- Analysis: Aeria Games forced to take browser game Caesary offline
- 01:04 Apr 6,2011
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Copyright infringement has haunted Caesary and Evony for a long time, and China-based Heroic Era seems involved into this problem while many of their co-publishers and partners are forced to take Caesary offline. Aeria Games are just one of them after Caesary Online, Kongregate, and TopMy.
Caesary remains available at Yoogames.com, R2games.com, Lekool.com, Caesary.net.
However, from our investigation, it is not a copyright infringement problem, but a SEO-targeted issue. Since the Aeria Games Spam team is crazy about tweeting Caesary, ultimately making Caesary in the No 1 position in the Google search Engine results.
The problem is the real official dev team’s website Caesary.net is thrown behind Aeria Games, and the Dev team cannot make more money with no advertising campaigns, and few of players deemed Caesary.net offiicial.
Let me do some math:
Aeria Games and Heroic Era worked to publish Caesary via 50% revenue share business mode. If Aeria Games could make $ 2000 each day, $ 60, 000 each month, then the Heroic Era team only get $ 30, 000 each month.
Heroic Era is so smart that they should have thought all members of Aeria Caesary will be redirected into Caesary.net, scoring $ 60, 000 for personal gains. What a good business! All promotions such as Google advertising, Facebook advertising, and online forum spamming, which have been made by Aeria Games, are readily exploited and tricked by Heroic Era.
So I suggest Aeria Games do the appropriate way when running other third-party games such as DDTank. If you use the same strategy to promote DDtank in the No.1 position in Google search result, you will be forced to take it office for sure.
Apparently, Yoogames, R2games, and other publishers did not rank higher than Caesary.net.
The free traffic from Google cannot be ignored, but if the developers cannot rank higher than any other co-publishers. A problem arises. Kongregate and Aeria Games fell victim to this SEO War!
Below are Aeria Game’s official statement:
Dear Caesary Players,
Due to circumstances beyond our control, we regretfully inform you that, on April 15, Aeria Games will remove Caesary from our portal. As you may be aware, the developers of Evony and Caesary have been involved in legal actions regarding the intellectual property rights of their respective games. As a third-party publisher of Caesary (we are not the developer of the game), we have waited patiently for the parties to reach a legal settlement. However, with the legal situation remaining unclear, we believe it is in the best interest of all parties involved to remove the game from our portal, until there is a satisfactory legal solution. Again, we apologize to you for these unfortunate circumstances.
Learn more about Kongregate Terminates Agreement with Heroic Era.
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- Analysis: Aeria Games forced to take browser game Caesary offline
Not sure where you came up with this theory, here’s just a few flaws that I see….
First you are assuming that SEO is the only way new Caesary players ever join the game. Ask players though where they heard of the game first and I’m sure most won’t say it was from SEO. Most of these big sites already have a large player-base plus they do tons of expensive online marketing (ad banners) on popular gaming sites. This is the reason why it’s to the developer’s advantage to partner with other sites, even if they become larger than the developer’s own version of the game.
Even if you assume that SEO is the main source of new players, does that mean that only the #1 result gets all of the players? If this was the case then all of the other publishers of the game would not be successful and would drop the game because they were making no money. So does that mean there’s a split? If so then according to your theory this would still result in less money for the developer vs being the only result for the game. This begs the question then why are they using this strategy to begin with (and the answer is that obviously it’s because it’s working better for them having partners).
Finally you assume that removing a large partner would result in all players moving to another version of the game so that the amount of money the developer makes would increase, but I am pretty sure this does not happen. Talking to players, many have said they are just going to look for a different game to play because they do not want to start all over again. Therefore in the end the developer is losing money whenever this happens.