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ZOOMIE1980 -> RE: Exciting update to 2by3Games' developers journal (11/9/2004 11:53:56 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Joel Billings
It's interesting how game marketing has changed over the last 5 years, at least in the minds of many Matrix/WitP fans. For many years, computer wargamers were just like boardgames in that once published, the only thing that anyone felt was left to be done was to fix any bugs (with boardgames this meant rulebook errata). With the advent of Matrix's (and others) ongoing work on old titles, especially with most of this work being provided free of charge, some people now see the publication of a game as just the first step in an ongoing public development process. This may also have a lot to do with the way online games have developed over the past 10 years, with subscriptions paying for ongoing work. Unless a subscription model can be developed that makes sense, I don't see how anyone could expect official development work to continue. We're all for unofficial modders (just wait for GGWaW to see more of the benefit of this), but spending our time continuing to improve a title that has long since shipped just doesn't make financial sense without ongoing revenues. By the way, we don't see WitP as being dead, in fact sales in October were significantly higher than they were in September, and we would expect the game to continue selling for some time. I just don't believe that improving the game will generate many additional sales over just committing to fix bugs as they are found.
Perhaps Matrix will look into the real interest in subscription revenue for future WitP work. As for leaving a bad taste in our mouths, it's more that we had the same taste in our mouth for so long that we're desperate to find something else to taste. There's no reason that WitP buyers shouldn't be able to enjoy the game for a long time, helped on by various fans that provide various art mods, info spreadsheets and new scenarios. Enjoy.
Well this is where the client-server model trumpetted by folks like Capt Cruft, myself and others comes into play, where the game rules and data are enforced in an server side SQL, database, and the code running on the gamer's machine is just an interpreted display (GUI client). One or more very large, powerful servers (4 way Xeon PIV 8GB RAM type things with fibre-channel disk arrays, etc....known as "Dieties") with a big pipe, hundreds/thousands of clients and subsription based access to provide a modest revenue stream. Optionally license the server side code to third parties for hosting or license an engine API for third party development/enhancement. The only turn based model of this I know of is the, still alive and kicking, Wolfpack bunch, but that is a very small user base and the code is OpenSource, i.e. no revenue, but it actually works very nicely. Not sure how well it scales, though, but unlike Everquest and other massively multi-player systems, you don't have to pump graphics across the pipe, just raw, compressed, data, the client translates the data into the visual interface. It would probably take several hundred or more subscribers at $10 month or so to make it worth anyone's while beyond a hobby stage. And to fit that model the WitP code would have to be significantly overhauled, I'm sure....especially the data handling...
And as an alternative to native GUI clients (which one could sell for $10 a pop as well, BTW) one could render the graphics using HTML/Javascript/Java and the gamer accesses the system entirely through a browser interface. The server side just renders Web pages via mechanisms like XLTS entities under a JBoss environment...
Interesting academic excerise, though, regardless of its practicallity.
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