Imagine How Good This Game Would Be If Stefan Hired Full Time Devs
 

As in, he actually paid a few people to work full time on developing playable content.

Right now we get new content maybe every 1-2 years(besides cosmetics).

Just think how amazing the game would be if Stefan actually paid someone to make content. As of now all there is a bunch of volunteers working for free, throwing something out when they feel like they have the time.

They're probably making a ****load of money off of gralat packs, I don't see why he can't hire a couple full time devs, or even hire freelancers to do a bit of coding on the side.

it would be super awkward since Stefan doesn't work for Graal anymore :0

Stefan never worked for Graalians :0
i get you tho

wait, Stefan no longer works on Graal now? Who manages it now, and what happened? But my point still stands, whoever owns it should really pay devs instead of relying on volunteers, the game has so much potential to grow.

Unixmad

the one who rolls in the dough. No, not money. Literal dough. After it is baked.

Unixmad is like the robots in matrix.
I'm neo.

It would also be great if you brought SHRUB back considering it was the first guild I ever joined

I typed graal but spellcheck changed it to graalians since I type it so much :0

I really wanna bring it back, but so many core members quit. Maybe if we can get some graalians together to revive the guild and get towers I'll definitely play a lot, but otherwise idk. A lot of our core members moved on or aren't playing anymore, it's not easy to get a successful tower guild started.

From a profit prospective, if what they're doing now is making money then there's no reason to change anything.

I wouldn't be surprised if the quality of content isn't change drastically if payed staff are hired since there's not a whole line of developers better than what Graal has now waiting to be hired to work here. It's not a career that leads anywhere.

That's what I thought would happen with Minecraft...

Did you know microsoft is making a Minecraft 2? I wonder if circles will be implemented..

well he hired remi and marion agessss ago but them quests apparently arn't worthy to go on game/would need to redo.. (that being said the lizardbaddy things etc in new town maybe it will eventually be done :o)

p.s. stefan has been gone from graal for agessss now suprised people are only just realising.. he got another game/cant say pm if want to know.

With unixmad in charge, it'd probably be more or less the same. They might be making money off Graal, but professional coders/artists are very expensive. To give an idea, a small set of custom pixeled armor can cost $80+. This might be due to the fact that Graal is also purchasing the commercial rights while buying the art(this might go for coding too, but I wouldn't know). So, if they hired professionals, itd be probably be for things that make the game the same, but a little bit better; updated UI, new tiles, new large sellable item, etc. Stuff that are a safe investment for the game. Probably wouldn't be as innovative as you'd expect. I doubt they'd use paid artists for original, creative projects when they can get people to do it for free. tl;dr: expensive things cause safe choices instead of creative ones

I think this is the best explanation for why not to hire devs I've seen.

stefuhn pls
hier real peeps

Skill do you remember green guy / iROOSTER

And anytime you want I'm down to help bring SHRUB back

Yup, I definitely remember you! You were one of our more active members.

@Latte they don't need to hire pixel artists, there are kids/teenagers willing to make stuff for free, it isn't a rare skill. Plus there's custom uploads. But hiring a couple programmers isn't that expensive. It would only cost maybe $50,000 a year each, and the amount of work they could get done is insane. It would cost less too if they outsourced it.

Well with towering more popular than ever I believe you should take it into consideration I'm usually on around 10 hours a day so I'll still be an active part of SHRUB but when all is said and done its your decision man I was just thinking about it the other day and happened to see your post on the forums

10/10 would tower with SHRUB again

Coders, under the right management, could take Graal to a new level; definitely not denying that. But really, $50,000-$80,000 a year is probably what Unixmad makes off of Graal alone, considering there aren't any advertising deals or pop-up ads, outside of the one airline sponsership Graal got (which didn't result in paid workers either). But! Coders could easily be paid for if Unixmad wanted to get investors to pay for them. Still, Graal has been around for more than a decade and Graal's business model hasn't matured at all.

Also, I wouldn't underestimate the power of professional art. While Classic's recent work has actually been very professional-looking, Classic as a whole lacks good marketing. There is a lot more art that Classic needs than just stuff that volunteers can do.

The problem isn't as simple as just getting a team that can fix the game and save the day. It's getting investors and growing the business model of Graal itself, neither of which seem to be happening any time soon.

+rep

stop repping the ****poster.

thats a nice amount of rep u have
would be a shame if
something
happened
to
it

I actually feel pretty strongly about the volunteer-based system Graal uses. Honestly, I think it's wrong and exploitative. The higher ups (Unixmad, Toonslab) RELY on the blood, sweat and tears of unapaid volunteers, and then profit on this unpaid work. It's sad. They do the absolute minimum for the game, yet reap all the rewards. Without these volunteers, the game would go nowhere.

i guess one could say I "have a brilliant future" ahead of me?

They are volunteers, if they are okay spending time developing for free, and having someone else earn money off of it, thats their deal. I can guarantee you most devs that you ask will say that they do not even want to be paid for working on Graal, there was a thread like this before and a few of the current devs actually came in and talked about how they'd rather not prefer to be paid.

I agree with not wanting to being paid. It sets standards (sometimes unrealistic) and creates a strange work environment (im referring to Graal, as normal jobs are much different).

That being said though, the "higher ups" should acknowledge the volunteer work that is being done and take steps to improve the game. For example, lag has always been an issue for Graal, yet Unixmad hasn't done much of anything to fix that issue. It would help for him to be communicative in the community, but I don't see that happening either.

So in ways I agree that the volunteer work is exploitative, only because the higher ups aren't even relevant in the game, just the team of volunteers are. And even then, they have little to no contact to the higher ups too.

OOOOOOOOOOO Mr.Simons...afterall...she is a SUPER MODERATOR!...
Latte...if u ever want to do anything with his rep...throw a little at me too <3

I'm pretty sure they make a lot more than $50-80K a year. There's over 3000 players online at a time on Graal Classic alone. Combine all the servers and its between 5-10K.

In comparison, Tera's concurrent userbase on Steam ranges from 10-20K(which is likely inflated due to people keeping the launcher open when they aren't playing). Now, Steam doesn't account for all the players, but from my experiences in Tera it seems like the population doubled after the Steam launch(maybe even tripled, servers that were "dead" even have login queues now. I'd assume Steam accounts for over half of the playerbase currently.

There's also Tera in Korean and Japan which are much smaller, so in total we're looking at maybe 50-100K concurrent users at most.

Tera generated over $200 million in revenue in 2013, and this was BEFORE the Steam launch, or the expansion. it's probably much higher now because the population went up immensely. With 10x the population, it generated over 1000 times what you estimated Unixmad makes off of Graal.

Also look at other games like Rise of Immortals, that had a team of dedicated developers to support an online playerbase of 50-100 players at a time before it eventually shut down. You'd be surprised how much money f2p games generate.

Also, if Unixmad hired developers, the population would likely grow and generate more revenue as a result. If they added cool items actually worth buying that actually did things besides look pretty, maybe people would buy gralat packs.

Need more reliable evidence? Team Fortress 2 is a Steam exclusive. In 2013, it generated $139 Million in revenue. Team Fortress 2 currently has 60,000 Online, Graal has ~5000 online between all servers. Also keep in mind tons of people in TF2 are probably idling/botting on multiple accounts for drops.

So at 1/10th the size, Graal would theoretically generate ~$13 million in revenue annually. Obviously it'll vary(maybe people are more likely to spend money on TF2 than Graal), but populationwise Graal is bigger than you think.

people still buy gralat packs regardless

Minecraft is dead. No content since Microsoft bought Mojang out.
Wait, this sounds pretty familiar...

The games you're talking about are made by matured and large gaming companies-- an entirely different market than Graal. Yes, Graal has around 7.5-10k active players, and some have probably purchased gralats at some point. But games like TF2 and Tera have a market that extends past the game itself. People talk about those games all the time; there are conventions, there are eSports, there is merchandise and Twitch streamers. If you think that those games make their money solely on in-game purchases like Graal does, you're sorely mistaken.

I'm sorry but that is just not how you determine the revenue of a game.

iEra isn't even one of the top grossing apps anymore (okcupid and dropbox generate more revenue than iera, or any other graal game for that matter). I highly doubt that Stefan is earning millions off of Graal right now.

Just because Graal has 1/10 of the players that TF2 has does not mean it earns 1/10 the revenue. The bulk of graal's players come from iClassic, where you can do very well without buying a single pack (look at Blueh for example). You are looking at full, highly developed games with a much different playerbase than Graal. Graal's target playerbase right now is kids, kids who are going to ask mommy for her credit card if they want to make an in game purchase. The same can't be said for the games you listed.

Also, does it occur to you that Graal has much more than 10k players? Graal probably has closer to 100,000 - 200,000 active players, when you look at the current online playercount, that is not every player on the server, that is the number that are currently online, a number that is changing as different people log on and off.

Be honest though... do you really think ol' unixmad is making 8 digits off of graal? I mean really, when have you ever seen someone take a dozen or so volunteers, have them do a bit of work, and then end up a multimillionaire. His business model should be a good hint that he is not making upwards of 10mil off of Graal, someone like that would be smart enough to hire devs, or do some actual advertisement.

Curious how you arrived at this figure.

we can't determine their yearly revenue unless we work at their headquarter and knows whats going on.

In most games, 1-2% of users will pay for virtual currency.

Swrve tracked the habits of 10 million new players on 30 games in its network over the course of 90 days, finding that only 2.2 percent of those players ever spent money.

Estimated that the average paying Candy Crush user spends $40 a year and that the game monetises around 8 percent of its total player base.

"Alright, alright, you've seen through the charade again. Let me explain how freemium games really work. [pulls down on the heavy rope again and new, prepared whiteboards come down over the used ones. The doors close and the room gets dim.] The truth is, a very small percentage of people who download freemium games ever pay anything for them. It's all aboot finding the heaviest users and extracting the most amount of cash from them. That's how you get addicts to pay two hundred bucks for a game that's not even worth forty cents. "

https://static-ssl.businessinsider.c...-micro-pay.png

http://southparkstudios.mtvnimages.c...this_16x9.jpg?

graal is more like 30%+

Yes and then they get banned for no reason and now will probably spend no more money on this game

Actually what upsets me more is that I've been playing since I classic hit the app store and I get banned without warning and my friend gets banned for the exact same thing but has shaydox help get him unbanned because he's french and they denied two of my tickets. And dusty gj with destiny tower now only if we could make sardons less OP

Stay on topic.

I've easily spent over 1000 dollars on graal

ur dum

I've been playing since graal iclassic released. That's 5 years of gralat packs

Guys better stop complaining, otherwise unixmad will start putting ads onto the game :D
You're gonna be sparring, close to getting high streak, you are both at .5... intense match
annnnnnddddd..... ad for Game of War 30 second video confirmation to earn 20 gralats pops up, and you lose the match :D
"How's that for new content. That'll show em. They wanted something new, didn't they? They complained about hat prices didn't they?...hmmmm"
-Unixmad