Hey everyone! How's everything?

[MacCentris]

Has anyone checked the popularity of the "fairly new" Utopia Kingdoms and overall Jolt Online outcome after the closure of Legends of Zork? I have... Anyone who wants to see, here it is. Please keep in mind that a company like "Zynga" (for example) has over 200mil monthly active users (MAU), so 62 thousand for Jolt is quite sad... http://www.appdata.com/devs/79941-jolt-online-gaming
Yes, that's less than 7,000 active users per month for Utopia Kingdom.

What do you all think? Well I don't have proof about LOZ but I recall pulling an old gaming magazine article or some news report that once reported 9,000 steady users online (everyday) for a while for Legends of Zork... that's 30% more users than what Utopia Kingdom gets in ONE month! Unfortunately, I tried to look for it and couldn't find it, and Alexa doesn't give those details to free users (I am not going to pay for subscription for that).

It might be true that the old Zork hype gave "Legends of Zork" the popularity it had (and it was lost within a year) but hey, anyone else thinks Jolt messed up bad (like I do)? I mean Utopia Kingdom is less than a year old! Is that rock bottom?

Please do speak up and if you'd rather not, I respect everyone's views

Liliana

PS Just for the record: http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/20 ... -game.aspx

[MacCentris]

How unfortunate, the page is not available as of today! Here is the cache page though: Cache from Bing and Cache from Google. I hope they don't become obsolete.

And by the way it has not been a year since then, Utopia Kingdom was released in Facebook in Dec 2010, so it is much less than 1 year old. LoZ may have been considered terrible by many, but it had not lost this much popularity so fast.

[KM3K]

I haven't tried Utopia Kingdoms as I'm not that interested in those types of games. I mainly played LoZ because it was Zork themed. Those numbers are pretty weak though. I'm surprised they're not doing better on Facebook. These types of games all work on feedback loops to get players coming back often and adding in Facebook friends and all the notifications provided by Facebook just adds to that to pull people in. With their poor numbers, I'd guess they're not leveraging the advantages of Facebook enough.

Maybe things could have been different if Legends of Zork had been built around Facebook, but I have a feeling that would have just delayed the inevitable a little.

[MacCentris]

Sorry for taking so long to respond, but in order to do all the research I do, it can take some time. I posted the original to the Facebook page notes, since Facebook allows the use of images freely. Please take into consideration I wasn't able to find some sources I had visited before, because they have either been taken down, or I just couldn't find them again in my research. Half of the information I know also comes from Jolt's online forum, which is no longer. You can find this post in The Zork Library Facebook page here:

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https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_ ... 2820757353
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Utopia Kingdom vs. Legends of Zork
by The Zork Library on Wednesday, November 30, 2011 at 2:45pm

Utopia Kingdom will really never get an edge over Legends of Zork. The last month of LOZ, compete.com analysis lists:


Unique Visitors: 1,472

Month 599 | 68.61%

Year -9,532 | -86.62%


What does that mean? I will explain. In May 2011, Legends of Zork received 1,472 unique visitors through the month, 599 of those had never visited before. Compared to ONE year traffic, they LOST 9,532 users from what they scanned the year before. This means in the last year of Legends of Zork, it had exactly 10,131 unique visitors. And that wasn't the most active time for LoZ.

Legends of Zork monthly fan base was that of the current Utopia Kingdom (6k to 7k month), late December 2010 checked by website traffic data. Which means LoZ had more fans even near it's end, dropping to a sad (record low) of about 368 users per month in April 2011.

THE SHOCKING TRUTH: LEGENDS OF ZORK traffic was 20,000 on November 2010. After one measly "update" in-game about a contest promotion.

http://www.appdata.com/apps/facebook/11 ... a-kingdoms

(see also image for 3 month record)

Traffic seriously went down after December 2010 due to the long expected Christmas avatars and updates not being launched/performed. I think the holiday lack of updates was the straw that broke the camels back. The game would have not died if it had been updated often; or at least it would have been steady until a better game similar to LoZ came along. For example, there is a game in Facebook similar to Utopia Kingdoms, called "Dragons of Atlantis". The game stinks in my opinion, it is ridiculous and tacky next to Utopia Kingdoms (great graphics though and it may have an edge on UK due to that). But just to mention a few of its flaws, you can not build two buildings at the same time (or queue them), it has countless bugs, the building construction times are off by about 20 seconds (ie. you have to wait about 20 seconds after a building finishes, to be able to construct another) and yet (get ready); user base 1.3 million.

Here you can check the Facebook fan page of that game (monthly active users figure on the left):

https://www.facebook.com/dragonsofatlantis

I checked it out last month for research purposes (to compare), I am looking at my current in-game messages, and I see up to TWO updates per day. The most this game has gone without updates is 3 days. Who can leave a game like that?

If Jolt had brought Legends of Zork to Facebook, not only would have been a unique game in the facebook platform (no such game in facebook yet) it would have also been a continuation to the Zork series. Millions of curious Facebook users who never even played the original game would have played it, old and new... eventually the history would have been revived and people would "eat, breathe, and sing Zork" once again.

For older fans, the name "Zork" would have been enough to bring them in. And honestly, I played LoZ for an entire year and I still liked it very much (I wanted to see updates of course). Would have never left it, if they have added the quests that were missing. It was evident the owner of Jolt is/was a rich guy who had TOO MUCH MONEY to spend and he managed it in the wrong ways. The company is running out of fuel, remember Playboy Manager?

Ahem, well it turned to "Playboy Party" and well, why not take a look at what happened to it?: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolt_Onlin ... yboy_Party

Anyway this is some interesting press release about Jolt: http://siliconrepublic.com/news/article ... olt-online

All in all, Utopia Kingdom's user base has increased by a measly 2,000 monthly due to updates and perhaps an expensive propaganda done though GameStop. The game will never reach 20,000 users however... records show that as many as 45,000 unique people played Legends of Zork in its history; by the time the game ended. Unfortunately, I can not remember the source and I did not take any screenshots. I WILL however, post as soon as I find that information again.

To conclude, Jolt never seizes to spark hopes in their players by posting propaganda announcements, then drops them like an egg. Will Utopia Kingdom last another year? Who knows, when Jolt's money starts to run out I guess.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid ... 7541933549

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid ... 7541933549


=======================


Any questions or inquiries, feel free to ask! I will gladly show as much as possible, including sharing the internet archives of Legends of Zork links. I do not think they have archives of Jolt forums however

[KM3K]

Impressive research!

[MacCentris]

Thanks that line should read: "Which means LoZ had more fans even near it's end, dropping to a sad (record low) of about 368 (new) users per month in April 2011 (total of about 4,000 existing users per month)."

I forgot to add that little detail. I changed the message in Facebook. In April it had 5k visitors and May had 4k roughly:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid ... 549&type=1

Also I should mention if you examine the image more closely you will see Legends of Zork maintained roughly 4k monthly visitors for 3 months straight: May, June, July of 2011

I mean those are still quite high for a game that had been closed for a while. I heard Jolt is into developing smart phone apps... I wonder how they're doing with those.

PS. the reason why I compare two games that have practically nothing to do with one another, is the fact that Jolt redirects everyone who visits http://www.legendsofzork.com into Utopia Kingdoms. As-if the games were even remotely related in ANY way! Why don't they just forward it to their website http://joltonline.com/ instead? *chuckles* even so, the thousands of visitors to the old LoZ website, apparently do not want to play Utopia Kingdom, judging by figures. *sigh* oh well

[Savannah]

I was ranked #77 on Legends of Zork before they shut it down with 3 days notice.

Only wish i knew about the website sooner.

Utopia Kingdoms sucks. Why waste time with a company that is just going to shut it down with out notice.