ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

[Mr_Bramboy]

That was a really sad read. I do feel bad for the entire Escape team, even if the first paragraph tells me not to. I hope all of them can get themselves together in 2020 and make next year their redemption year. The entire Escape team consists of wonderful and passionate people with their hearts in the right place and I wish them the best in any possible future endeavors.

@Dolan Your omniscient attitude is starting to get boring. I'm sure you've made mistakes in your life too. Show a bit of compassion and empathy, if you can.

[fightinfrenchman]

His whole post is about how and why his project failed and that he feels bad about it, why would you make posts continuing to criticize him lol

@Mr_Bramboy Dolan believes that empathy is bad

[BrookG]

Another explanation is that the AoE3 scene only had 1 channel to follow and support (ESOC). Escape was a huge addition to the scene so it was worth investing in. The AoE2 community is already split and the impact of the ECL was relatively a low smaller.

What also didn't help is that Escape hardly ever mentioned they needed the support to continue with their studio. They even invited an extra third team to the ECL because they had money left over, so from an outsiders perspective it seemed like they had all the money they needed.

In all honesty, ESOC was crucial to NWC LAN's success. We have a significant experience in hosting and managing tournaments and this experience helped Escape administratively. Also, the biggest part of aoe3 community is gathered here, therefore they didn't need to reach to other media for further marketing. As for the group management, indeed it is a much simpler task to accommodate and invite 40 people compared to 150, almost triple the number. All I can say is that I am glad that LAN happened and it will be a sweet memory.

I don't want to diminish aoe2, yet I am much unaware of the community and what would have been necessary for them. There is no point discussing feedback they could have used to improve, exactly like Zak said, and it will be too draining.

[Dolan]

With such a project you just can't get around the fact that you have fixed, constant UK-level expenses and only occasional revenue created by subs, that were supposed to come from the hype generated by seasonal events.

It simply does not make any sense, however you look at it businesswise. Why would you ever keep an entire studio rented for the whole year, if you only need it for seasonal events? You have a perpetual high cost that you want to offset with revenue from subs generated by seasonal events. Not even big streamers do such a thing and they could easily afford it. Only huge corporations might do that and I'm not even sure about them. Maybe Riot Games simply rents a location every time they need a venue for an event. Most likely they don't keep a rented location for an entire year.

There was probably no business-minded person at the helm of this project, no offence. I appreciate the content that was created as a result of having an AOE3 LAN tourney, but this thread is probably not about that. You can think of ways in which you can run a LAN tourney without keeping a location rented and staff employed permanently.

@Mr_Bramboy I didn't know the thread was about shoulder patting. It's obviously useful to understand why a project failed.

[91]

These guys worked 80 hour work weeks, it's pretty easy to say what could've been done better but imagine for a second how much time they sacrificed on this and STILL not have the time they want for marketing and content. You could plan better from the start but by that time the knowledge of what was possible and how much time they had to put in was likely very different from what they relized a few months later - when it was too late because they're all already drowning in work.

My respect to these guys for going through with it and not giving up. I can imagine an incredible personal growth from such a project. And it wasn't wasted, a lot of people enjoyed it. Maybe it was more expensive than it needed to be but I guess the alternative is just never having anything like it. Or if anyone feels like they could do it better, go ahead! Nobody would be mad, it would be great!

Good read!

[Astaroth]

The reason I'm being so critical is mostly that I struggle to understand how anyone could ever have thought that this venture might make a profit. I actually already wondered that years ago when Escape was founded, but even more so once the big studio space was rented.

Actually, many ppl shared that sentiment; most thought it was just a Microsoft project because it seemed so unfeasible on its own.

I don't intend to be mean, but it really seems to me that the extent of their initial thought process was: oh great opportunity, let's all work hard and something will work out.... somehow. Which would be fine for a hobby but not for a company with 4 full timers.

Even putting aside an actual business plan, I wonder what the thought process was, in very basic terms. I mean Zak puts it as if NWC was a success, but even that only covered 75 % of the overhead of ONE month. So even if ECL had miraculously been a success and covered the overhead of 1,5 months (how?), how can not even 2,5 months cover for 12 months?

Also, why would thousands of people subscribe to a channel with barely any aoe content for months? Did they think 3000 ppl would just randomly subscribe during ECL, which has never even remotely happened in any aoe2 stream (the most, even including hundreds of gifted subs, was like what, 500 for a big event?)?

And even if 3000 ppl had subscribed during one weekend, many of those would've been 1 month subscriptions. What would they do the following months? I don't get it.

[Riotcoke]

The reason I'm being so critical is mostly that I struggle to understand how anyone could ever have thought that this venture might make a profit. I actually already wondered that years ago when Escape was founded, but even more so once the big studio space was rented.

Actually, many ppl shared that sentiment; most thought it was just a Microsoft project because it seemed so unfeasible on its own.

I don't intend to be mean, but it really seems to me that the extent of their initial thought process was: oh great opportunity, let's all work hard and something will work out.... somehow. Which would be fine for a hobby but not for a company with 4 full timers.

Even putting aside an actual business plan, I wonder what the thought process was, in very basic terms. I mean Zak puts it as if NWC was a success, but even that only covered 75 % of the overhead of ONE month. So even if ECL had miraculously been a success and covered the overhead of 1,5 months (how?), how can not even 2,5 months cover for 12 months?

Also, why would thousands of people subscribe to a channel with barely any aoe content for months? Did they think 3000 ppl would just randomly subscribe during ECL, which has never even remotely happened in any aoe2 stream (the most, even including hundreds of gifted subs, was like what, 500 for a big event?)?

And even if 3000 ppl had subscribed during one weekend, many of those would've been 1 month subscriptions. What would they do the following months? I don't get it.

There are ways of making money for a tournament organizer other than direct revenue from fans of the tournament, the hope was that sponsors would get on board after the ECL and therefore be able to pay for a large chunk of the cost, or to be paid by organizers of other events to host lans for different games.

[[Armag] diarouga]

Zak mentioned this in his post but I think an issue that is generally underestimated was the ECL format. You don't want to be playing AoE2 teamgames, which can last a long time and take much longer to set up than 1v1s, at a LAN event where you have limited time and need to keep the stream going. Large delays and long, stalemate-y games can kill the hype fast. I watched what I could, but I had moments where I thought "meh, maybe I'll watch something else". The hype wasn't really there. And considering I tend to watch AoE2 1v1 events religiously and the quality of the content was great, I have to conclude that it's the format's fault.

I agree, RTS are 1v1 games and team games are boring to watch because they're too long and it's less exciting than 1v1.

I was very sad (and surprised honestly) when I learnt that escape closed.

Zak tried his best although it didn't work, and Escape will be remembered, these events were amazing.

[gibson]

Unfortunately relying on twitch revenue to fund a studio was probably doomed to begin with. After nwc they should have reached out for sponsors. I would have contacted every single gaming brand, tell them about the nwc audience and make projections about what the ECL audience would be and offer to run ads, have a permanent ad somewhere on the screen, have the players where X branded headphones etc. Also they needed more constant streams, even if it meant paying some 2k elo player 15 euro an hour for 300 viewers.

[Goodspeed]

Paying a 2k player 15 an hour wouldn't have worked. Nobody would have cared. You need a good streamer who is preferably also good at the game, but the problem is all of those people have their own brands already and would be too expensive to hire. Frequent showmatches between high level players cast by Zak and Interjection from the studio may have worked, but like he said in the post they just couldn't find time to fit that in.

[Bucknasty]

They would stream board games like 5 days a week....they had time just didn’t use it properly

[n0el]

Unfortunately relying on twitch revenue to fund a studio was probably doomed to begin with. After nwc they should have reached out for sponsors. I would have contacted every single gaming brand, tell them about the nwc audience and make projections about what the ECL audience would be and offer to run ads, have a permanent ad somewhere on the screen, have the players where X branded headphones etc. Also they needed more constant streams, even if it meant paying some 2k elo player 15 euro an hour for 300 viewers.

Ya, if you look at like TakeTV for example, they use a mixture of subs, donations and sponsorship.

[Brutalglory]

These guys did an unreal job bringing AOE3 back to life. You should take the footage and data to the new AOE studio and see if they will sponsor you in the lead up to the aoe3de and aoe4 launch. To get as many people as you did to show up and watch a “dead game” is impressive.

[gibson]

Paying a 2k player 15 an hour wouldn't have worked. Nobody would have cared. You need a good streamer who is preferably also good at the game, but the problem is all of those people have their own brands already and would be too expensive to hire. Frequent showmatches between high level players cast by Zak and Interjection from the studio may have worked, but like he said in the post they just couldn't find time to fit that in.

It’s not about people caring, it’s about having a plan so that sponsors think they’re getting more exposure than a 1 weekend lan. Something is always better than nothing. Larger studios show reruns of previous tournaments( to 1/10th if not less of their normal viewers), which would have been an option as well, although I don’t know if there’s enough content to show.

[Garja]

The reason I'm being so critical is mostly that I struggle to understand how anyone could ever have thought that this venture might make a profit. I actually already wondered that years ago when Escape was founded, but even more so once the big studio space was rented.

Actually, many ppl shared that sentiment; most thought it was just a Microsoft project because it seemed so unfeasible on its own.

I don't intend to be mean, but it really seems to me that the extent of their initial thought process was: oh great opportunity, let's all work hard and something will work out.... somehow. Which would be fine for a hobby but not for a company with 4 full timers.

Even putting aside an actual business plan, I wonder what the thought process was, in very basic terms. I mean Zak puts it as if NWC was a success, but even that only covered 75 % of the overhead of ONE month. So even if ECL had miraculously been a success and covered the overhead of 1,5 months (how?), how can not even 2,5 months cover for 12 months?

Also, why would thousands of people subscribe to a channel with barely any aoe content for months? Did they think 3000 ppl would just randomly subscribe during ECL, which has never even remotely happened in any aoe2 stream (the most, even including hundreds of gifted subs, was like what, 500 for a big event?)?

And even if 3000 ppl had subscribed during one weekend, many of those would've been 1 month subscriptions. What would they do the following months? I don't get it.

I sort of agree with this but you have to bear in mind that Escape was basically a start-up so it obviously relied on "things happening" to keep going.

[RefluxSemantic]

Even if it's just a start-up, you have to run the numbers to properly access the viability of your project. The current media environment is filled with the coincidental succes stories and omits most stories of failure, so it is easy to think that you just need some decent idea and work hard and that it then all will work out in the end. The reality is that you need to actually do run the numbers to even know if there's any chance of succes.

I think this is the part where escapeTV made a mistake. They didn't properly access the expenses and sources of revenue. The article doesn't really say what the real costs of escapeTV were. However we can make a guess; Having 4 people fulltime, at minimum wage would cost you roughly 8000 a month, not considering the expenses for the studio (I don't really know how much that would cost). On the income side of things, you'd mostly make money from subscribers and ads and then donations from the community. Twitch gives you 50% of the revenue of a subscriber, so $2.50 per subscriber. I found a source claiming that advertisement revenue averages [url=https://influencermarketinghub.com/how- ... mers-make/]$250 per 100 subscribers[\url], so another $2.50 per subscriber. So if you wanted to cover the costs of the salaries with subscribers and ad revenue, you'd need a whopping 1600 subscribers. This doesn't sound very reasonable.

So looking at how many followers you roughly need for 1600 subscribers, I've taken 4 twitch channels with roughly 1600 subscribers (from twitchtracker.com) and looked at their follower count.
- Damnit2Hell, 1625 subs, 35000 followers
- Lestream, 1627 subs, 811000 followers
- Crreal, 1628 subs, 160000 followers
- Thedapperrapper, 1632 subs, 36000 followers

So this actually varies wildly. There are not any good numbers on this. We can however look at the followers for ESOCTV and TheViper's channel. They have 5300 and 88000 followers respectively. Theoretically then it would be possible, based on the aoe2 viewer base, to finance the 4 staff members from subscribers and adds, but you would need to have a good subscriber to follower ratio to achieve this. They ended up hitting 38000 followers, so you could still pay salaries from that if you get a good subscriber to follower ratio, but it's even harder than what the numbers from thevipers channel would suggest. But we're still not paying for the studio at all with this, and there is also no money for the tournament prize pools.

Financially at this point, EscapeTV looks like a huge risk. 1600 subs is theoretically possible, but thats assuming you earn 2.50 of ad revenue per subscriber. I don't know if that is reasonable, given that with escapeTVs setup you won't have as many broadcasting hours, compared to for example someone who just streams himself playing a game (much easier way of creating content). You'd have to do the more precise calculations on ad revenue.

I think the point is that even a draft calculation shows the financial risk of such an endeavor. I would advise anyone planning to start a business to actually do such a calculation (or rather a more thorough calculation) to know what the risk is, what the potential benefit is and what would need to happen for it to even be profitable. I think had escapeTV done such a calculation, they would not have started this project. It's not really something we can blame them for, because who wouldn't try to take this opportunity. I can imagine this was a dream for those involved, and I hope that they will be fine despite the project failing.

[Dolan]

I'm sure they ran some numbers, but it was all based on the optimistic target of getting 1600 subs (and probably having those subs renew constantly to provide a constant stream of revenue). And they did get like 1100 subs, iirc, but like 800 of them were given by 3 people.

Meanwhile they kept all that space rented so that Inter (or others) could cast games from behind a desk, on Twitch, in a big hall occasionally shrouded in fog.

[iCourt]

Economic Stimulas Optimization - Community .net

Where I go for all my financial advice.

[Amsel_]

Look, I can understand why people are making the argument that money isn't everything, that we enjoyed and are grateful for what Escape did, and that's what matters. I largely agree with that sentiment, and I am always happy to see content creators putting the goal of creating good, innovative, and enjoyable content out ahead of the goal of making money. But this whole thing has been mismanaged rather badly. And, though, one can argue all day about how money isn't what counts, we would have been much happier had Escape been a financial success, and you all know it.

You had 100,000 pounds. That's a lot to work with. You could have given that to some money manager to establish a trust of sorts, and gotten an 8% return a year, post inflation. Then you could withdraw 5% of the account's value a year, so that you have a constant, growing source of revenue. So you could have set up that trust, and then started Escape just off of the name recognition of those taking part in it. Start it off small as something you guys are running out of your homes, long-distance, for the first year. (mostly do streaming or other videos) Take most of the donations from that and contribute it to the trust. Then, when you get your 5% payment in, you'll have at least 5,400 to work with, but almost certainly more. I feel like this should be enough to host a smaller, party-sized LAN.

I think the biggest mistake was trying to use 100k to support a full-time team instead of taking a part-time model that was largely focused on building momentum so that they could try and snag the "top dog" slot for Age of Empires 4. I just don't see the reason to go rush and buy a giant, unsustainable studio. There are some other ideas too. It might've made sense to outreach more to the community. Have weekly Q&As on YouTube. Have a thread on ESOC and whatever forum aoe2 plebs players use. I don't like how Sunday Smackdown - the holiest of aoe3 events - kind of got buried underneath other content. At that point it should have been clear to operate multiple channels underneath the overarching Escape moniker.

I feel bad about what has happened, but I have to wonder just what on earth you guys were expecting to happen. Why gamble like that?

Once aoe comes across more financier cash, here's my pitch: ESOC Mansion. It's like the playboy mansion, but its residents are ESOC players. It's also a reality TV show. I've already got an idea for the pilot. H20 is doing what he normally does in the evening, enjoying a hot tub with dozens of beautiful women. He lets out a remark that he only lost a game to another player because of bad hunts, and drama ensues as that player overhears him. Other options are the Age of Empires shounen anime, and a Star Wars dub full of age of empires memes.

[fightinfrenchman]

@Amsel_ I don't think they would have gotten the 100k if it was going to be on a timescale that long

Also we're working on the ESOC Mansion already. It will be based in Lancaster, PA

[Amsel_]

@Amsel_ I don't think they would have gotten the 100k if it was going to be on a timescale that long

Also we're working on the ESOC Mansion already. It will be based in Lancaster, PA

"Yo, bro. Thanks again for that hundred grand you dropped on us, expecting us to make something big. But about that, I'm a bit confused about what ya wanted us to do with that money. Some guy on a competitive tic-tac-toe forum is suggesting a business plan that has us constantly growing, being a major player in the community, and prime for a massive burst of success with tic-tac-toe 2 coming out soon. But I always thought we were going to gamble that money on two massive, multiday parties that will last a week out of the year, while spending the rest of the year in our expensive warehouse streaming checkers and monopoly to 30 people."

Also I'm worried about having the ESOC Mansion in Lancaster. All the girls are going to be surrounding you because of your sexy globalist watches and amazing yugioh jokes. If that happens, the only story the directors will give me is one where I sit in a room arguing why one politician I dislike is going to beat another politician I dislike for the nomination of a party I dislike. How stupid and unrealistic. No one would actually do that. haha. I'd rather do that story where I become a boomer and give people financial advice on a competitive tic-tac-toe forum. *crack* Now that's character development.

[fightinfrenchman]

@Amsel_ Imagine a Gimmick Puppet Disaster Leo in your teeth

[Dolan]

@Amsel_ You're supposed to say the pro-social, positive, Redditor-tier thing:
I totally appreciate everything you do guise, it's the thought that matters, wow you are such heroes, it's all about the journey not the destination, etc etc.
Because when you stroke other people's egos that's when they start thinking: oh, this guy is such a good guy, because he's being good to me.

[fightinfrenchman]

@Amsel_ You're supposed to say the pro-social, positive, Redditor-tier thing:
I totally appreciate everything you do guise, it's the thought that matters, wow you are such heroes, it's all about the journey not the destination, etc etc.

I like that you say pro-social like it's a bad thing. You're like an undomesticated animal

[Dolan]

Yep, that's the only path to greatness, undomesticate yourself.