Executive summary / TLDR: We're good -- you're good!
Peeps wrote:Add more cosmetics
Hats and sketches both sell very little, by orders of magnitude less than subscriptions and verifications, and nothing we've seen indicates that cosmetics is a viable alternative. What cosmetics do guarantee, however, is a ton of work not only in producing, but in maintaining them, their resources, their account statuses with buying players, &c. We have a fair bit of work cut out for us with the hats alone, and I don't mind that, as I kind of enjoy making the odd hat, and whatnot, but it's not something we can use to drive development. We've sold 21 units of the Campaign cap, for example, and that's one of the better ones we've added.
Now, perhaps, it is true that fancy wardrobes or tattoos, or whatever -- some cosmetic option that we haven't tried -- would really be the shit, and would sell a ton, but the problem is that I have zero indication that they would, and I have no leads in that direction. Every cosmetic approach we've tried -- both here and in Salem -- have more or less flopped. What people have been consistently willing to pay for are, dislike it though I may, tangible advantages.
Now, a lot of you have said, "Well, just try it", but that's easier said than done. Every time we try out some new means of monetization we create future dependencies that we will have to honor to one extent or another. If we sell tattoos, sell five units of them, and then decide that they weren't all that, then we still have five customers whose purchases we have to honor in one way or another. Not saying that we couldn't compensate them, or whatnot, but it has to be handled one way or another, and certainly carries a cost in both maintenance and implementation.
No one would be happier than I if we could live off of selling hats and colorful balloons, but I have to call that a pipe-dream.
Pay2win. Try some other payment model.
Fun fact: Salem, which uses "microtransactions" to sell ingame stuff on a per-item basis, outsells or breaks about even with Haven, with less than a third of Haven's population.
We have chosen this model because we consider it less intrusive, and less pay2win. Perhaps we are wrong, and you'd rather see a more dedicated item shop instead?
It could certainly be argued that a problem with the present model is that it allows too few options for "whales" to sink lots of money into the game, to perhaps compensate for a large base of players not using the shop at all.
I realize fully that there is a very real sense in which a shop never adds anything to any game. It's there only because it has the hope of adding development time to the game, and not because anyone particularly likes it. I do not enjoy fighting over shekels, but only death is truly a respite from that.
Lower the price
We have no indication that lower prices lead to significantly boosted sales. Our statistics speak in the opposite direction, in fact, suggesting that the biggest hurdle is not price, but using the store at all. The $5 hats have, for example, as a general rule pulled in about half of what the $10 hats have, and we did not see much of a boost in sales when we went from $10 subs to $7 either. We can certainly lower the price, that's easy, but raising it is extremely difficult. Given the nature of inflation -- $7 loses purchasing power every year -- color me skeptical.
Atamzsiktrop wrote:I hope it's not another game because Haven is at its best right now and if you swap to some shitty Salem-like abomination you must be braindead, honestly.
I agree that Haven is the best it's ever been, and there are zero plans for other MMOs, at the very least. If we can't make this idea reasonably profitable with three attempts, over ten years, we're certainly not going to try it again from scratch.
(Developing neatly contained single-player games, limited in scope, and with clear end- and cutoff-points, however, feels appealing from time to time. One of the downsides of MMOs is all the maintenance that comes with them. We spend a fair amount of time just fixing exploits, account problems, and shit that, were this a single player game, wouldn't matter in the slightest, or would only break the game for the person using them. We also -- and this is perhaps one of our bigger failings -- have a great deal of responsibility in actually maintaining the game world(s) -- deciding when to start new games, and such -- and actually managing the fundamentals of how the game is played. In a single player game that is entirely at the player's discretion. I'm often quite the jelly of people who build single player games, and all the whatnot they get away with that would never fly in an MMO environment.)
Barring that we could always get real jobs. The world certainly doesn't owe us a living.
Giving up
No one is really considering a hard halt to development, so I don't think we're giving up. On the contrary we are still making new plans for future development. I want to have both grit and perseverance -- I'm pretty sure the forums, and the game, will still be here ten years from now -- but I also want to have reasonable expectations, and engage in productive work. We have spent ten years on this idea in total, and three-ish years on this particular incarnation of Haven. The project can hardly be said to be in the green -- we worked on it for two years without seeing a centavo -- so if you want to be crass about it, we're arguably out money on it as well. If you want to be really crass about it, we spent three years building the first incarnation of Haven entirely for free, and there are opportunity costs as well. At some point we have to take some sort of stock of how we spend our time, and scale our efforts to what the game actually motivates. Do note that I don't think that number is zero.
We are blessed and fortunate to have been so well received as we have been. I am in a fundamental sense very happy about what we have here, and hope to keep it going for years to come. Maintaining the server costs peanuts, so the running costs are very low, and the bottom line is that we like the game and enjoy working on it. I've played more in this world than any world previously, and the game has -- objectively -- never been better!
Bad updates
The project grows with each thing we add to it, and each update is, as a percentage of the total, smaller than the last. As I've stated in the OP, there is certainly a sense in which we ourselves feel the same way. A lot of the low hanging fruit has been picked, and the really impactful changes we'd like to spend time doing are bigger projects, and even they will probably seem small in comparison to the whole. We could spend the three odd months -- or whatever it would take -- working on object-controlled objects, but at the end of that we'd have, perhaps, a slightly more fun raft as the immediate, visible result, and I can only imagine the great feedback we'd get on that. Adding freeform building and bridges would then take additional time, and be projects in their own right. I believe there is plenty of room for the game to grow, develop, and become better -- there is no shortage of things to work on -- but, again, the low-hanging, fat fruits have to a large extent been picked. Almost by definition our returns on more development will grow more marginal, and that equation is hard to square with the economic realities. I'm not excluding that there are enormous break-throughs that could happen, at very low costs in development time, but I do not know of any such options. I do, for example, not see any single update that would increase interest in the game by an order of magnitude.
I'd love to spend time fleshing out the quest system with dialogue and deeper motivations for the quest-givers, but that's a month's work of development effort, with no guarantee of success, and I'm not sure it'd be a week before it was old news. I'd love to add real waterfalls and other "pixie-dust" things like footsteps or kicking up sand when the player walks across the beach. Seasons. More qualitative kingdom buffs. Fixing the barter stands finally. Go really deep on the siege system again. Adding wolves and pack animal-AI. &c&c.
I think the single biggest failing of the game is that it does not generate enough of an event stream for players to interact in and with. The idea has been that PvP, and other social interactions, would drive the game, but that hasn't worked as well as anyone would have liked it to, for various reasons. It works in the early game, until people hunker down behind walls which they are never incentivized to leave. (I might also add that when we do create content which players have to fight over, that hasn't been particularly well received either, as it's suddenly then not fair that not everyone can have everything, and blablabla). Perhaps that is an argument -- and some have made it -- to be more aggressive with world resets. That, however, reduces the incentives to really commit, or return, to presently running worlds, and also seems like feeding an addiction.
All that being said, I'd like to point out that we have delivered at least a couple of updates lately that have addressed some pretty big things. We've added the ability to travel with livestock, pack-racks, quests, kingdoms have certainly not decreased the amount of stuff happening in the game, ability to grow herbs, windmills, maps, tool belts, the new fighting system, &c&c. I stand by a lot of those updates and priorities, and I'm not sure anyone has suggested any well-defined, single things that would have been better uses of our time.
Not enough to motivate a world reset
We're going to try our best to make it interesting!
I agree with this, in the sense that the decision is not strictly and exclusively motivated by development reasons -- there are real issues we intend to fix with the map generation, mind you -- but it is nevertheless the single biggest, easiest and most impactful thing we can do for the game, and by our measurements, it needs a shakeup. World 9 has been one of the longer running worlds, and one legitimate purpose we have here is to see what kind of longer-term interest we can attract and maintain with a fresh world, running with all the stuff we've added over the odd year since the last reset. World 9 did a lot better than World 8, so I am certainly optimistic.
... and if you want to argue that our efforts over the past year won't make a difference, you are effectively telling us to go do something else, so I'd be careful with that.
A rare smiley. I'll end on that note.
Haven is a great and beautiful game, I am very proud of it, and I enjoy working on it, and I hope you all will continue to enjoy playing it! We are very grateful to everyone who has supported us in any capacity, ever, and hope only to continue to deliver whatever value you have found with us in the past.
We can't let
UrW beat us.
Happy New Year's!
by rainstol » Thu Dec 29, 2016 11:46 pm 
