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

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

Post by Riotcoke »

Manchester still has more clout when you have a LAN tournament in a western country than an eastern european country, i do agree though overall the studio was in a shockingly bad place. It wasn't even in Manchester, but some shit town 10 miles out.
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by RefluxSemantic »

I sure would prefer going to for example a Lan in or near Budapest, Prague, Sofia or something like that than spending part of the summer in Manchester. I actually think those places are very cheap destinations too.
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by Amsel_ »

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.

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.
You don't exactly need to be employee of the month at Goldman-Sachs to know that modest, safe growth is better than an extremely risky unprecedented gamble. I don't see why so many people are attacking others for pointing out obviously bad business decisions. It's a thread about Escape failing, and we're talking about why Escape failed. Everyone critiquing Escape's strategy has actually been pretty friendly about it too. It's the positivity-only love brigade accusing people of being jealous and calling them hindsight backseat entrepreneurs.
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by Dolan »

@Amsel_ They haven't heard about the concept of post-mortem in project management.
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by japanesegeneral »

Amsel_ wrote:
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.

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.
You don't exactly need to be employee of the month at Goldman-Sachs to know that modest, safe growth is better than an extremely risky unprecedented gamble. I don't see why so many people are attacking others for pointing out obviously bad business decisions. It's a thread about Escape failing, and we're talking about why Escape failed. Everyone critiquing Escape's strategy has actually been pretty friendly about it too. It's the positivity-only love brigade accusing people of being jealous and calling them hindsight backseat entrepreneurs.
That is not necessarily true. It strongly deepends on the utility function of the individual. Obviously you try hedging by minimizing the variance and getting the highest possible expected value. However private equity investors do take some risk in oder to get the chance to score a high return on invest. It is super easy/ cheesy to critizise a failed project. But as a matter of facts the guys bringing up argument have no intern information so all of their points are literally pointless. Thats why i am salty.
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by japanesegeneral »

RefluxSemantic wrote:
japanesegeneral wrote:
Show hidden quotes
Unfortunately nobody believes in your talent. All you can do is waste your one money :o
I might just not be as smart as you, but I fail to see how you baselessly insulting me makes escapeTV (you know, the startup that caused 4 people to be unemployed and wasted tons of money on renting a warehouse and buying equipment) a heroic journey.
Most start up companies fail. What's the point of blaming them for the failure? 100k sounds like a lot of money, however if you pay wages and rent and so on it really is not a lot of money. The private equity investor knew it might fail so he was basically taking a gamble. People pointing out failures, when they don't know anything about the business is that makes me mad.
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

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Post by Dolan »

Suddenly, a horse jumping rope, out of nowhere

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

Post by japanesegeneral »

Dolan wrote:Suddenly, a horse jumping rope, out of nowhere

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Thank you for your first valid point in this discussion.
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by Dolan »

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

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Post by Goodspeed »

Amsel_ wrote:Everyone critiquing Escape's strategy has actually been pretty friendly about it too. It's the positivity-only love brigade accusing people of being jealous and calling them hindsight backseat entrepreneurs.
Isn't that what we're doing? Hindsight backseat entrepeneuring? If you feel "attacked" by someone factually representing your activity, maybe you should stop that activity; you apparently don't like that you're doing it.
You don't exactly need to be employee of the month at Goldman-Sachs to know that modest, safe growth is better than an extremely risky unprecedented gamble. I don't see why so many people are attacking others for pointing out obviously bad business decisions.
I'm not attacking anyone, just disagreeing with their assessment that all of this would've been "obvious" at the time. Mostly the disagreement is in how large of a factor ECL's relative unpopularity was. To me it makes sense for them to have made business decisions that relied on a much more popular event because the event could've reasonably been expected to do much better. It didn't live up to its potential, though.

Another thing is that, with everyone here only having the shallowest possible understanding of the situation, your apparent rush to judgment isn't reflective but judgmental. Not good for an entrepeneur. You're losing points on the leaderboards of "ESOC's hindsight backseat entrepeneurs".
It's a thread about Escape failing, and we're talking about why Escape failed.
And failing. You're just looking like a bunch of people reviewing a book by its cover, and inexplicably even calling your conclusions "obvious".
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

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Post by Dolan »

@Goodspeed Can you tell me another Twitch streamer that rents a warehouse to run daily streams and who can afford such an expense from subs revenue? Is there anyone else in the world doing this? Was it ever proven to work for top Twitch streamers like Tfue, Ninja, DrDisRespect or Tsm_Myth?

If you check out their Twitch channels, they all stream from their houses/flats, as far as I can tell. I'm not aware of any top streamer who rents his own studio just to stream on Twitch. And I'm talking about the big guys who make millions per year. And guess what, they don't see the point in spending money on a big special place where they could have an audience or cheerleeders or something.

You could say they don't do that because they're not running tourneys. Ok, let's see who runs tourneys on Twitch then... Riot Games, Blizzard, Valve, DreamHack with sponsors like Corsair/SAP, etc etc. It's only big companies or specialised companies that first make sure they have sponsors to support the costs.

So it seems clear to me that you can't afford as a small startup to keep a permanently rented location and permanently hired staff just for running a few tournaments per year, when most of the time you're just doing daily Twitch streams. Even if that objective of reaching 1500 subs were achieved, you'd still need those subs to keep getting renewed all the time and that's not something sustainable. You'd be struggling to cover unnecessarily high costs of production for a studio that mostly does daily Twitch streams and only occasionally organises a tourney. It's just basic reasoning, you don't even need to have sophisticated project management knowledge to see this couldn't have worked.
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by Goodspeed »

While obviously challenging, I don't share your confidence that it "couldn't have worked". And you know what they say about the confidence level of people who don't have a clue what they're talking about.
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by RefluxSemantic »

Dolan wrote:@Goodspeed Can you tell me another Twitch streamer that rents a warehouse to run daily streams and who can afford such an expense from subs revenue? Is there anyone else in the world doing this? Was it ever proven to work for top Twitch streamers like Tfue, Ninja, DrDisRespect or Tsm_Myth?

If you check out their Twitch channels, they all stream from their houses/flats, as far as I can tell. I'm not aware of any top streamer who rents his own studio just to stream on Twitch. And I'm talking about the big guys who make millions per year. And guess what, they don't see the point in spending money on a big special place where they could have an audience or cheerleeders or something.

You could say they don't do that because they're not running tourneys. Ok, let's see who runs tourneys on Twitch then... Riot Games, Blizzard, Valve, DreamHack with sponsors like Corsair/SAP, etc etc. It's only big companies or specialised companies that first make sure they have sponsors to support the costs.

So it seems clear to me that you can't afford as a small startup to keep a permanently rented location and permanently hired staff just for running a few tournaments per year, when most of the time you're just doing daily Twitch streams. Even if that objective of reaching 1500 subs were achieved, you'd still need those subs to keep getting renewed all the time and that's not something sustainable. You'd be struggling to cover the costs of keeping unnecessarily high costs of production for a studio that mostly does daily Twitch streams and only occasionally organises a tourney. It's just basic reasoning, you don't even need to have sophisticated project management knowledge to see this couldn't have worked.
twitch.tv/gsl rents a studio! Although I don't disagree that for Age of empires it makes little sense to rent a studio or warehouse fulltime.
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by SoldieR »

I dont think it could have worked at that time. Just thinking of the costs, rent 2k, even just 1k for each of the 4 people, that's 6k a month. That would require a massive audience. That's not long term realistic, I dont think. Not to mention cost of living rent. For it to even have hope, you MUST live in that rented studio space.

It would have been much more viable around de2 release tho.
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by japanesegeneral »

Dolan wrote:@Goodspeed Can you tell me another Twitch streamer that rents a warehouse to run daily streams and who can afford such an expense from subs revenue? Is there anyone else in the world doing this? Was it ever proven to work for top Twitch streamers like Tfue, Ninja, DrDisRespect or Tsm_Myth?

If you check out their Twitch channels, they all stream from their houses/flats, as far as I can tell. I'm not aware of any top streamer who rents his own studio just to stream on Twitch. And I'm talking about the big guys who make millions per year. And guess what, they don't see the point in spending money on a big special place where they could have an audience or cheerleeders or something.

You could say they don't do that because they're not running tourneys. Ok, let's see who runs tourneys on Twitch then... Riot Games, Blizzard, Valve, DreamHack with sponsors like Corsair/SAP, etc etc. It's only big companies or specialised companies that first make sure they have sponsors to support the costs.

So it seems clear to me that you can't afford as a small startup to keep a permanently rented location and permanently hired staff just for running a few tournaments per year, when most of the time you're just doing daily Twitch streams. Even if that objective of reaching 1500 subs were achieved, you'd still need those subs to keep getting renewed all the time and that's not something sustainable. You'd be struggling to cover the costs of keeping unnecessarily high costs of production for a studio that mostly does daily Twitch streams and only occasionally organises a tourney. It's just basic reasoning, you don't even need to have sophisticated project management knowledge to see this couldn't have worked.
I doubt reaching 1.5 k subs every month was the goal they wanted to reach (at least in the early stage), however they hoped to get better numbers. They stayed way beyond their expected amount of viewers and failed their subcount goal (however high it might have been). The general idea was to get a huge crowd of people behind them when aoe 4 is published. As they dramatically failed to come anywhere near these numbers (especially viewercount) it seemed to be the best long-term decision to shut down the studio as aoe 4 seems to be quite early in the development process.
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by Dolan »

@RefluxSemantic GSL used to be sponsored by a Korean beverage company (HOT6ix http://www.hot6ix.com/). Maybe that's why they could afford their own studio.

If you check out their latest tourney stream

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/490922070

it's easy to see who sponsors their event, by checking out the logos behind the players: SBS-AfreecaTV and Blizzard. Sponsors would never miss an opportunity to make their brand visible everywhere during the event.
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by RefluxSemantic »

Dolan wrote:@RefluxSemantic GSL used to be sponsored by a Korean beverage company (HOT6ix http://www.hot6ix.com/). Maybe that's why they could afford their own studio.
I think they are also sponsered by blizzard themselves. The hot6 sponsorship ended I believe. The tournament is currently hosted by afreecaTV, whose CEO is said to actually love starcraft. I think that's the main reason why GSL exists in its current form. I doubt it's even profitable.
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

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Gift economy, lul.
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by gibson »

Sponsorship is the only viable way to do what escape was doing and not go bankrupt. I mean beyond the summit does something very similar to what escape did and have the 5th most watched twitch channel of all time and they need sponsorship to do what they do, granted they are giving out 100k+ prize pools
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Post by lordraphael »

id just like to thank @zeroempires great perosn to meet, so were all the other guys from escape, and that LAN was awesome. Im grateful i actually was a part of it (almost decided i wouldnt participate )
breeze wrote: they cant even guess how much f***ing piece of stupid retarded they look they are trying to give lesson to people who are over pr35 and know the best mu. im pretty sure that we need a page that only pr30+ post and then we could have a nice discussins.
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by lordraphael »

Dolan wrote:@Goodspeed Can you tell me another Twitch streamer that rents a warehouse to run daily streams and who can afford such an expense from subs revenue? Is there anyone else in the world doing this? Was it ever proven to work for top Twitch streamers like Tfue, Ninja, DrDisRespect or Tsm_Myth?

If you check out their Twitch channels, they all stream from their houses/flats, as far as I can tell. I'm not aware of any top streamer who rents his own studio just to stream on Twitch. And I'm talking about the big guys who make millions per year. And guess what, they don't see the point in spending money on a big special place where they could have an audience or cheerleeders or something.

You could say they don't do that because they're not running tourneys. Ok, let's see who runs tourneys on Twitch then... Riot Games, Blizzard, Valve, DreamHack with sponsors like Corsair/SAP, etc etc. It's only big companies or specialised companies that first make sure they have sponsors to support the costs.

So it seems clear to me that you can't afford as a small startup to keep a permanently rented location and permanently hired staff just for running a few tournaments per year, when most of the time you're just doing daily Twitch streams. Even if that objective of reaching 1500 subs were achieved, you'd still need those subs to keep getting renewed all the time and that's not something sustainable. You'd be struggling to cover unnecessarily high costs of production for a studio that mostly does daily Twitch streams and only occasionally organises a tourney. It's just basic reasoning, you don't even need to have sophisticated project management knowledge to see this couldn't have worked.
ninja makes like 500k a month just by subs. OFC its possible, wheather or not its possible for aoe 2 remains a secret. I for one am skecptical about it but dont tell it couldnt be possible in theory.
breeze wrote: they cant even guess how much f***ing piece of stupid retarded they look they are trying to give lesson to people who are over pr35 and know the best mu. im pretty sure that we need a page that only pr30+ post and then we could have a nice discussins.
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

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Post by kami_ryu »

I read a few key words that made me laugh. "failure" and "ruined lives" ... are very loose terms. A life is hardly ruined because a start-up business did not work out. There were risks and mistakes and things did not happen as wanted. None of that is genuine failure as far as I care.
spoiler
Not a single life was ruined by this endeavor. None of ANY of this was destructive in the slightest. You do not have the slightest inkling of what ruin is, to speak of it so casually.
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by kami_ryu »

The NWC LAN, on the contrary, was amazing. I'm not just talking about financial success or sustainability. I'm pleasantly surprised to hear that NWC was profitable at all. It warms me up that the AOE3 event did so well.

What that LAN did accomplish is something that money has a very hard time replicating. Meaningful memories and meet-ups took place at that LAN. Our community got a lot out of it. It was a genuinely, genuinely special thing to happen. I wish I could have gone. Though to be fair the place where I was when the LAN took place was very special to myself for personal reasons. That is beside the point, I guess.

No matter which way I look at it, Escape did a good number of very good and humane things. I'm very happy that the work that went into it took place. I'm glad someone stepped up and actually went out and accomplished things. It's a shame that it was not more sustainable, but that's how things are sometimes. I wish the people of Escape all the best moving forward. I don't doubt that they will move on and continue doing good in their lives. Sounds corny, but honestly it isn't really.
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by RefluxSemantic »

kami_ryu wrote:I read a few key words that made me laugh. "failure" and "ruined lives" ... are very loose terms. A life is hardly ruined because a start-up business did not work out. There were risks and mistakes and things did not happen as wanted. None of that is genuine failure as far as I care.
spoiler
Not a single life was ruined by this endeavor. None of ANY of this was destructive in the slightest. You do not have the slightest inkling of what ruin is, to speak of it so casually.
Nobody said a life was ruined though? And how was any of this not destructive? People lost jobs over this, people lost serious amounts of money. That's what destructive is. ZeroEmpires even admits this himself, that he's lucky he's still in a position to produce some content after all that happened. This was a huge, irresponsible risk. This project deserves criticism. This is not about monopoly money, this is about real money, about people potentially getting in a lot of financial troubles.
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Re: ZeroEmpires: The story of Escape, the hardest year of my life

Post by kami_ryu »

RefluxSemantic wrote:
kami_ryu wrote:I read a few key words that made me laugh. "failure" and "ruined lives" ... are very loose terms. A life is hardly ruined because a start-up business did not work out. There were risks and mistakes and things did not happen as wanted. None of that is genuine failure as far as I care.
spoiler
Not a single life was ruined by this endeavor. None of ANY of this was destructive in the slightest. You do not have the slightest inkling of what ruin is, to speak of it so casually.
Nobody said a life was ruined though? And how was any of this not destructive? People lost jobs over this, people lost serious amounts of money. That's what destructive is. ZeroEmpires even admits this himself, that he's lucky he's still in a position to produce some content after all that happened. This was a huge, irresponsible risk. This project deserves criticism. This is not about monopoly money, this is about real money, about people potentially getting in a lot of financial troubles.
Your being dramatic is as boring as it is ignorant. Losing a job or some money is not the end of the world. Sometimes businesses fail. Financial troubles are real ones but you're acting like Escape was letting 6 year olds play with grenades. Tone it down brother, if you want people to take you seriously.

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