent in a better way (like going to EU for example). The players you are targeting will for sure play Mage Wars with the original language. That is what all of us others are doing that is not French, German or Spanish (or English by the way) native speaking. To demand this, and take time and money from AW from your development of more expansions or simply be able promote the product more, is just to be spoiled. There are no Dutch, Sweds or Poles who are asking for this what I can see. I believe you won't translate into these languages as well, are you?
Again thanks for your reply and keep up the good work. Mage Wars deserves it. And I'm sorry if my comments sound a bit hard or not complete. English isn't my native language either...
Foreign translations, in general, cost our time more than money. That said, not even time vs a schedule, but time in just the amount of work on someone's shoulders here at the company. Depending on the relationship, games can be either licensed to a partner to print in their language, with them providing us a royalty, or, we can print them, and sell them to the partner at a highly discounted rate for them to distribute, but with enough profit for us as well. There are also many locations that perfer local language for games over English, and this helps build the market and playerbase in those areas. At the moment, Dutch and Sweedish are not being discussed, but Polish is, to potentially be added.
Overall though, the most work that licensing a game puts on a company like ours is from an operations standpoint, and it doesn't impact the design team as nothing changes in the design of the game.
We get much more feedback than is seen online at our customer service and sales emails and I can tell you the languages we choose to partner to produce are in demand. We wouldn't be making those decisions to partner with other publishers to bring them out if we didn't think they had the opportunity to improve the game's reach and player base while being a profitable decision.
I full agree with you about the passion for marketing the games. We believe we could do more and do better. It is something I've brought up to all our partners in all the regions we work with. Since the partners are investing the majority stake (usually both in time and money), they prefer to maintain marketing control, with our input and guidance. We provide assets and suggested messaging and tone, however, we look to the partners to know the best outlets to market in. Marketing a game is a long run and not a short sprint, and making knee jerk reactions can be worse for the wear in most cases. That said, every relationship is different and we try to evaluate as much, and as often, as we can.
I'm sorry if you took my reply as investing money in Europe is a bad investment. That was not the intent. It is simply that we have a limited budget and as a small company we need to spend it where we can maximize the impact and profits to grow, and as we grow, make decisions that impact a broader range.
Again, we will have Ambassadors helping us promote the game at UKGE and Essen this year. If anyone has other large conventions they feel we could work with in Europe to hit as well, we'd love to hear from you where the players are, where the opportunities are, and what those conventions are. We're always happy to explore opportunities when and where they may present themselves.
