Also, the whole web hosting thing was, to me, just an excuse to pull the plug on the forum. He could have had it back up and running within 12 hours if he wanted to keep it. Using that as an excuse was in poor taste.
Where exactly are you getting your inside knowledge of PVP's finances? I'm honestly interested in how you know more about it than Scott does.
He openly said that the reason the forums came down is because they were using too much bandwidth, and he opted to just cancel them after that. If straub could afford to keep the forums running for as long as he did, making less than half of what kurtz does, (I'm basing that off the fact that straub couldn't afford to stay in kurtz's office and is now looking for another part time job, but still keeps his site and forums running), then I know kurtz can afford to keep his forums running, or at least split the cost.
that's why I said he was just using the forum bandwidth issue as an excuse.
That's not really the point though is it. Of course he can afford it, but that doesn't make it a justifiable expense. PA can afford to give me a company car, but if they did that they would be spending money in a retarded way.
Aside from buying the game and attending PAX and donating to Child's Play I like to occassionally click the ads just for its own sake, even though I usually have no interest at all in what it's selling. :P
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amateurhourOne day I'll be professionalhourThe woods somewhere in TennesseeRegistered Userregular
That's not really the point though is it. Of course he can afford it, but that doesn't make it a justifiable expense. PA can afford to give me a company car, but if they did that they would be spending money in a retarded way.
that's a difference of opinion then. Community building is essential to the webcomic business model, and all four of the authors of how to make webcomics, including kurtz, agree on that. He could have remade the forums and really laid down some new ground rules, instead of just cancelling it.
Also, another poor move on his part was to let straub host the pvp forums, and do all of the modding, which straub did, regularly. Kurtz hardly ever regulated that place, and instead just whined about what it was becoming.
I'm really suprised that straub isn't more pissed about all of this, because a lot of kurtz's fans are pointing their torches at halfpixel and straub for no good reason, and aside from a double edited blog post telling them not to, in a half assed way, kurtz hasn't done much to correct that.
That's not really the point though is it. Of course he can afford it, but that doesn't make it a justifiable expense. PA can afford to give me a company car, but if they did that they would be spending money in a retarded way.
that's a difference of opinion then. Community building is essential to the webcomic business model
It really isn't. Not at the level that PVP and PA are at.
Seriously. PA is an ad and content company as much as anything else. Their money comes directly from Blizzard and so forth. One of these days I expect a PA strip to just be a standard part of those little mini-manuals that come with games, and people will freak out if it isn't in there.
He openly said that the reason the forums came down is because they were using too much bandwidth, and he opted to just cancel them after that. If straub could afford to keep the forums running for as long as he did, making less than half of what kurtz does, (I'm basing that off the fact that straub couldn't afford to stay in kurtz's office and is now looking for another part time job, but still keeps his site and forums running), then I know kurtz can afford to keep his forums running, or at least split the cost.
Here's where I'm going to defend them a bit.
The thing about the word "bandwidth" is that it's now a catch-all for any expenses related to web hosting. You actually have three big considerations when it comes to hosting a forum: bandwidth, storage, and CPU overhead. While a huge forum will use huge amounts of resources no matter what, bandwidth and storage costs tend to be pretty much the same for forums as a website serving up a similar number of hits. Considering a lot of web hosts out there will give you 10 gigs of space and 2 terabytes of bandwidth a month for ten bucks, space and band are rarely big problems for anyone.
The issue is CPU usage. A web server can only process so many requests at a time, and forums make a METRIC SHIT TON of requests. There's little doubt in my mind that the hardware used to power these forums is probably beefier than the hardware powering the Penny Arcade site itself.
The thing about CPU usage is that a web host will only give you so much before they start to charge you extra for it. A lot extra. The second you start to adversely affect any other sites on the same box as you, bam, you have to switch from shared hosting ($10, maybe $20 a month) to dedicated hosting ($100+ a month). And if you start taxing that machine, you either see 500 errors everywhere (like these boards were plagued with back in the day), or you have to switch to colocated hosting, which means you have to buy or build a server ($2,000+) and get it plugged directly into your host's grid -- and we're now talking $500 to $1k a month.
It's entirely possible that this decision was based on an EXPONENTIAL increase in hosting costs, not somebody saying "I don't want to spend $10 a month on the forums anymore".
Edit: I use the phrase "the thing about" too much.
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amateurhourOne day I'll be professionalhourThe woods somewhere in TennesseeRegistered Userregular
That's not really the point though is it. Of course he can afford it, but that doesn't make it a justifiable expense. PA can afford to give me a company car, but if they did that they would be spending money in a retarded way.
that's a difference of opinion then. Community building is essential to the webcomic business model
It really isn't. Not at the level that PVP and PA are at.
maybe not PA, but kurtz still needs help from his community. He doesn't do as much freelance stuff with developers and vendors as PA does, unless he just never advertises it to the public.
It seems like the bulk of his sales are still store based on his end. He does a little bit for blizzard, but his forays into animated series and comic books that aren't pvp based both tanked, and his pvp books don't sell very well through image. He's said that before.
That's not really the point though is it. Of course he can afford it, but that doesn't make it a justifiable expense. PA can afford to give me a company car, but if they did that they would be spending money in a retarded way.
that's a difference of opinion then. Community building is essential to the webcomic business model
It really isn't. Not at the level that PVP and PA are at.
maybe not PA, but kurtz still needs help from his community. He doesn't do as much freelance stuff with developers and vendors as PA does, unless he just never advertises it to the public.
It seems like the bulk of his sales are still store based on his end. He does a little bit for blizzard, but his forays into animated series and comic books that aren't pvp based both tanked, and his pvp books don't sell very well through image. He's said that before.
And yet he can still run his business as he sees fit. If that means not providing an official forum, that's his prerogative. He's not under any obligation to anyone or even to himself to build his career in a way he doesn't want. I'm pretty sure Scott Kurtz hasn't sold shares of himself, so he only has to answer to himself.
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amateurhourOne day I'll be professionalhourThe woods somewhere in TennesseeRegistered Userregular
That's not really the point though is it. Of course he can afford it, but that doesn't make it a justifiable expense. PA can afford to give me a company car, but if they did that they would be spending money in a retarded way.
that's a difference of opinion then. Community building is essential to the webcomic business model
It really isn't. Not at the level that PVP and PA are at.
maybe not PA, but kurtz still needs help from his community. He doesn't do as much freelance stuff with developers and vendors as PA does, unless he just never advertises it to the public.
It seems like the bulk of his sales are still store based on his end. He does a little bit for blizzard, but his forays into animated series and comic books that aren't pvp based both tanked, and his pvp books don't sell very well through image. He's said that before.
And yet he can still run his business as he sees fit. If that means not providing an official forum, that's his prerogative. He's not under any obligation to anyone or even to himself to build his career in a way he doesn't want. I'm pretty sure Scott Kurtz hasn't sold shares of himself, so he only has to answer to himself.
Agreed. I'm not arguing that he can't do as he sees fit with his business, my argument was that this was a poor business decision on his part, and it's likely to affect his income in some way. It may be 2%, it may be 20%, but his business is still more community and personal sales driven then that of PA's.
It should also be kept in mind that PA is a -company-, while Kurtz is a -dude-.
One man can only do so much.
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amateurhourOne day I'll be professionalhourThe woods somewhere in TennesseeRegistered Userregular
edited November 2008
update: halfpixel.com is completely done for now. They've redirected to webcomics.com, so at least Straub isn't footing the bill and or maintenance for the whole thing anymore.
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amateurhourOne day I'll be professionalhourThe woods somewhere in TennesseeRegistered Userregular
Kurtz is a company too. PvP is an LLC, and he has employees. Those employees are his family, but they're employees none the less.
And they do what exactly...?
Marketing, probably. He sells books. He has other comic projects too. Uhm...I think he had a cartoon for a bit?
Also, this thread reminded me that I need to buy the second PA game.
He outsourced his cartoon to Blind Ferret, his books are all printed through Image, which he has a partnership with, his wife handles all shipping and customer service, and his brother helps with marketing, although his brother also holds down a job with his own business making cakes.
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amateurhourOne day I'll be professionalhourThe woods somewhere in TennesseeRegistered Userregular
Hey where did these "couple hundred posters" do their bitching? On the Facebook group?
They moved to the webcomics.com forums briefly, then set up several sister forums, settling on halforum.com finally. That's how I found out how much it was affecting Kurtz, regardless of how much he said it didn't, because he found each of these forums and made posts there.
That's not really the point though is it. Of course he can afford it, but that doesn't make it a justifiable expense. PA can afford to give me a company car, but if they did that they would be spending money in a retarded way.
that's a difference of opinion then. Community building is essential to the webcomic business model
It really isn't. Not at the level that PVP and PA are at.
maybe not PA, but kurtz still needs help from his community. He doesn't do as much freelance stuff with developers and vendors as PA does, unless he just never advertises it to the public.
It seems like the bulk of his sales are still store based on his end. He does a little bit for blizzard, but his forays into animated series and comic books that aren't pvp based both tanked, and his pvp books don't sell very well through image. He's said that before.
I just simply am not buying the idea that a forum linked directly from the website is a required to have help from "his community". Do you think that a significant portion of people that bought stuff from/read/like PvP will simply stop because they don't have an official forum? While I give you that this could be possible, unless you have some evidence of a similar situations and at least some rough numbers to back it up, I really think you're jumping the gun here.
Just take PA as an example of the disconnect between a webcomic vs. the "official" forums, take a look at the 10th anniversary thread, and see how many people say they don't even read the PA comics anymore. And this is on a thread specifically about the comic.
You come across as acting like its gonna be the end of PvP based solely on some assumptions (such as a having a forum boosts sales significantly and that a large segment of the population that buys stuff will be disenfranchised by the loss of the forums) that I really don't think are that well justified or supported.
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The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. ~ Terry Pratchett
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Zen VulgarityWhat a lovely day for teaSecret British ThreadRegistered Userregular
Also, the whole Dyack/Too Human fiasco is a pretty good example of why someone should stay the hell away from forums.
I don't think I've heard of that one.
The barest story is that Dyack went to, I think Neo-GAF and basically said his game was gonna be amazing and anyone who disagreed can eat shit and die (not literally what he said, but it was essentially one of those "If you disagree I hate you" moments).
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Zen VulgarityWhat a lovely day for teaSecret British ThreadRegistered Userregular
edited November 2008
Dyack was pretty nice when he came over here.
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amateurhourOne day I'll be professionalhourThe woods somewhere in TennesseeRegistered Userregular
edited November 2008
Chrono, I have in no way said this will be the end of pvp, just that I think it will affect his income and was a poor way to handle things on his part.
Chrono, I have in no way said this will be the end of pvp, just that I think it will affect his income and was a poor way to handle things on his part.
At least Kurtz didn't do what Buckley did.
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amateurhourOne day I'll be professionalhourThe woods somewhere in TennesseeRegistered Userregular
Chrono, I have in no way said this will be the end of pvp, just that I think it will affect his income and was a poor way to handle things on his part.
At least Kurtz didn't do what Buckley did.
That brings up a really good point. Buckley has moderated his forums with an iron fist, boots people that don't like him, and has alienated a fan on more than one occasion, and does very well for himself. Taking that into consideration, this could all be for nothing, and Kurtz will be fine.
We also really liked the game and had serious questions about how it worked so we could be better at it.
Now that the game is probably bargain bin, I should get it again.
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Zen VulgarityWhat a lovely day for teaSecret British ThreadRegistered Userregular
edited November 2008
I think we were told not to be total fuckups because yes, he was actually Dyack. No, we should not flame him and be a bunch of retards like when Bungie was being cool with us.
I just simply am not buying the idea that a forum linked directly from the website is a required to have help from "his community". Do you think that a significant portion of people that bought stuff from/read/like PvP will simply stop because they don't have an official forum? While I give you that this could be possible, unless you have some evidence of a similar situations and at least some rough numbers to back it up, I really think you're jumping the gun here.
It would certainly be an interesting natural experiment.
I think we were told not to be total fuckups because yes, he was actually Dyack. No, we should not flame him and be a bunch of retards like when Bungie was being cool with us.
Weren't Bungie pretty much just spamming us though?
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Zen VulgarityWhat a lovely day for teaSecret British ThreadRegistered Userregular
edited November 2008
As I recall they sure as hell weren't.
I wasn't a poster at a time; but, I remember Tycho and Gabe being royally pissed.
I think we were told not to be total fuckups because yes, he was actually Dyack. No, we should not flame him and be a bunch of retards like when Bungie was being cool with us.
Bungie wasn't really cool with us, it was more like they graced us with their presence and thought we were going to kneel.
If some random Joe had posted what Frankie did, they would have gotten their asses banned, too. And rightly so, if you're going to wander into one of the bigger gaming forums on the internet as part of your PR stunt, you should probably, I dunno, read and respect their rules first.
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SarksusATTACK AND DETHRONE GODRegistered Userregular
edited November 2008
Dyack basically pulled a mini-Derek Smart at the NeoGAF forums. He made a lot of claims, got called on them, called NeoGAF a terrible community, said Too Human was going to be better than two other shitty games (he specifically meant the review ratings), it wasn't. Lots of drama. Spilled over into other communities who couldn't shut the fuck up about him. The end.
So I don't think Kurtz really had much of a choice here. Regardless of how he felt about the community, Straub's webhost was breathing down the guy's neck and was going to take everything down if something wasn't done, so instead of trying to appeal to the company they simply backed everything up and took the forum down. Considering this happened on Thanksgiving, I think I can forgive someone for not wanting to deal with it right away. The hosting company, though, wouldn't be so understanding, so they had to take it down immediately.
I also think the importance of the community is being overestimated. Do we have any stats for the number of unique visitors on the forums, and the number on the site (unique visitors, not hits). Can we say, with evidence, that the people on those forums also visit the website and regularly view the comic there (something that probably can't be said about this place). Can we determine how much money people on the forums are spending on merchandise? I just don't think they're very important. Besides, if any of them are making such a big deal about this, and they are villainizing Kurtz and Straub, then fuck 'em. An individual or company does not have to cater to a group of unsavory people just because that person or company might need them.
Posts
He openly said that the reason the forums came down is because they were using too much bandwidth, and he opted to just cancel them after that. If straub could afford to keep the forums running for as long as he did, making less than half of what kurtz does, (I'm basing that off the fact that straub couldn't afford to stay in kurtz's office and is now looking for another part time job, but still keeps his site and forums running), then I know kurtz can afford to keep his forums running, or at least split the cost.
that's why I said he was just using the forum bandwidth issue as an excuse.
that's a difference of opinion then. Community building is essential to the webcomic business model, and all four of the authors of how to make webcomics, including kurtz, agree on that. He could have remade the forums and really laid down some new ground rules, instead of just cancelling it.
Also, another poor move on his part was to let straub host the pvp forums, and do all of the modding, which straub did, regularly. Kurtz hardly ever regulated that place, and instead just whined about what it was becoming.
I'm really suprised that straub isn't more pissed about all of this, because a lot of kurtz's fans are pointing their torches at halfpixel and straub for no good reason, and aside from a double edited blog post telling them not to, in a half assed way, kurtz hasn't done much to correct that.
It really isn't. Not at the level that PVP and PA are at.
Here's where I'm going to defend them a bit.
The thing about the word "bandwidth" is that it's now a catch-all for any expenses related to web hosting. You actually have three big considerations when it comes to hosting a forum: bandwidth, storage, and CPU overhead. While a huge forum will use huge amounts of resources no matter what, bandwidth and storage costs tend to be pretty much the same for forums as a website serving up a similar number of hits. Considering a lot of web hosts out there will give you 10 gigs of space and 2 terabytes of bandwidth a month for ten bucks, space and band are rarely big problems for anyone.
The issue is CPU usage. A web server can only process so many requests at a time, and forums make a METRIC SHIT TON of requests. There's little doubt in my mind that the hardware used to power these forums is probably beefier than the hardware powering the Penny Arcade site itself.
The thing about CPU usage is that a web host will only give you so much before they start to charge you extra for it. A lot extra. The second you start to adversely affect any other sites on the same box as you, bam, you have to switch from shared hosting ($10, maybe $20 a month) to dedicated hosting ($100+ a month). And if you start taxing that machine, you either see 500 errors everywhere (like these boards were plagued with back in the day), or you have to switch to colocated hosting, which means you have to buy or build a server ($2,000+) and get it plugged directly into your host's grid -- and we're now talking $500 to $1k a month.
It's entirely possible that this decision was based on an EXPONENTIAL increase in hosting costs, not somebody saying "I don't want to spend $10 a month on the forums anymore".
Edit: I use the phrase "the thing about" too much.
maybe not PA, but kurtz still needs help from his community. He doesn't do as much freelance stuff with developers and vendors as PA does, unless he just never advertises it to the public.
It seems like the bulk of his sales are still store based on his end. He does a little bit for blizzard, but his forays into animated series and comic books that aren't pvp based both tanked, and his pvp books don't sell very well through image. He's said that before.
And yet he can still run his business as he sees fit. If that means not providing an official forum, that's his prerogative. He's not under any obligation to anyone or even to himself to build his career in a way he doesn't want. I'm pretty sure Scott Kurtz hasn't sold shares of himself, so he only has to answer to himself.
Agreed. I'm not arguing that he can't do as he sees fit with his business, my argument was that this was a poor business decision on his part, and it's likely to affect his income in some way. It may be 2%, it may be 20%, but his business is still more community and personal sales driven then that of PA's.
One man can only do so much.
Kurtz is a company too. PvP is an LLC, and he has employees. Those employees are his family, but they're employees none the less.
And they do what exactly...?
Marketing, probably. He sells books. He has other comic projects too. Uhm...I think he had a cartoon for a bit?
Also, this thread reminded me that I need to buy the second PA game.
He outsourced his cartoon to Blind Ferret, his books are all printed through Image, which he has a partnership with, his wife handles all shipping and customer service, and his brother helps with marketing, although his brother also holds down a job with his own business making cakes.
They moved to the webcomics.com forums briefly, then set up several sister forums, settling on halforum.com finally. That's how I found out how much it was affecting Kurtz, regardless of how much he said it didn't, because he found each of these forums and made posts there.
I hear the Order of the Stick guy hates his forums.
I know Jeph from QC steadfastly refuses to post on or even read his.
Forums are the main reason I gave up ownership of a fairly popular website.
I gave it up to one of the forumers. And now that site's a shit hole.
Forums are proof of the need for government.
I just simply am not buying the idea that a forum linked directly from the website is a required to have help from "his community". Do you think that a significant portion of people that bought stuff from/read/like PvP will simply stop because they don't have an official forum? While I give you that this could be possible, unless you have some evidence of a similar situations and at least some rough numbers to back it up, I really think you're jumping the gun here.
Just take PA as an example of the disconnect between a webcomic vs. the "official" forums, take a look at the 10th anniversary thread, and see how many people say they don't even read the PA comics anymore. And this is on a thread specifically about the comic.
You come across as acting like its gonna be the end of PvP based solely on some assumptions (such as a having a forum boosts sales significantly and that a large segment of the population that buys stuff will be disenfranchised by the loss of the forums) that I really don't think are that well justified or supported.
What did wind up happening with Dyack though?
I don't think I've heard of that one.
He's crawled under his bed to hibernate, I think.
Sad considering Too Human was pretty good.
That brings up a really good point. Buckley has moderated his forums with an iron fist, boots people that don't like him, and has alienated a fan on more than one occasion, and does very well for himself. Taking that into consideration, this could all be for nothing, and Kurtz will be fine.
PA generally lacks the hive mind that GAF has.
And we were nice to him.
We also really liked the game and had serious questions about how it worked so we could be better at it.
Now that the game is probably bargain bin, I should get it again.
It would certainly be an interesting natural experiment.
Weren't Bungie pretty much just spamming us though?
I wasn't a poster at a time; but, I remember Tycho and Gabe being royally pissed.
Bungie wasn't really cool with us, it was more like they graced us with their presence and thought we were going to kneel.
If some random Joe had posted what Frankie did, they would have gotten their asses banned, too. And rightly so, if you're going to wander into one of the bigger gaming forums on the internet as part of your PR stunt, you should probably, I dunno, read and respect their rules first.
So I don't think Kurtz really had much of a choice here. Regardless of how he felt about the community, Straub's webhost was breathing down the guy's neck and was going to take everything down if something wasn't done, so instead of trying to appeal to the company they simply backed everything up and took the forum down. Considering this happened on Thanksgiving, I think I can forgive someone for not wanting to deal with it right away. The hosting company, though, wouldn't be so understanding, so they had to take it down immediately.
I also think the importance of the community is being overestimated. Do we have any stats for the number of unique visitors on the forums, and the number on the site (unique visitors, not hits). Can we say, with evidence, that the people on those forums also visit the website and regularly view the comic there (something that probably can't be said about this place). Can we determine how much money people on the forums are spending on merchandise? I just don't think they're very important. Besides, if any of them are making such a big deal about this, and they are villainizing Kurtz and Straub, then fuck 'em. An individual or company does not have to cater to a group of unsavory people just because that person or company might need them.