This Game Will Die Without Advertising [1]

General
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I’ve seen player counts steadily drop with time more and more until the only people left are those who spend half their waking moments on the game stirring up meaningless highschool-tier drama and drive away players new and old alike. (Those who spend enough time on this game know exactly what I am talking about) It becomes unbearable.

Furthermore, the simple lack of other players to interact is slowly choking the life out of what is, at the end of the day, a social game. I love Tower and I love what the devs have done and are doing with it. But if more people are not injected into Tower Unite, it will die. It is on the decline, and it will die.

Previously, the justification for not advertising was that the devs wanted to wait until Tower Unite was out of early access. It’s out of early access now and has been for a long time. This is not a problem that can be slept on and fixed later. Advertising needs to be done now before it reaches a point of no return, NOT once we reach that point.

Personally, I feel that the best means of advertising may be through youtubers and streamers. I know I myself only started playing this game because I saw Alpharad play it a few years back.

To those who might be opposed to this as it would disrupt the “small community” vibe of the game you might enjoy, there will be no community if the game dies. Servers require upkeep. Updates require time away from other work. Motivation to keep working on the game requires both money and a playerbase to appreciate that work.

As for myself, I am regularly discouraged to play. The lack of an active playerbase makes it hard to want to work on a condo few will ever see. The toxicity of the terminally online middle-aged highschoolbrains and their drama that stalk and harass others over menial slights make engaging with the community feel arduous and stressful at the best o times. Both problems can be fixed through advertising. Low playercounts for obvious reasons, and the dramaqueens will have their influence diluted in a sea of new players.

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While I think that the drama is something that’s going to happen in every community at some level or another, I agree overall. It’s hard to find any good and lasting condos that have more than three or four people, and it’s even hard to fill more than one plaza these days. I doubt there’s more than a hundred fifty people playing on TU at any one time, and it’s kind of sad.

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Hello, I’m a player who has been around since release (2016) :rabbit:

I’ve seen TU’s playercount up and down over the years and I’d say it’s stable oddly enough around the 150 - 250 mark when there is no content updates. Major updates the playercount jumps to 600 - 1500. And these numbers have not changed since. Which is incredibly good for a game with very little to non-existent advertising. And also pretty damn good for a multiplayer indie game to have that consistent recurring playerbase.

Personally, I think the devs understand when it comes to advertising you have only ONE SHOT at the spotlight, and if it misses the mark, it doesn’t matter how much more advertising you do after that, you gain nothing. So picking the right time, with a product that they are proud of is very important to bridging that gap to new players whom have never heard of the game.

The playerbase isn’t going anywhere and nearly a decade of playing and watching it grow has proven that to me. It can only grow more, and when the time comes, it will.

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I disagree. Looking at the chart, there is a noticeable trend of the playerbase taking a downturn overtime since its higher average playercount after COVID. This isn’t the time to panic, but it’s the time to do something about the problem before it becomes too severe.

I’ve been playing since 2022. It’s become harder and harder to find lobbies for minigames. Plazas are less populated (Save for the casino). You can feel the decline.

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I play less often these days for several reasons, I don’t need to go into deep details but mainly I’m lacking some motivation, although I introduced a new friend into Tower Unite and we love playing it together as we put aside all the community problem it might have, we’re enjoying building or playing game worlds, that restored the lost motivation.

Beyond that, I’m afraid for the game itself, it kinda “slowly” dies, if I can say. I used to get on Tower Unite daily early this year and before.
Besides the original campaigns such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, was there any advertising at all? Maybe when the game was out of early access with the 1.0?

I play Tower Unite since it’s first release and played its past version from GMod back in 2009, honestly I’m just a bit upset to see a low playercount going even more down a little more every time I log in.

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Hi, I’ve restarted this thread (hence the [1] at the end of the title) as it became derailed by an argument about the game’s rules about protecting players from being targeted for their identities.

I’ve tried to preserve the original discussion before the issue occurred so it can move forward again.

Please keep the conversation civil here and try to stay close to the original topic.

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I am roughly paraphrasing here, but I think one of the devs has said in the past that they don’t have the budget to invest in proper marketing and the 1.0 release has not brought in enough regular players either to help out financially. But I am also not familiar with how game advertisement works or what is going on behind the scenes.

I always genuinely wondered why VRChat and other competitors are so much more popular. The VR aspect is definitely a huge point but what else makes the player base die out in the first place with all the content tower gets? I guess what I am saying is, if we could make the regular player count higher and give existing players a reason to come online more often, maybe that might be enough to draw in new players.

Also, I remember the official release bringing in a huge wave of toxic people but I admit I’d rather have more annoying people in the plaza than lose access to my condos in a couple years

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I think the game is fine, personally. I’ve not noticed a significant difference as of late compared to before 1.0 or any other time. More people would always be nice, being a social game, but with more people, more toxicity is inevitable.

I think its more about retaining people in general, which we seem to do fine. Even the graph Vanok shared has a slight downward trend since the pandemic’s slight upward trend, but if you look at the lifetime graph on the bottom of that screenshot, its got an upward trend from the beginning to about covid, and then its relatively stable since, with maybe a little tick down since 2024.

Personally, I’m not worried; I doubt the developers would just let the game die for lack of funds, or without saying anything. Personally I put what money I can in for patron, and the other things, not even because I’m worried about the games’ finances, but because I enjoy them, and it ain’t gonna break my back (that’s the job of the various insurances, apparently).

I think some advertisement could be good, but as far as I’m aware the game doesn’t have anything restricting it, hence the yogscast recently (re?) finding it, and that’s a bit of advertising.

Growth for the sake of growth is just never sustainable, but I’d hope if there were an actual concern, we’d be told as so, instead of there just being like the makeship campaigns for “if you can, and want to support us, this helps us and you get this cool thing.”

Plus I think the slight downtrend might have more to do with big games releasing again and tying up people’s time rather than people leaving altogether. Personally I never played Tower or any other game 100%, I jump around between at least 2 to 5 in any given month according to steam’s timeline thing they started doing yearly. Right now, as usual, TU is included for me, but I’ve also been playing Outer Worlds 2 since its’ out.

I think this is something all games struggle with unless they employ the kinds of things that trap people in their games, which TU doesn’t even want to do, because that’s kinda unmoral. I think as long as there’s means and a will on the developers side, and the players side, the game will continue to be fine. Could always get more people in, but I don’t think the ship is sinking either, by a good margin.

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Really, one of the main things I want more focused on is player creation. The reason why VRChat and the like is able to maintain is because VRChat has the ability for immersive and creative creation.

Too many bugs right now in Condo Creation for it to have people want to mess around with it or multiple hours at a time like I have.
At the current moment condo creation has you have to know tons of small quirks and bug fixes for things that feel like shouldn’t be an issue! This make creation way harder.

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The biggest problem for retention with this game is that there’s nothing really keeping you around after you get enough units to never have to care about grinding for more. I’ve been sitting on 2-3m units for a while now and despite my reckless spending of buying every item in the game ten times, it never seems to really go down.

I can build another condo, but I don’t really have to buy anything more because nothing I use is consumed and the few bits I am missing never reallly cost more than 50k units. I can gamble it all away in the casino, but I do also have a pretty high chance to just double what I’m trying to burn.

I think the daily tasks feature would increase engagement, but it would also make the infinite unit stockpile easier to achieve. The thing I believe the game needs is some kind of “end-game unit sink” that isn’t in gambling or catsacks - something like rare trophy items that cost millions to obtain, consumables that start plaza events, or even having a way to convert units to tickets or event coins at a massive ratio (for example - 50,000 units per event coin).

For context - back during Gmod Tower I really struggled to keep up with the GMC (units) required to keep building my condo, which created a game loop of buying new condo items and playing minigames to buy more. In Tower Unite I can just bulk buy a ton of garbage and never have to worry about going into unit poverty.

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A good point. I’ve heard lots of longtime players mention having too much money. Maybe you could have fancy outfits or cars that are super expensive, or a few new condos

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Yeah I think that could be a part of it. Units are a huge motivator to play the games, especially early on, but it’s like, maybe too easy to get a hoard of coin and never worry about it ever again (some casino games are super generous with big payouts, you can make a ton from selling treasures, etc). It’s probably too late to actually fundamentally do something about that, but yeah I agree it’d probably help to have a set of late-game super expensive items, even if they’re kind of tacky and just exist to show off basically.

I think daily tasks would actually help a lot as long as they don’t just pay out with Units, though. Like, for example, if daily tasks gave out a unique currency and there was a shop that let you buy some unique items (or even other stuff like temporary EXP boosts for specific games, luck boosts for fishing, currency exchanges, etc.) then there’d kinda always be a reason to try and do them, regardless of how long you’ve played or how many units you have.

Daily tasks in general are a thing I’m really cautiously excited for; if they’re done right, it could help so much with “late-game” issues like having fewer goals to work for after getting most of the achievements or collecting a virtually infinite hoard of units, but it could especially help with getting people to try out underappreciated/“dead” games and areas (Laser Tag, Theater, LC, SDNL, classic Virus, etc). But also like, if it’s added and all the tasks are just “get a birdie in Minigolf for 1000 Units” or something, then it probably wouldn’t do any of that lol.

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cannot relate! Been playing TU since 2021 or so and I spend units on arcade tokens and furniture faster than I can make them most of the time. What’s your secret? (Expensive consumables to start plaza events is a GREAT idea btw, I would LOVE that)

anyway, on the main topic, I guess OP has a point. I would love to see TU sponsor some streamers sometime. Would be a great way to inject some more users into the game. Personally I only really use this game to build condos and check out other players’, so I haven’t really noticed the decline too much. Lobbies feel empty outside the casino, but… Lobbies have kinda always felt empty outside of the casino, IMO. I don’t notice much of a difference, personally.

That being said though, more exposure and more players is never a bad idea. Better to start now before the game is completely dead.

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In my case I got a lot of money back when horse races were unbalanced in such a way that you could make millions of units in a short amount of time - I got about 6m in units and gambled about 4m of it away on meme roulette setups for a laugh.

PixelTail never reverted the units people got from that exploit and it’s really too late to do so now.

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It takes just a cursory glance to see this game is in a bad state playerbase-wise.

  • Plazas are full of AFKs and loiterers.
  • The casino typically houses 5-10 genuine real life addicts who will not speak a single word, ever.
  • There are at best like six minigames (total, of any kind) active at a time and probably only one of them has a playercount to speak of.

The most active, social, talkative group I’ve found hang out exclusively in condos. And it’s just ONE group of people, who have “drama” (god, spare me) with some other group.

The active game board should be massive LED walls on the OUTSIDE of the game plaza. I’ve had this game for years, coming back on and off, and JUST noticed that board recently. Offer meaningful unit incentives for playing x amount of games or completing x amount of tasks in a day (planned, good). Pull a Valve-Counterstrike/Rockstar-GTA-verified-type-thing and ask workshop creators for permission to adopt some game maps into the official pools (people like to know its been vetted for quality)

The condo experience feels entirely separated from the plaza. The whole idea that we are all people who live in this big tower is completely lost imo.

The excessive particle effects, size potions, and speed potions probably turn off new players. Everyone is visually unreadable and zipping around at warp speed, AND they won’t speak, AND they won’t play games.

Sigh, rambling, but I agree, this game needs a stimulation of the player base. If you describe Tower Unite to someone, it SHOULD sound like the coolest thing ever that would appeal to anyone. But no one knows about it and your first log-on experience will probably be less than stellar.

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i have been talking about this regarding arcade and casino since as early as five years ago, some of those were meant to often bring up in-server discussions of ongoing gameplays.

what did we get more in casino so far? five card draw with betting limits, Keno that hasn’t had its betting amount bug fixed, average Bingo Night, table Blackjack with only classic betting types, and horse racing with only basic betting types.
even the real-life casinos already have rolled out much more exciting side bets type like Lucky-7 on Blackjack, so no real reasons for developers to never implement those to get players excited.

arcade side? still to this day, there aren’t anymore ways to play it when those were supposed to be added ages ago. we did get target shooting, some carnival games on the Boardwalk; only like Wheel of Fire and Ultimate Cow Wheel got a reasonable balancing.

implementing daily objectives isn’t a good idea either, it is not rare to see people log into the game, complete them and out - like going to a gym just to use their toilets.

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