Bay 12 Games Forum

"Urist, this whole area... it's infested with insects! By Armok, there are swarms of them everywhere..."

"Eh -- there's only one solution, Bomrek -- KILL THE TURKEYS!"

A low annual fee actually makes more sense to me the more that I think about it. Yes, there's some degree of uncertainty you'll have to prepare for when it comes to the first year's subs going up, but you should be able to get a fairly decent sense judging by new subs in that first-year period of whether the game will be viable past that point (and if it's not, just make sure you have enough banked to finish out two years' worth of server costs). At any rate, you can cut the costs for customers and also receive a larger initial financial boost than you would with monthly subs. And perhaps more importantly, I think people would be more willing to deal with a one-time yearly payment than with the hassle associated with monthly payments. Seems win-win to me.

Charge them $6.00/year.

Any particular reason you need to do a monthly subscription? A 1 payment/year subscription seems more manageable, and users would probably be a lot less hesitant to pay $6 for a year's worth of a game (not much of a loss if you don't like it) than to sign up for a monthly subscription, which is a much bigger hassle.

Fair enough. I'm not saying there's no risk involved or that it's impossible to be duped - in general, I'd also say a more cautious approach is warranted when it comes to something you don't have a tangible and immediate return from.

I do agree that there should be more accountability involved in the process; promising rewards for campaigns like these should be binding in some way, i.e., there should be significant legal ramifications if you don't follow through. I don't know how plausible that is, but yeah, it certainly should be the case.

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Yeah, indie devs here type up a forum post. That's different than paying someone several thousand dollars to spam the internet, call journalists, make videos and add to your overhead by doing so.

Not particularly. It's still advertising. And indie devs' ads can be just as annoying as "professional" game developers...probably even more so if the indie dev advertise a game that I don't particularly care about.

Time is money, so if you're wasting time spamming the internet, calling journalists, and making videos, it's the same as you paying money for someone else to do so.

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When people start crowdsourcing out their overhead, rather than trying to crowd source support for their idea, that's when I think it's taking advantage of the promise of indie games.

There is no promise of indie games. Indie games are just about "independence" for the game developer, to be allowed to do what he wants, not what the "community" wants. If Today wants to set aside 10% of his donated income, then he is still being indie, because he's the one deciding what to do with HIS money. Now, if someone told Toady to set aside 10% of his donated income, then he's no longer indie; he's taking orders. Even a multi-million-dollar private individual is still an indie developer, but the minute he goes public and becomes accountable to shareholders and a CEO, then he has "sold out" and became non-indie.

Also, I find the idea of begging money to other people to fund your idea to be incredibly exploitative to the consumer, no matter if you're crowdsourcing overhead or 'support' or whatever. Because the consumer has no accountability over the process; all he really gets is just sweet-sounding words and smiles from a indie developer (who is probably just as greedy and cynical as his non-indie counterparts). If anything, I want the crowdsource of ideas and programming, you know, crowdsource the actual game, as opposed to just throwing money at a developer who's free to spend it as he please.

It's pretty ridiculous of you to broadbrush all developers as 'cynical and greedy'.

If you dislike crowdfunding, well, you're certainly not obligated to try it. On the other hand, if people crowdfund something and receive what they expect in return, it's hardly your right to tell them they were exploited. Developers are individuals and there is no reason to assume they are all dicks who are out to exploit the public.

By your reasoning, a publisher who funds a game or product before it is completely realized is being 'exploited' by the developer because they're footing the bill in advance. In fact, they're being exploited by an order of magnitude more than anybody who crowdfunds, since an individual who donates towards a Kickstarter-esque campaign is only funding a very small portion of the overall cost.

I shouldn't tell you this, but if a computer is told to divide by 0, it'll explode.

It's one thing to implement error handling that'll prevent players from crashing the game by means of producing code errors. That's fairly easy.

It's entirely another thing to say 'oh sure infinite loops yay' and then prevent griefers from bringing entire servers down via lag.

It seems pretty obvious that, yes, there would be some kind of protection in place from letting the code go truly wild.

That said, now that I think of it, serious issues will arise from letting people actually code things in a multiplayer game unless the code is well and truly made impotent.

It'll only be a matter of time until some griefer with a working knowledge of basic code structure figures out how to create an infinite loop despite any restrictions placed on such attempts.

Quote from: Loud Whispers on April 06, 2012, 08:29:20 am

Quote from: Shinotsa on April 06, 2012, 08:27:00 am

PNS 80085

+1

80,000+ penises? 

Apparently you never owned a calculator in grade school.