CoH3 Player Retention & Monetization

Read below interview with Sega Europe Data Scientist, Stanley Wang. Without a doubt, Sega Europe wants to implement this in future CoH games. Remember to vote with your wallet.

Sega Europe is working with Data Scientists to improve player retention and monetization.
This was one of the reasons Sega/Relic cancelled new content for DoW3.

Quote Relic Communications lead, Benjamin Boudreau

Retention and sentiment were the two biggest measures we were watching most closely.
https://community.dawnofwar.com/discussion/15995/well-relic-q-a/p6

Recent Relic job announcement for a "LIVE OPERATIONS DIRECTOR" for future CoH content/features/monetization/retention:
https://archive.ph/465Ky
https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/1515159400/

As a Live-Ops Director, you will…
▪Manage and design content, campaigns and features that maximize acquisition, retention and monetization throughout the product life cycle
▪Conduct and communicate in-depth analysis of in-game economy using data insights and strong business acumen to set and achieve KPIs
▪Seek in-depth player insights and develop new content strategies through data- driven analysis

How SEGA leverages in-game data to keep players coming back
22 November 2019

https://techhq.com/2019/11/how-sega-leverages-in-game-data-to-keep-players-coming-back/
*SNIP*
“There’s a huge revolution going on in data at the moment and many companies, SEGA included, are collecting a wide variety of data about their product, about their fanbase.

“We thought they’d been very good about what had happened in the past. But there’d been fewer questions about how that past informs our future,” Wang said.

“We’re all part of this data revolution here— it’s a great thing to be part of, but everyone has the responsibility to use the data in a way that will enhance the lives and the experiences of the community around us.”
*SNIP*
Data comes in two raw types; the first is monthly sales insights data from Steam— a digital distribution platform that hosts millions of concurrent users, where SEGA games are available to download.

But the second is data from in-game player activity. Wang and his team work with SEGA’s developer studios to add in-game events into the products, which allow insights and analysis to be drawn on how players play the game, ultimately shedding light on aspects of the game that can be improved on.

“With this data, we get about 5,000 events per second,” Wang told us.
*SNIP*
All this fine and granular insight help SEGA’s developer teams continually craft and update experiences that surpass user expectations.

“We can take this data to analyze clusters of player behavior and understand what the main groups of play styles are on the game,” Wang said.

“This has been a huge success, and it’s great for us and it helps us to make improvements to the game in the future and better content for the game that the community actually wants.”

While this forms the basis for in-game insights, the data team explore all sources available to them to better understand their users, across each unique community, and what keeps them coming back. That can include using machine learning to scour games reviews for keywords to analyze the sentiment the game is evoking.

https://twitter.com/stanleywanguk
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stanley-wang-1941a3157/
Also on Stanley's team is Felix Baker:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/felix-baker-b879a32a/

That said, there is a very dark side to Data Science and that is Whale-Hunting AI;


Bellular News | The Ghastly Monetisation AI That Tracks Down & EXPLOITS Whales


Yodo1's AI-driven whale hunt is a bad look for the games industry:
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-10-21-yodo1s-ai-driven-whale-hunt-is-a-bad-look-for-the-games-industry-opinion

Transformers players spending $150k grabbed headlines, but Yodo1's GCAP talk raised tough questions about responsible monetisation in mobile
"I always used to think that if you monetise your audience too hard, they'll leave the game. But it's actually the other way around"

Henry Fong, Founder & CEO at Yodo1 (Beijing):
https://www.linkedin.com/in/hfong/

Well, if Sega follows the path of EA and sells air in his games, what can be expected in CoH3: sale of DLC factions, sale of commanders, maybe a separate sale of single companies, sale of infantry skins, sale of tank skins and camouflage, sale of cooperative missions and mini stories (something like the Theatre of War in CoH2), selling units (?) something like CoH1 award units, which will either be purely cosmetic or still change the characteristics and abilities of the unit. Yeah, I wouldn’t like to see such a game.

My bet: They will sale infantry skins, so the game will more focus about infantry combat and the engine will use the zoom-in function more than ever.

Seeing which route the once great "Total war" series has gone (taking out core factions from the games and reselling them as on-disk DLC while simultaneously now pumping out another shitty to mediocre game every year to milk the player base), I fear that CoH3 might go a similar way.

We've seen parts of this in CoH2 already. Factions that were batshit broken on release. Nobody with a bit of honesty at Relic could have looked at this and said "yep, that's a balanced state to start with and we can sort out the rest later".
The factions were planned to be OP to give incentive to buy them if you want to continue to have fun in one of your favourite games. Also it is questionable if a couple of units is really worth the price they are asking for at release. In my opinion it is not. Other games release whole DLCs with story, characters, items and even cinematic cut scenes for similar prices. And then there's the ingame store where you can buy skins (maybe forgivable), but also commanders which make up a huge part of the meta. Most of them were also broken at release to make people buy them.

I'm sure that there are many people at Relic that are passionate about the franchise and want to produce a good game, but I assume that the corporate pressure from Sega will be too much.


I'm not sure if I want to see CoH3 released. If this game is a shitty DLC festival, then our playerbase will be split even further and we will end up with basically two unplayable games.

We've seen parts of this in CoH2 already. Factions that were batshit broken on release. Nobody with a bit of honesty at Relic could have looked at this and said "yep, that's a balanced state to start with and we can sort out the rest later".

Knowing Relics history of balance.... well, lets just say I don't expect much balance of them in regards to anything.
Vanila factions were equally broken as DLC ones, only difference here is vanila were balanced a bit already when DLCs released.
Just look at any single relic RTS, doesn't matter if base or DLC factions, they ALL were broken op.

Knowing Relics history of balance.... well, lets just say I don't expect much balance of them in regards to anything.
Vanila factions were equally broken as DLC ones, only difference here is vanila were balanced a bit already when DLCs released.
Just look at any single relic RTS, doesn't matter if base or DLC factions, they ALL were broken op.

My comment was not about being "broken" in a sense that the faction has bad designs, not enough viable strategies etc, but in the sense that they were designed to be too strong on purpose to generate a higher perceived value for the players.
Design issues are often fixable and I can forgive that. Even our current balance team with years of experience in the game has to correct their own changes sometimes because even they can't foresee all consequences, but exploiting players like that is not forgivable.
Relic/Sega won't see a single penny or any support from me if this should become the case, and I hope that the players will "vote" like this as well.

Design issues are often fixable and I can forgive that. Even our current balance team with years of experience in the game has to correct their own changes sometimes because even they can't foresee all consequences, but exploiting players like that is not forgivable.
Relic/Sega won't see a single penny or any support from if this should become the case, and I hope that the players will "vote" like this as well.

+1

I dont have no problems with long term monetization because that means that the game get long term support. I would also certainly buy dlcs. The thing is: DLCs have to be good. Players pay for quality. A good example is TW:Warhamme. The playerbase wants further dlcs because the quality got better and better. The dlcs in former TW games were utterly shit and not worth a single cent.
That shows: If players feels they get treated well and get quality they dont have problems with dlcs.
That being said, Relic certainly have to win back trust. I good way to achieve that would be to include the community more in COH3. The last years have shown that good things happen if you do that.

My hope would be that factions have less commanders but more diverse ones with 6 commander slots.

My comment was not about being "broken" in a sense that the faction has bad designs, not enough viable strategies etc, but in the sense that they were designed to be too strong on purpose to generate a higher perceived value for the players.
Design issues are often fixable and I can forgive that. Even our current balance team with years of experience in the game has to correct their own changes sometimes because even they can't foresee all consequences, but exploiting players like that is not forgivable.
Relic/Sega won't see a single penny or any support from me if this should become the case, and I hope that the players will "vote" like this as well.

You're not talking to snek here, I'm fully aware what you meant.

I'm simply saying that relic balancing crew is too incompetent for the short run, requiring too much time and too wide intervals to identify and fix problems.

Balancing is very hard thing to do and you really need perfect people to do it, sadly, Relic never managed to get them, at least not on the product management and balance lead level.

I believe they are simply too incompetent to deliberately release something broken and that is based on patch and expansion history of DoW and CoH series, units and factions going from OP to UP and OP again, never reaching even remote balance until community was directly involved.

You're not talking to snek here, I'm fully aware what you meant.

I'm simply saying that relic balancing crew is too incompetent for the short run, requiring too much time and too wide intervals to identify and fix problems.

Balancing is very hard thing to do and you really need perfect people to do it, sadly, Relic never managed to get them, at least not on the product management and balance lead level.

picked up the game again after stoping for a few years, Coh2 balance is now much better than when relic handled that.
I think that some people in this company are incompetent as fuck, but that's something that happen in every business.

RTS are not as popular as they use to be so I am expecting lots of paid DLC and repeat of COH2 shenanigans.

If they sell cosmetics, not only colored skins, but different uniforms, Rust and Bullet holes in Tanks, different kinds of helmets, Caps for soldiers, Tanks with sandbags, camo nets for tanks, Backpacks or coats for soldiers,

i'm pretty sure the fans of this game will throw TONS of money at them, because that 's something cool.

If they do commanders again, well, the negative backlash sbhould ve been warning enough.

Also i suggest the 2sided tree system from coh1 for the commanders (with fewer commanders than now, of course)

My bet: They will sale infantry skins, so the game will more focus about infantry combat and the engine will use the zoom-in function more than ever.

+1
Along with infantry skins, I suggest replacing CoH2 faceplate with a custom Avatar used for loading screen/ingame chat lobby/forum.
Example: CoHO
https://www.gamereplays.org/companyofheroes/portals.php?show=news&news_id=441613

That shows: If players feels they get treated well and get quality they dont have problems with dlcs.
That being said, Relic certainly have to win back trust. I good way to achieve that would be to include the community more in COH3. The last years have shown that good things happen if you do that.

I hope fans are not misled by corporate double-speak/buzzwords.
Relic's corporate side don't have a soul and don't necessary care what the community wants due to conflict of interest.

By law, corporate management has a fiduciary duty to act in the best interest of Sega shareholders and increase profit when feasible.
Corporate management can be removed for breach of fiduciary duty;


With future CoH release there is a risk "corporate pirates" hijack the ship and throw the community overboard.


CoH has no real competition except Iron Harvest so exploiting fan passion is quite easy.
The pro-consumer option is to encourage CoH fans staying vigilant and not fall into the trap of complacency.

As long as Relic doesn’t make CoH3 and SEGA hires a bunch of high profile CoH2 community people to balance CoH3, I’ll be happy.

I hope fans are not misled by corporate double-speak/buzzwords.
Relic's corporate side don't have a soul and don't necessary care what the community wants due to conflict of interest.

I think you are creating a wrong dilemma. Business interests and care for the community are 2 sides of the same medal. A smart management cares about the community because happy customers will spend more money in the long term.
I think game companies are more sensitive about this topic now than in the past imo. Look at CA with their mix of FLC/DLC and constant updates for Warhammer. The same company sold trash dlc for ROMEII and released the game in a poor state. After this desaster my love for TW that started with ShogunI was gone.
Warhammer won me back as a customer because the studio finally understood how important it is to listen to the community. Why should RELIC not do the same when another SEGA owned studio is making millions with this approach?

Business interests and care for the community are 2 sides of the same medal. A smart management cares about the community because happy customers will spend more money in the long term.

Ideally yes (long term mutual interest), in reality corporate management for AAA gaming is shortsighted.
CoH2 game director openly admits that money talks louder than unhappy fans in post-launch interview (July 2013):

COH2.ORG: How do you feel about the (largely negative) way players have reacted to the day 1 DLC?
Quinn Duffy: At first I was a little bummed out, but then I realize in this internet day and age that what people say (‘I hate DLC and I hate Relic’) and what they do (buy DLC) is really at odds. https://www.coh2.org/news/4977/quinn-duffy-post-launch-interview

For crying out loud the gaming industry is normalizing gambling for kids.
Money talks and happy customers don't necessarily equal happy shareholders. EA Fifa is one example, many negative user reviews yet whales/gullible fans reward EA with millions of dollars.

In FY19, more than 45 million unique players engaged in FIFA 19 and FIFA 18 on console and PC.

https://www.ea.com/news/electronic-arts-reports-q4-fy19-financial-results
Ultimate Team microtransactions now make up 28% of all EA’s sales – more than FIFA itself.:
https://metro.co.uk/2019/07/25/ultimate-team-microtransactions-now-make-money-fifa-10461286/

Actiblizz/Activision management now consistently ignores unhappy players/negative reviews. As long the money is good, management don't care much.
Activision executives say fans are ‘embracing new in-game content,’ but community reaction all time low:
https://charlieintel.com/activision-executives-reaction-versus-community/55842/

During Activision Blizzard investor call today, the company revealed that they are continuing to make staggering amounts of money from microtransactions from their entire library of games.

They stated that they earned $800 million in the last three months from in-game items across their franchises.

Activision also stated that their new “initiatives” that they are implementing in Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 has lead to stronger engagement from the community, and that they have seen a higher microtransaction revenues from Black Ops 4 than Call of Duty: WWII.
*SNIP*
The core gaming communities that have interacted with the company for years have started to hate on them to new levels because of the lack of care for their feedback. Activision executives continue to show that the community feedback for their games, especially Call of Duty, is going on deaf ears.

Black Ops 4 has one of the worst MTX systems the franchise has ever seen, but according to Activision, it’s a model that is being ’embraced’ which is very worrisome as we look towards Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. The company continues to embrace the RNG system with game changing items locked by supply drops even as lawmakers around the world are looking to ban such models going forward.

Reddit CoH analysis from RepoRogue:

It's almost like Activision doesn't care about the long term viability of Blizzard as a company but is mostly concerned with doing the video game equivalent of asset stripping where IPs are exhausted by releasing high margin mobile games that alienate the core fan base and slowly lead to the demise of the company and its brands.

The problem is that Activision has a very shortsighted view of things. They're obsessed with quarter on quarter growth and making sure everything the company does shows a direct profit. But competent business involves thinking past the current quarter to ten years down the line. Blizzard has been a staggeringly successful independent company but has been making bad decision after bad decision since it was acquired by Activision. It doesn't take Nostradamus to project what will become of Blizzard in five years.
*SNIP*
Part of the problem is that claims such as Activisions that RTS games are unprofitable are not based on solid evidence, nor are they unchangeable, natural facts. The reality is that StarCraft I and II have made a ton of money for Blizzard, so not continuing the series because RTS are unprofitable is just stupid.

Capitalists are not necessarily rational or intelligent. Many of them are not particularly knowledge about the industry they are in. As a result, they end up taking a lot of received wisdom on-board and just mimicking other big companies rather than seriously thinking through a long-term growth strategy. Activision has been on the yearly sequels until an IP stops being profitable train for a long time, and I suspect that's what they'll try to do with Overwatch (Blizzard's most marketable franchise).
*SNIP*
Except there's a reason that publishers have systematically been killing game studios for decades now: the research they do is inherently conservative in it's outlook. The focus is on genres with consistent sales over and above doing something more risky that has the potential to be way more profitable.

Consider where innovation and smash hits have come from in the last decade. A lot of them have come from Indie studios. Minecraft has been insanely profitable, PUBG has created a genre of imitators while making tons of money, etc. AAA game publishing has been stagnant and slowly eroding itself through running IP after IP into the ground with annualized releases that are more or less identical to what they were before.

This isn't because there are necessarily a bunch of morons at the top but because they have systemically short sighted incentives (namely, quarterly profit reports). The long term trajectory of this strategy, the one Activision appears to be pursuing with Blizzard, is a long term loss of profitability and probably the closure of the studio.

If relic wants to sell stuff in future COH games, they should also sell the voice overs from past games. I would certainly pay to have the COH1 tiger voiceover on my COH2 tiger, you could do that with all units, would be fantastic.

Ive also written about one way to reinforce the COH player base that might be worth reading: https://www.coh2.org/news/87123/company-of-heroes-3-with-whiteflash-addendum#Esp

voice-over sell would be quite nice

Ideally yes (long term mutual interest), in reality corporate management for AAA gaming is shortsighted.
CoH2 game director openly admits that money talks louder than unhappy fans in post-launch interview (July 2013):

It is not like we have a high opinion on Quinn "every game tells a story" Duffy anyway and like he can teach everyone success story's lesson with DoW3 release. I guess (and hope for him) he changed his mind between 2013 and today.

Now if we talk only about RTS genre, of course the game and monetization model have to be done from scratch because there is no model available on the market today. The only other RTS game retaining a player base is Starcraft2 but wthe platform used for its lobby is probably paid with WOW subscription.

It shouldn't be hard for Sega and Relic to find out that selling cosmetics should be the way to go if they want to make everyone happy. And if they don't, their short coming mind with meet their short coming revenue on the game. RTS genre isn't MOBA with millions of potential players.

It is not like we have a high opinion on Quinn "every game tells a story" Duffy anyway and like he can teach everyone success story's lesson with DoW3 release. I guess (and hope for him) he changed his mind between 2013 and today.

One can hope, eh? Wasn't he the one personally pushing first batch of new commanders with things like tiger ace?

Now if we talk only about RTS genre, of course the game and monetization model have to be done from scratch because there is no model available on the market today. The only other RTS game retaining a player base is Starcraft2 but wthe platform used for its lobby is probably paid with WOW subscription.

*modern RTS, remember there is that nostalgia party called age of empires.

It shouldn't be hard for Sega and Relic to find out that selling cosmetics should be the way to go if they want to make everyone happy. And if they don't, their short coming mind with meet their short coming revenue on the game. RTS genre isn't MOBA with millions of potential players.

SC2 model seems to be fair, even if a bit pricey.