GalCiv - updates as a business strategy
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Stardock Forums
Stardock Forums
Wrote this on Usenet, thought I'd share it with you:
>David Short wrote:
> > "Brad" Wrote:
> > Aferall, who here has heard of a really good game but didn't buy it because
> > it was "too old" (where too old could be merely 2 months since release)?
> > I know I have, I don't know why but I've done it.
>
> On the other hand I've taken to not buying a game because it's too fresh.
> I'll wait for a lower price point and a patch or two or perhaps even the
> gold version before buying in many cases. Of course, there are exceptions.
>
> >But when games are continually updated and I read about those updates, it
keeps them fresh.
>
> ....Boy I'm just not sold on this. Good luck and all, but most updates
have
> been thinly veiled attempts to extort more cash from consumers in the form
> of expansion packs and (with all respect to Richard and Aaron) Gold
> versions of dubious value. I don't mean to be too harsh with the rhetoric,
> but publishers have educated me as a consumer to not rush out and buy
> games when they first appear on store shelves, because the publisher has
> a better game at a lower price waiting 6 months down the line.
Ah David, I'm not talking about expansion packs. Have we all been so abused by game publishers that we forget how much the rest of the industry works? We're talking free, extended feature packed updates to games after release.
When Stardock released WindowBlinds 3.0 in November, we didn't look at that as the end of its development. In January we released WindowBlinds 3.1, in March we'll be releasing WindowBlinds 3.2, in May 3.3 and so on. And these aren't "patches" that fix bugs, they had significant features to the product and they are free.
The user just goes to http://www.stardock.com/support, types in their email address and it'll email them a link to all the latest updates of our software. Only users who have purchased software show up in it.
We don't release these updates for free purely out of being nice guys. There is a significant economic reason. First off, it allows us to continue gaining exposure for our software. Software that is updated gets mentioned in the various webzines and elsewhere. And it's a lot less expensive to do that than to write an entirely new product. Second, it keeps the product
"Fresh" in users mind. Just as we often will pass by a perfectly good game because it's "too old", other types of software are dealt with that way too.
But when you update it, it again becomes "new", especially if the new version has significant new features instead of just bug fixes.
This is how the non-game software development community works (outside a handful of mega software companies and even they regularly release updates and even video card makers have discovered how well this sytem works).
Which brings us back to this on GalCiv. While thanks to the popularity of things like Object Desktop and WindowBlinds Stardock can compete with AAA games in budget to a degree, it can't compete with them in marketing and distribution or clout. To the typical game magazine or even game player, we're "star duck?" There's no way to really change that either. It's not a
conspiracy, it's just the unfortunate thing about the PC game industry that one has to deal with. But we can compete in the sense that we can work harder and longer. We can keep adding features to the game after release.
When someone on GalCiv.com comes up with a good idea, we can say "Not in 1.0 but let's try to get that into GalCiv 1.1!"
>
> Other than continued fiddling with the balancing, I'm not sure what
> you could "update" in a 4x to keep the game fresh. A nice customizable
> editor would be nice, but then you're relying more on a user community
> to update content than stardock staff.
Ah but there are so many features that can be added. Remember GalCiv on OS/2? The governrors feature showed up in one of the free updates. And since GalCiv is being designed with after-release development in mind, the feature set has been designed to handle that. A couple examples:
a) United Planets Issues.
There are .issue files that come with the game. These can be created by players. Have you ever heard of teh game Twilight Imperium? Basically, various "issues" get raised every X game turns that the civilizations vote
on. We've brain stormed up about 60 to 70 different issues already. Those 60 to 70 issues could be turned into 500 to 600 derivatives (i.e. the infamous "Tax trade routes by 10% with the money going to the race with the fewest planets" coudl be turned into a dozen different "Take money from A, B, and C, and give it to D." where players would have to weigh the harm from
themselves versus the harm to their opponents). You can imagine how many different issues could be coded in as users start thinking of them. This would have to be done after release.
Anomolies.
In the GalCiv directory there are files called .anomoly (except spelled correctly!). Basically, floating in the galaxy are dozens if not hundreds of these things that can do everything from give the player some money to give them weapons to alter the game in some way (open a dimension portal in which a fleet of evil trapped ships escape to wreak havoc). The more different ones there are, the richer the game.
c) Events.
Same as B but randomly rolled at different times. The more there are, the mroe difference between the, the richer the game experience is.
So the plan is to fit as many as we can in before release and keep making more after release and release them as packs that are free. Players benefit
becuase their ideas can get into the game and they get free new stuff. We benefit because it allows us to get more word of mouth on it and help build
a community of players.
Here's a specific example - fleets. From the old OS/2 days, I've always been a bit ambivalent about "fleets" of ships. But one idea that came up a
few weeks ago was to create a special unit called a "Flag ship". If you build this ship, you can then have other ships merge with it as independent
ships. THen when they battle, they battle in a way similar to HOMM. This won't be in 1.0, but maybe in 1.2 or 1.3. You get the idea.
And this is just the tip of the ice berg. Other examples woudl include "Heroes" (heroes you find who give bonuses to near by ships), a political
cabinet (GalCiv has political parties, we'd like to have it where when you become a Star Democracy you pick a cabinet of individuals who have their own
strengths and weaknesses and have sets of events tied around them - ever read the stories on John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin? Brilliant but flawed men, imagine the types of things you could do with fictional characters - help you in immsense ways but have random negative events tied to it. As a side note, anyone who's ever played the
Champions role playing system like Fantasy Hero knows about creating characters with "weaknesses" in order to get extra player points, same thing here).
So the idea is you keep adding this stuff over time for free. The key is to design the game to be able to be expanded in this way (otherwise you'd have a programming mess eventually).
>
> Again, good luck and all. I've long looked for a 4x with support
> behind it. You've already got my drengin money, but I'm not
> sure how many like me are out there.
Thanks. It will take time. A lot of time. Especially if we don't get a retail publisher. It could all bomb, of course. The game industry is a very different thing. And one doesn't become a game developer for money, they do it (or should) do it because they really really like games.
Of course, ironically, WindowBlinds was turned down by every publisher we sent it to. It has nearly 6 million users today and is now in the top 25 most popular downloads from Download.com of all time. But it didn't do well at first. It took a long time of free updates to build that momentum bit by bit.
Brad
--
Brad Wardell
Stardock - http://www.stardock.com
GalCiv - www.galciv.com
>David Short wrote:
> > "Brad" Wrote:
> > Aferall, who here has heard of a really good game but didn't buy it because
> > it was "too old" (where too old could be merely 2 months since release)?
> > I know I have, I don't know why but I've done it.
>
> On the other hand I've taken to not buying a game because it's too fresh.
> I'll wait for a lower price point and a patch or two or perhaps even the
> gold version before buying in many cases. Of course, there are exceptions.
>
> >But when games are continually updated and I read about those updates, it
keeps them fresh.
>
> ....Boy I'm just not sold on this. Good luck and all, but most updates
have
> been thinly veiled attempts to extort more cash from consumers in the form
> of expansion packs and (with all respect to Richard and Aaron) Gold
> versions of dubious value. I don't mean to be too harsh with the rhetoric,
> but publishers have educated me as a consumer to not rush out and buy
> games when they first appear on store shelves, because the publisher has
> a better game at a lower price waiting 6 months down the line.
Ah David, I'm not talking about expansion packs. Have we all been so abused by game publishers that we forget how much the rest of the industry works? We're talking free, extended feature packed updates to games after release.
When Stardock released WindowBlinds 3.0 in November, we didn't look at that as the end of its development. In January we released WindowBlinds 3.1, in March we'll be releasing WindowBlinds 3.2, in May 3.3 and so on. And these aren't "patches" that fix bugs, they had significant features to the product and they are free.
The user just goes to http://www.stardock.com/support, types in their email address and it'll email them a link to all the latest updates of our software. Only users who have purchased software show up in it.
We don't release these updates for free purely out of being nice guys. There is a significant economic reason. First off, it allows us to continue gaining exposure for our software. Software that is updated gets mentioned in the various webzines and elsewhere. And it's a lot less expensive to do that than to write an entirely new product. Second, it keeps the product
"Fresh" in users mind. Just as we often will pass by a perfectly good game because it's "too old", other types of software are dealt with that way too.
But when you update it, it again becomes "new", especially if the new version has significant new features instead of just bug fixes.
This is how the non-game software development community works (outside a handful of mega software companies and even they regularly release updates and even video card makers have discovered how well this sytem works).
Which brings us back to this on GalCiv. While thanks to the popularity of things like Object Desktop and WindowBlinds Stardock can compete with AAA games in budget to a degree, it can't compete with them in marketing and distribution or clout. To the typical game magazine or even game player, we're "star duck?" There's no way to really change that either. It's not a
conspiracy, it's just the unfortunate thing about the PC game industry that one has to deal with. But we can compete in the sense that we can work harder and longer. We can keep adding features to the game after release.
When someone on GalCiv.com comes up with a good idea, we can say "Not in 1.0 but let's try to get that into GalCiv 1.1!"
>
> Other than continued fiddling with the balancing, I'm not sure what
> you could "update" in a 4x to keep the game fresh. A nice customizable
> editor would be nice, but then you're relying more on a user community
> to update content than stardock staff.
Ah but there are so many features that can be added. Remember GalCiv on OS/2? The governrors feature showed up in one of the free updates. And since GalCiv is being designed with after-release development in mind, the feature set has been designed to handle that. A couple examples:
a) United Planets Issues.
There are .issue files that come with the game. These can be created by players. Have you ever heard of teh game Twilight Imperium? Basically, various "issues" get raised every X game turns that the civilizations vote
on. We've brain stormed up about 60 to 70 different issues already. Those 60 to 70 issues could be turned into 500 to 600 derivatives (i.e. the infamous "Tax trade routes by 10% with the money going to the race with the fewest planets" coudl be turned into a dozen different "Take money from A, B, and C, and give it to D." where players would have to weigh the harm from
themselves versus the harm to their opponents). You can imagine how many different issues could be coded in as users start thinking of them. This would have to be done after release.
Anomolies.In the GalCiv directory there are files called .anomoly (except spelled correctly!). Basically, floating in the galaxy are dozens if not hundreds of these things that can do everything from give the player some money to give them weapons to alter the game in some way (open a dimension portal in which a fleet of evil trapped ships escape to wreak havoc). The more different ones there are, the richer the game.
c) Events.
Same as B but randomly rolled at different times. The more there are, the mroe difference between the, the richer the game experience is.
So the plan is to fit as many as we can in before release and keep making more after release and release them as packs that are free. Players benefit
becuase their ideas can get into the game and they get free new stuff. We benefit because it allows us to get more word of mouth on it and help build
a community of players.
Here's a specific example - fleets. From the old OS/2 days, I've always been a bit ambivalent about "fleets" of ships. But one idea that came up a
few weeks ago was to create a special unit called a "Flag ship". If you build this ship, you can then have other ships merge with it as independent
ships. THen when they battle, they battle in a way similar to HOMM. This won't be in 1.0, but maybe in 1.2 or 1.3. You get the idea.
And this is just the tip of the ice berg. Other examples woudl include "Heroes" (heroes you find who give bonuses to near by ships), a political
cabinet (GalCiv has political parties, we'd like to have it where when you become a Star Democracy you pick a cabinet of individuals who have their own
strengths and weaknesses and have sets of events tied around them - ever read the stories on John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin? Brilliant but flawed men, imagine the types of things you could do with fictional characters - help you in immsense ways but have random negative events tied to it. As a side note, anyone who's ever played the
Champions role playing system like Fantasy Hero knows about creating characters with "weaknesses" in order to get extra player points, same thing here).
So the idea is you keep adding this stuff over time for free. The key is to design the game to be able to be expanded in this way (otherwise you'd have a programming mess eventually).
>
> Again, good luck and all. I've long looked for a 4x with support
> behind it. You've already got my drengin money, but I'm not
> sure how many like me are out there.
Thanks. It will take time. A lot of time. Especially if we don't get a retail publisher. It could all bomb, of course. The game industry is a very different thing. And one doesn't become a game developer for money, they do it (or should) do it because they really really like games.
Of course, ironically, WindowBlinds was turned down by every publisher we sent it to. It has nearly 6 million users today and is now in the top 25 most popular downloads from Download.com of all time. But it didn't do well at first. It took a long time of free updates to build that momentum bit by bit.
Brad
--
Brad Wardell
Stardock - http://www.stardock.com
GalCiv - www.galciv.com
