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Comment by JeffL | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting reading this thread as one of the founders of Star Sonata, a space MMO that launched in 2004. Star Citizen has a lot of hype and a lot of money, but people seem to hate the game/results. Our players for the most part love our game and keep playing and subscribing even after more than a decade, but I can't for the life of me get the marketing right, so have been unable to bring in new players in any kind of numbers. I just wish 1% of the players who paid for Star Citizen even knew about Star Sonata.

For a while back in 2007-ish Google ads were working really well and bringing in paying players at about $35 cost to acquire each and they were worth more than $200 over their lifetime, but something changed almost over night and Google ads got more competitive and almost no amount of money would bring people in. I'm sitting here with a game that people like and will pay for but can't figure out anymore how to acquire them.

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The "something" that changed is that private equity (and even banks) figured out how to financially model MMOs just like SAAS.

I think Tomasz Tunguz illustrates this concept beautifully in considering SAAS / MMOs as annuities (1)

With little incremental cost to each additional user, and predictable revenue over time, the customer acquisition cost becomes highly flexible if you can finance it (or leverage it).

As a result it's become an arms race and a common VC model today is to spend 2 - 3x total annual revenue in marketing spend to land grab new channels while the "annuity" cost is low.

If you're open to sharing more details you may spark somebody's attention on HN :) - I personally invest in SAAS / MMO / CRE + bring customer acquisition expertise (and a team) for cases exactly like this - although we try to target some minimum scale ($5m+ ARR / ASR)

(1) https://tomtunguz.com/recurring-gross-margin-dollar-efficien...

Happy to share more information but don't want to hijack the thread too much. Would love to talk to you about this stuff sometime if you'd be interested. My email is in my profile.

How do I get in touch with you?

My email is in my profile.

Hey man... I appreciate your game, and your problem.... it's a tough one to crack.

But the kind of person who appreciates this > https://www.starsonata.com/inc/images/screens/gallery/Galaxy...

Is not the same person who is just looking for a modern update of Wing Commander.

I think you need to focus those ads on the True NERD crowd. Like I bet the ROAS for an ad against "Terragenisis" search queries might be positive for you.

Also you need to go a little more modern in some of your design choices.

But you are 99% crushing it. I really hope Star Sonata 2 breaks through!

Interesting to hear, because what you've said really reflects my short contact with Star Sonata. I found it through ads at about 2007, because at the time, my way of finding games was through ads. I played a bit, joined a team, had fun with base building, and stopped because it wasn't really my thing. Fast forward... Nowadays my go-to places for games are basically: Steam and web games. With both, you literally just navigate to the game and hit play. I think that's a big thing: if I have to download and install executables myself it feels less sleek, less secure and trustworthy even. I can't imagine finding games through ads anymore.

Not to be harsh, but suppose I was a new player and I knew that Star Sonata 2 was a thing. (I do now because I Googled it.) I still probably will not take the effort to download it, simply because of the work and trust investment it represents today, an investment which I would not have thought twice about ten years back.

As a layperson, I visited the Star Sonata web site and there doesn't seem to be a page telling me about the game. I guess a screenshot tells a thousand words, but I always look for words before trying out a game. As a newcomer I don't necessarily look for news and that seems to be the main thrust of the home page.

I hate how so many MMO game homepages are basically 100% oriented towards current players with news and community features...meanwhile the "marketing" side is a generic "photos" and "videos" with no context or summary of the game. And the videos tend to have no context and are often also oriented towards experienced players, as they show advanced game play.

Or worse the "about" page is some fiction storyline from the game with no indication of what game play is like, or how it compares to other games.

Some major games do this and it's shocking. Must be nice having such good word of mouth and press coverage (ie, written reviews, youtube videos) that you don't even need to bother making a nice marketing page.

I wonder if any of those have proper marketing "funnels", landing pages, analytics, elsewhere etc and just don't care much about using their homepage for sales. At last Star Sonata has a nice big CTA at the top of the homepage but otherwise is lacking a true central landing page.

Pay a Twitch.tv streamer who plays similar games to play your game?

Wow, what a throwback. I played Star Sonata, Astro Empires, and Pardus in the mid-2000's timeframe. And Eve Online later in early 2010's. Only Pardus and Eve stuck with me because of the persistent sandboxes. They're the only ones I remember and therefore talk about.

Astro Empires, my favorite gamified spreadsheet. People took that game way too seriously for me to have much fun with it.

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