Toribash
Original Post
Everything I personally think should happen with Toribash
Would like to start this by saying I am in no means trying to tell hampa and any other investors within Nabi how to run their company, this is completely from an outsider looking in perspective and customer/user perspective.

Everything needs a revamp, everything about Nabi studios screams side hobby instead of 12+ year old game development company and I hate it. I truly believe Toribash has the potential to do very big things just because of how unique it is, I believe the issue comes from lack of execution and possibly care by this point. So basically I just want to suggest everything I can in one little place and try to structure it as neatly as possible.

So starting off, the actual www.toribash.com needs a revamp(mcfarbo literally just suggested this but I've thought about making this thread for a while and his post just kind of pushed me more to do it) and the way we split that page and the forums using "www." for that page and "forum." for the forums I believe would have an impact on SEO and how Toribash is found from non-marketing efforts(which as far as I know are nonexistent). Toribash should be present on all social media platforms and have calls to those pages on the landing page. An updated promo video as McFarbo suggested should have been a no-brainer at this point. a breakdown of what all is possible through Toribash, explaining art, dueling, selling TC, replay making, legend status, etc. (feel free to further this list in your post to act as a reference for if any of this actually ever gets done). Also making sure to use the landing page to rank on more popular searches. The entire page is just garbage and irrelevant at this point, literally, anything would be better.

Secondly is going to be social media and someone to manage the social media pages. Now let it be noted I don't know Nabi's revenue and how much they can allocate to expand employee wise but the whole point of a company is to make money and you need to spend money to make money, but the point of social media is to get new users without necessarily marketing efforts, so this is pretty damn important. Social media pages are so easy to grow naturally if they're kept up with but as of now there's less than the bare minimum being given to them and it's a flaw on Nabi's part. With the release of TBN expected to be soon, I would hope pulling in new customers/users would be the ideal outcome of this and without being present on social media it makes marketing even harder which again screams side hobby instead of an aged company. Keeping up to date on events currently live within Toribash, giveaways to act as a call of action to not only keep the page alive and relevant but to further grow the pages through shares/retweets/repost/etc. You seriously just cannot go wrong with social media so it's stupid how little is being done with it at this point, any company is going to benefit from it and if given the correct care it can do an actual shit-ton for the company.

Next, I'd love to see more marketing efforts. TBN is supposedly going to drop soon and the only people it's going to attract are those currently active which in theory completely contradicts the point of allocating any kind of budget to developing a new game and if that budget is also nonexistent then I really worry for the future of Toribash and Nabi as a whole. Don't really want to get to in depth with this suggestion as I'd hope someone who's apart of Nabi would have a pretty solid marketing background but it would not surprise me if there wasn't so if someone important responds then I can come up with a marketing plan I believe would do very good things for Nabi if given a theoretical budget for its execution.

We also need to create a much better tutorial, again a no-brainer the only thing I ever hear on this suggestion is how difficult this supposedly is but the tutorial and introduction to the game is the biggest contribution to the turnover rate this game has. When a person joins they are given the most basic explanation ever, a vague idea of how the game works and sent on their way. I believe even if a player is flooded with more than necessary information they'd be more inclined to stay, compared to "contract this, extend this, hit space yay now go play the game" again going back to the website idea you need a much more in-depth explanation to get the players attention and have it all present so what isn't retained can be looked at again. I'm sure devs are aware of this issue it just comes back to the lack of execution.

Next would be, Nabi needs to be more worried about making an income. There are many ways for this to be done but for the most part, the only thing I can imagine is a new user joins, buys stuff because they don't know about the user market, and that's it. If they stick around long enough they'll learn that holy shit buying anything for USD other than QI is the dumbest shit ever why the hell did I do that and now you have a user and not a customer and from a company standpoint that's fucking horrible. This also leads to users selling TC, I don't really know what to do with this because it hurts the company but it's a big reason a lot of users stay. Only thing I could think of makes it possible to have users deposit a balance and when they purchase TC from another user, a tax/fee is taken for the transaction so it's some kind of income for Nabi. Also having some kind of interface for users to sell and buy TC through each other should make it possible to collect an average rate for USD to TC and use that average for Nabi to sell TC at a competitive rate so users can benefit if they sell below average for a while but Nabi can attract purchases by offering bundle deals or something along those lines, don't really know for sure what to do with this issue.

This is all I care to write about at this moment but if this attracts responses then I'll continue. If you can please leave a response and feel free to further these suggestions or create your own along the lines of bettering Nabi for the company's sake. Thank you!

tl;dr - revamp the site, social media, marketing efforts, better tutorial, better ways for Nabi to make money.
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I semi agree with this post, although suggestions brought up aren't necessarily the best (like what's the point to revamp the website when 99% of new playerbase is on steam).

What I think is happening is that Nabi owner(s) either isn't confident enough in his own product or is just comfortable with the size of the community that is currently present.

Concept of spending money to get money is quite a venture. Of course hiring more devs and other team members would most definitely improve quality of the game and exposure that it would get, but would it be good enough to justify the costs? That's the question that can't be answered and going into it can either be a success or a big failure depending on many factors.

Sir has already hinted in another thread that Nabi had additional paid positions in the past, but it didn't work out for them. That might be big reason why currently there's only 3 devs and pretty much no other team members to our knowledge. Even having no social media manager in a game developing company already loses a lot of potential publicity by a huge margin, but these guys are missing so much more. Besides social media absence there's also no real project manager. All improvements to the game or website come from developers themselves, which is not only the least productive way of implementing improvements, but also unnecessarily demotivating for developers themselves. There is no real motivating force pushing them to implement certain features just because they can say "oh, this would be quite tricky to do and I got easier thing to implement so I'm just gonna do those".

There are so many different "professions" that would make Toribash and Nabi more successful, but for one reason or another they have no desire to strive for bigger team, so things won't change until company changes.
Originally Posted by Smaguris View Post
like what's the point to revamp the website when 99% of new playerbase is on steam.

So you're saying because %99 of all new players come from steam we shouldn't opt to not only achieve a more updated and professional look but also not venture to possibly sway these percentages to an easily possible 50/50? I don't know how much discussion you and I could have on this topic because I don't believe you stress the importance of SEO as much as I do but I do believe this is very much so an important aspect.

Originally Posted by Smaguris View Post
What I think is happening is that Nabi owner(s) either isn't confident enough in his own product or is just comfortable with the size of the community that is currently present.

This could be so but if it's the first then that's what the post is made about and if its the latter then I'm concerned about how the hell this game/company makes any money especially in comparison to how much it could potentially.

Originally Posted by Smaguris View Post
Concept of spending money to get money is quite a venture. Of course hiring more devs and other team members would most definitely improve quality of the game and exposure that it would get, but would it be good enough to justify the costs? That's the question that can't be answered and going into it can either be a success or a big failure depending on many factors.

No matter what you have to spend money to make money, that's the entire point of an investment and if you don't make that investment you won't know the profit possibilities. I do see any possible way it wouldn't justify the cost unless as you said they just manage to fuck everything up or get super shitty employees.

Originally Posted by Smaguris View Post
Sir has already hinted in another thread that Nabi had additional paid positions in the past, but it didn't work out for them. That might be big reason why currently there's only 3 devs and pretty much no other team members to our knowledge. Even having no social media manager in a game developing company already loses a lot of potential publicity by a huge margin, but these guys are missing so much more. Besides social media absence there's also no real project manager. All improvements to the game or website come from developers themselves, which is not only the least productive way of implementing improvements, but also unnecessarily demotivating for developers themselves. There is no real motivating force pushing them to implement certain features just because they can say "oh, this would be quite tricky to do and I got easier thing to implement so I'm just gonna do those".

Well money is supposed to act as the incentive in most cases so that brings me back to the spend money to make money, which makes me curious as to what Nabi is bringing in quarterly and yearly, what decreases they're seeing, and what their plan is to combat this because they need to expand and worry about the subjects brought up if they ever plan on being as successful as I'd like to believe they want to be. Basically, it's just sad to see how minute the budget is for this game, with enough money this game could pull insane returns and fully believe it but I have seen past remarks from SkulFuk on how hampa just kind of does whatever he wants whenever he wants and just never talks about it which would detour pretty much any investor.

Originally Posted by Smaguris View Post
There are so many different "professions" that would make Toribash and Nabi more successful, but for one reason or another they have no desire to strive for bigger team, so things won't change until company changes.

And this is the saddest thought because I know they're open to investors as of now but when they won all their awards and had the publicity they were not, I believe more than anything it was a sense of greed that completely fucked this game to a possible point of no return.
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I realised that so far this thread is just discussion rather than suggestion, but hey, something might come out of this.

I completely agree with you on everything, but I don't think there's gonna be much change in how things are moving.

They're probably pulling not that bad of an income even now, enough to get decent return anyways. When I was HS I saw many newbies buying TC from TB store, often as much as 100$ worth. Now add all the Toriprime subscriptions, profile customisations, you're looking at really good numbers considering game's size. That might be good enough of a reason for hampa to be satisfied with how much he's getting from this and he just doesn't see any worth in investing that money. Similar situation was seen with PUBG developers until recently, as well as many other indie studios.

If they were to expand their team, they would have done it before starting to work on TBN. Hampa is working on it by himself and that's probably just his preference above anything.

In terms of advertising, games don't get that much exposure through cheap web adverts anymore. These days paid YouTube or Twitch promotions are go-to for any indie game, but those are expensive and usually not that reliable because you're not really in control of what's being covered for that price. The rest is through partnerships, but I think it's pretty obvious that Nabi has no partnerships with anything, and in its current state they have nothing to offer.

Nabi had a chance to prosper in 2012-2014. Now that TB hype died down it's an uphill battle to gain any sort of exposure for a relatively low cost. It's really sad to think of it like that, but unless TBN proves itself to be revolutionary in current game standards, it's not really bringing any more success to Nabi.

Gaming industry has greatly evolved in the way that studios are being managed and promoted over these few years. We have to face the possibility that Nabi might be outdated to the point of no recovery.
Last edited by Smaguris; Sep 4, 2018 at 04:04 AM.
Also having some kind of interface for users to sell and buy TC through each other should make it possible to collect an average rate for USD to TC and use that average for Nabi to sell TC at a competitive rate so users can benefit if they sell below average for a while but Nabi can attract purchases by offering bundle deals or something along those lines, don't really know for sure what to do with this issue.

I've brought this exact idea up with staff before - It wasn't super well taken, mostly due to concerns with increasing the TC/USD rate more than it has already, the fact that booster sales are actually fine and are much more reasonably priced, as well as sinking the spawned TC.

But, I do think this is honestly a really good idea and could actually bring Nabi in as a decent seller for TC. It just needs to be fully fleshed out as an idea first, with a set plan for pricing procedures so there isn't any risk of forcing players to sell at cheaper and cheaper rates.


I also generally feel positively about your other points, but Smaguris does raise a good point when he says that TB might be beyond saving.


Another point to consider is that staff don't actually get any of the returns that might come from brainstorming and pitching new revenue ideas. There's zero incentive for anyone except one specific person who is already very busy to spend any time at all thinking of ways to get Nabi more money. Which is probably why it never comes up, and there haven't been many significant attempts at it (besides a notable few, e.g. 3d item customization).

If enough good ideas were thrown at higher-ups, and were pushed enough that they weren't forgotten, I can see change happening, though.
Originally Posted by pouffy View Post
If enough good ideas were thrown at higher-ups, and were pushed enough that they weren't forgotten, I can see change happening, though.

I would love if someone with a little better rep than myself could run this thread by some higher-ups in an attempt to gather valuable responses.
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err why are you concerned for nabi making money instead of being concerned about them making a great game?
tell me about aikido
~referencing Dark Souls in suicidal threads since 13/01/15
Originally Posted by snake View Post
err why are you concerned for nabi making money instead of being concerned about them making a great game?

It would've been too easy for me to call you an idiot and move along. The entire point of the OP and thread are me attempting to compile a list of flaws and potential fixes(suggestions even!). I'm actually quite amazed at the fact you typed this out and never once stopped yourself, my question is, after 10 years why are you still here? This should stand as proof that the game has got extremely unique aspects and has the potential to do great things but because Nabi isn't addressing the major issues it never got to see a fraction of the success that it could have and so I made this thread. Toribash is a great game in concept, polishing up the no-brainer hard shit would make it a great game, but it has no money to do so, so that's why I worry about the money. You need one for the other. Please don't post here again with anything even remotely close to as useless as this post was.
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~ raku ~ Team Girl Scouts ~ Clan League 2013 Champion ~ Duelist ~
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nah, i mean that just reminds me posting something among these lines that you do around 2013-2014 before the delayed big steam release, about polishing before releasing to steam as there would not be other big opportunities to promote, aaaand i guess you remember how on release date gm team were manually jumping ingame creating rooms for newbies, so even after a delay it was pushed pretty much as is


i don't think money is the issue here, thats all i'm saying
tell me about aikido
~referencing Dark Souls in suicidal threads since 13/01/15
Originally Posted by snake View Post
nah, i mean that just reminds me posting something among these lines that you do around 2013-2014 before the delayed big steam release, about polishing before releasing to steam as there would not be other big opportunities to promote, aaaand i guess you remember how on release date gm team were manually jumping ingame creating rooms for newbies, so even after a delay it was pushed pretty much as is


i don't think money is the issue here, thats all i'm saying

Well in a way it's what I'm trying to do before the release of TBN, and as discussed earlier we may just be at a point of no return. Basically, all I want to happen out of this post is to discuss everything that would be necessary to make everything about this game "great". If you'd be interested in posting what flaws you find with the game itself(aside from the physics, goes for future posters as well, don't say some dumbshit like "oh grab glitches ned 2 b fixt") because I also agree the game has a lot of flaws that if I care enough to spend free-time writing about I will, currently hate the chat and command look everything about it irks the fuck out of me and just yells amateur hour for whatever reason, but the game itself just looks choppy and not nearly as polished as I'd deem necessary to call the game "great" although I like the direction the main menu is going but there's only so much you can do before it just looks like shit but as of now I like the direction it's going.
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