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

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United States of America Cometk
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

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Post by Cometk »

you can offer something constructive without being a dickhead in the process
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by Amsel_ »

Dolan wrote:@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. :smile:
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.
There are different perspectives people have. Some are making valid business critiques. These are important because failures always have a salvage value of the lessons learned. Others recognize that there's not much point in telling a guy how to run a marathon the day after he quits running, and instead just want to give the guy support. There are different perspectives, different points of view. It's healthy. I think it's healthy that we're speaking our mind instead of repeating the same thing over and over. No point in accusing each other of being either overly positive or empathyless.
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by Dolan »

@Cometk
A few months ago, Zeroempires was boasting, while replying to me on Twitch, about how he created this thing from scratch on his own and how successful the whole thing is.
And now you're telling me I should offer constructive advice for free to people who got paid to run this project and they ran it into the ground?

Well ok, first thing I would have never ever rented a big space on a permanent basis, when you only need that space for the occasional tourney. You don't need so much space just to have Inter or other people cast daily games on Twitch. It's a complete and utter waste of resources. You could have kept most of the money, ran the streams from a smaller office space and only rented a bigger venue when you actually held an event. Yes, it would have been a logistic nightmare to set up all the cables and the rigs, but the costs would have been much smaller and it would have given you more time to get the business model right.

After all, players who attended the LAN event were actually complaining they didn't have enough PCs to practice on. So even with all the money that have been invested in setting up that studio, it still wasn't enough for a professional setting. It really shows only big companies can afford to run such events. And if you're not a big company, you need to think things a lot more carefully if you embark on such a project.
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by BrookG »

Do you need help in beating a dead body?
Correlation doesn't mean causation.
http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

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

Post by edeholland »

BrookG wrote:Do you need help in beating a dead body?
With the blog posted here I think the topic is actually relevant again.
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by BrookG »

edeholland wrote:
BrookG wrote:Do you need help in beating a dead body?
With the blog posted here I think the topic is actually relevant again.
It's mundane to point out the mistakes in escape's decisions, my humble opinion
Correlation doesn't mean causation.
http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

"mr.brookg go buy jeans and goto the club with somppuli" - Princeofkabul, July 2018
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by gibson »

BrookG wrote:
edeholland wrote:
BrookG wrote:Do you need help in beating a dead body?
With the blog posted here I think the topic is actually relevant again.
It's mundane to point out the mistakes in escape's decisions, my humble opinion
It is certainly insensitive to the people involved, however if someone in the community is magically given another opportunity they can certainly learn lessons from escapes failure, which to be completely honest are very blatant. I mean there whole premise for generating income was not feasable and going the complete wrong direction.
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by vardar »

Amsel_ wrote:
Dolan wrote:@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. :smile:
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.
There are different perspectives people have. Some are making valid business critiques. These are important because failures always have a salvage value of the lessons learned. Others recognize that there's not much point in telling a guy how to run a marathon the day after he quits running, and instead just want to give the guy support. There are different perspectives, different points of view. It's healthy. I think it's healthy that we're speaking our mind instead of repeating the same thing over and over. No point in accusing each other of being either overly positive or empathyless.
fightinfrenchman wrote:You're like an undomesticated animal
That hits too close to home.
i like marathons
c0ns!
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by RefluxSemantic »

It makes total sense to me to discuss why the escapeTV business model was bad on a forum thread about the failure of escapeTV, right? Not everything someone says needs to be productive or constructive.. a forum is also there for people to enjoy discussing something and to share their thoughts.

Besides, I think escapeTV is a textbook story of an overenthousiastic business idea that demonstrably had a very low chance of succeeding. The only constructive thing to say is that you have to run the numbers when you do something like this.

For example I had some friends who came up with the genius idea to buy an old second hand boat to fix it and make a profit. Surely there would be no or little financial risk. Until I told them to run the numbers, which made them realize that you will have to pay to store the boat and that you'd need to buy a noat engine, which you can definitely fuck up due to lack of expertise. Just running the numbers saved them from wasting their money.
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by Amsel_ »

Proposal: I use my connections with the big guys at bain capital to get ten of us jobs in private equity, and we all pitch in 100k to Escape, so they can work off of 50k a year. They owe me a favor after my tip to short the airline industry.
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by Dolan »

I'd be down for that if they hire remotely too xD
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

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Post by Thrar »

I don't think the retrospective armchair advice given out here is particularly helpful or necessarily even valid. Some people are making assumptions about Escape's business model and funding/revenue strategy (or lack thereof), and then go to great lengths explaining why it shouldn't have been done the way they assume it went.

As a matter of fact, none of those participating in the discussion here were part of any business discussions within Escape, or between Zak and his funders. How do we know that they didn't think through the strategy the way some here think they should have? How do we know they didn't weigh the risks and decided to move ahead anyway, because they decided it was worth a try?
What we do know from Zak's post is that the funding came from a friend who "works in the family private equity business". That can mean many things, but without knowing any better, I think it would be reasonable to assume that someone like that having ÂŁ100k at his disposal for seed funding would have a solid basis for judging whether they consider an investment worth the risk, and would be capable of coming up with a plausible business strategy.

I don't think it's fair to assume that because someone failed they must have had no idea what they were doing. As a matter of fact, the majority of new businesses fail within the first few years of operation, because by its nature, starting a business carries a lot of risk. In hindsight it may look easy to point at something from the outside and say that's why someone succeeded or failed, but actually running that race, actually making these decisions predictively rather than retrospectively, is a completely different ballgame.
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by gibson »

@Thrar youre largely correct, however at least what I’ve hinged upon is the fact that they were counting upon the audience of the aoe2 lan to stay open. This piece of information alone is enough for me to doubt their entire business strategy, because from a business standpoint that in and of itself is a terrible strategy and it feels like it shouldn’t have come to that. Ultimately though hindsight is 20/20 and it’s incredibly easy to back seat drive these kind of things especially when looking back at something that most of us are disappointed failed.
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by Riotcoke »

RefluxSemantic wrote:It makes total sense to me to discuss why the escapeTV business model was bad on a forum thread about the failure of escapeTV, right? Not everything someone says needs to be productive or constructive.. a forum is also there for people to enjoy discussing something and to share their thoughts.

Besides, I think escapeTV is a textbook story of an overenthousiastic business idea that demonstrably had a very low chance of succeeding. The only constructive thing to say is that you have to run the numbers when you do something like this.

For example I had some friends who came up with the genius idea to buy an old second hand boat to fix it and make a profit. Surely there would be no or little financial risk. Until I told them to run the numbers, which made them realize that you will have to pay to store the boat and that you'd need to buy a noat engine, which you can definitely fuck up due to lack of expertise. Just running the numbers saved them from wasting their money.
Which capital budgeting technique would you use (NPC is somewhat useful but completely useless when the data just isn't there) when the revenue can't be accurately determined at all, it's just something you can't accurately depict, it's very easy in hindsight to say something is going to fail.
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by Amsel_ »

Riotcoke wrote:
RefluxSemantic wrote:It makes total sense to me to discuss why the escapeTV business model was bad on a forum thread about the failure of escapeTV, right? Not everything someone says needs to be productive or constructive.. a forum is also there for people to enjoy discussing something and to share their thoughts.

Besides, I think escapeTV is a textbook story of an overenthousiastic business idea that demonstrably had a very low chance of succeeding. The only constructive thing to say is that you have to run the numbers when you do something like this.

For example I had some friends who came up with the genius idea to buy an old second hand boat to fix it and make a profit. Surely there would be no or little financial risk. Until I told them to run the numbers, which made them realize that you will have to pay to store the boat and that you'd need to buy a noat engine, which you can definitely fuck up due to lack of expertise. Just running the numbers saved them from wasting their money.
Which capital budgeting technique would you use (NPC is somewhat useful but completely useless when the data just isn't there) when the revenue can't be accurately determined at all, it's just something you can't accurately depict, it's very easy in hindsight to say something is going to fail.
Did you mean NPV instead of NPC, or is there a new acronym for me to learn?
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

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Post by Warno »

Thank you for all the work you guys put into it, I truly appreciated the event.

This write up came across quite self deprecating - you should be proud of what you have done.
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by Riotcoke »

Amsel_ wrote:
Riotcoke wrote:
RefluxSemantic wrote:It makes total sense to me to discuss why the escapeTV business model was bad on a forum thread about the failure of escapeTV, right? Not everything someone says needs to be productive or constructive.. a forum is also there for people to enjoy discussing something and to share their thoughts.

Besides, I think escapeTV is a textbook story of an overenthousiastic business idea that demonstrably had a very low chance of succeeding. The only constructive thing to say is that you have to run the numbers when you do something like this.

For example I had some friends who came up with the genius idea to buy an old second hand boat to fix it and make a profit. Surely there would be no or little financial risk. Until I told them to run the numbers, which made them realize that you will have to pay to store the boat and that you'd need to buy a noat engine, which you can definitely fuck up due to lack of expertise. Just running the numbers saved them from wasting their money.
Which capital budgeting technique would you use (NPC is somewhat useful but completely useless when the data just isn't there) when the revenue can't be accurately determined at all, it's just something you can't accurately depict, it's very easy in hindsight to say something is going to fail.
Did you mean NPV instead of NPC, or is there a new acronym for me to learn?
Yeah sorry my phone mustve auto corrected
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by Dolan »

@Thrar This wasn't a semiconductor business or some derivatives trading firm, it was a rather simple and small startup. I don't want to keep flogging a dead horse, but I think the mistakes are quite self-obvious.
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by fightinfrenchman »

Dolan wrote:I don't want to keep flogging a dead horse
You could have fooled me
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by RefluxSemantic »

The mistakes were indeed obvious. When a draft calculation of the finances already shows that its a bad idea, you dont really need to go any deeper. And you can always claim its easy talking in hindsight, but this is 100% something you should do whenever you want to invest. It needs to at least seem to be profitable or sustainable. EscapeTV didnt have any indications of it being sustainable..
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by Goodspeed »

That they wouldn't get enough subscribers to stay afloat wasn't set in stone at all, so I don't know why you guys are pretending it was "obvious". With a better format for the ECL I think the LAN event could've done much better and they might've actually ended up with the amount of subs they needed. Retaining them and gaining more could've been doable as well, with the right follow up. The AoE community may not be big, but it's old (which means relatively wealthy compared to other gaming communities). It could've worked. You can't "run the numbers" on how many subs you're going to get from hosting a LAN event. You can take a wild guess and try your best, that's about it.

And sure, renting the studio only for the LAN events and running the business out of a smaller space in the meantime may have been cheaper. May have been, because there are many (financial and otherwise) advantages of having to set it all up only once. Some of you may be underestimating the logistics involved in setting up a LAN event. And I'm sure they weighed their options before deciding on that. More than all of you hindsight backseat entrepeneurs, that's for sure.
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by japanesegeneral »

RefluxSemantic wrote:The mistakes were indeed obvious. When a draft calculation of the finances already shows that its a bad idea, you dont really need to go any deeper. And you can always claim its easy talking in hindsight, but this is 100% something you should do whenever you want to invest. It needs to at least seem to be profitable or sustainable. EscapeTV didnt have any indications of it being sustainable..
Like you could probably know that. Just shut the fuck up man. Be happy that it happened and be thankful for all the great memories from the lan. Don't pretend to know anything since you don't.
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by Astaroth »

Goodspeed wrote:That they wouldn't get enough subscribers to stay afloat wasn't set in stone at all, so I don't know why you guys are pretending it was "obvious". With a better format for the ECL I think the LAN event could've done much better and they might've actually ended up with the amount of subs they needed. Retaining them and gaining more could've been doable as well, with the right follow up. The AoE community may not be big, but it's old (which means relatively wealthy compared to other gaming communities). It could've worked. You can't "run the numbers" on how many subs you're going to get from hosting a LAN event. You can take a wild guess and try your best, that's about it.

Ofc you can make an educated guess based on the amount of subs and views your channel ans other channels got before for at least comparable events:

1. Amount of viewers (prerequisite for even getting subs): no channel has ever gotten a huge amount of views just off the bat, no matter how good the event was.the by far biggest stream numbers till now (excluding non-aoe streamers) were achieved by longtime aoe2 streamers who did massive promotions for their respective events (t90, nili aoe). There was just no basis whatsoever to assume that the ECL lan would hit anywhere near the required, lets say 10k at least viewers, considering that the Eacqpe twitch channel had comparatively few views and subs.

High viewer numbers are firstly due to constamt viewership over time and much less about event quality. Im sure a random t90 tourney would get more views than the best Lan ever on an unknown channel.

2. There was also no reason to assume they would get that many new subs suddenly. No other event with way more (!) viewers has ever gotten that many new subs right off the bat. Not even close.

3. All the events that garnered a lot of new subs mostly resulted in gifted 1 month subs. Those are not sustainable, unless you have constant, high quality content. And even then they will decrease. Every other aoe2 streamer has had this experience.

All of these factors combined show that there was basicslly no chance in hell to get the amount of subs needed on a permanent basis. Ofc you can now claim, but oh, this was a completely different animal, you can't compare it. But really, there was zero evidence for it.

Why would 1,5k viewers randomly subsribe to a quite small aoe2 channel, just due to one Lan, which cant even be expected to get that many views due to lacking a permanent viewership, when even in the past nothing like has ever remotely happened, even on much bigger, more popular channely with 24/7 new streams and content?
And sure, renting the studio only for the LAN events and running the business out of a smaller space in the meantime may have been cheaper. May have been, because there are many (financial and otherwise) advantages of having to set it all up only once. Some of you may be underestimating the logistics involved in setting up a LAN event. And I'm sure they weighed their options before deciding on that. More than all of you hindsight backseat entrepeneurs, that's for sure.
But they didn't set up everything at the start. They set up stuff for NWC, thrn later they seemingly started prep for ECL from scratch because they were only busy with that for weeks.

They rented that place for months, yet didnt set up basically anything for a long time there. Maybe they couldnt, sure - but then why rent the place all the time?
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by Dolan »

If someone set this up in Eastern Europe, it would have been 5 times cheaper and since the revenue from subs would be the same no matter where the studio/office were hosted, you'd have cheap Eastern Euro costs and the same revenue.

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

Post by japanesegeneral »

Had they done the lan on the mars elon musk would have sponsored it. What is the point guys? Want to spread toxicity? There are easier ways...
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