Kabam has a new CEO, for real?
TeufelHunden
Member Posts: 114 ★
Maybe a good sign or should we be nervous?
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Kabam CEO confirmed
A new CEO coming from the parent / holding company is usually charged with cleaning up the mess, and they are being asked to do it as quickly as possible. Coming from the inside also means you're trusted and given the ability to make larger investments.
Change is needed. Time will tell if this turns out good or bad - but I'll happily take a chance at improvement over the status quo.
To be honest, this could go two ways.
One way is that they see how many people have been complaining about bugs for months and they decided to get someone else to help clean up the mess. Coincidentally, this month, all of a sudden we actually got updates/hotfixes to fix bugs when usually we'd have to wait a month before a bug would get fixed, if it would get fixed.
I'm on the firm belief that they swapped CEOs because the last CEO was more lenient on it. Maybe the new CEO will crack down and help get a lot of these bugs fixed cuz God knows this game has a lot of bugs that need fixed.
On the other hand, it's a Netmarble CEO... and that has me concerned. These are the Future Fight, Seven Deadly Sins, and Lineage 2: Conan Ad guys.
I'm going to remain optimistic and assume for the former but I'm prepared for the worst.
It almost certainly has nothing to do with bugs, unless they are impacting profits, which apparently is not true considering how well Kabam has performed recently. Investors and board members only care about money.
I've worked in the corporate world for more than three decades, and he number of new CEOs I've seen come and go would boggle the mind.
The guy leaving was brought in as a transition leader after Netmarble bought Kabam, and that he stayed this long speaks to his success not failures, IMO.
10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000%
So if he needs any credibility as CEO he has to surpass this limit
not quite the fresh start a lot of people think it is
On the one hand, a lot of people complain about the game and its direction. On the other hand it is one of the most successful Marvel mobile games with one of the longest track records and that is responsible for over an eighth of our global revenue. So the CEO is going to say hey, Mr. MCOC Producer, you keep doing you, and meanwhile send in Mr. MROC Producer, because we need to talk about what he's going to be doing in April.
The CEO is going to be making decisions about how they try to expand the Marvel IP next, about what direction successor games for their other IP head towards, about what new opportunities exist they should be tackling, about what relationships they should be forming with other partners. Picard does not generally go on the landing party. To the extent that the new CEO makes changes that affect MCOC, they will probably be changes no player recognizes as a change coming from the new CEO. They will be invisible operational changes.
This happens in reverse. One reason why MCOC failed in its original attempt to expand to China (at least in my analysis) was that even with the microtransactions pumped way up, our game is simply fundamentally not beneficial to spenders enough. It wasn't sufficiently pay to win, so players were reluctant to spend. They tried to make it more "pay to play" because they needed to, but it wasn't enough.
That's just something you have to be aware of when you play games primarily designed for western audiences or games primarily designed for Asian audience. I doubt they would try to turn MCOC into a more Asian-style monetization game any more than they tried to just shove MCOC into China without ramping up the monetization before doing so. You have to know your market.
He has most likely had significant input on the company since 2017, so his finger prints are already all over the place.
His impact is probably going to be more focused on new ventures.
MROC didn't fail because it is not a good MOBA. At least I don't think that was the strategy. MROC failed because the strategy was to put their own spin on the genre with the MOBA part as a piece of a larger whole with a lot of other Marvel content surrounding it. That's basically the MCOC model. They just couldn't flesh it out well enough quickly enough to hold enough players' attention, and too many other factors were working against them to survive that critical flaw.