Game Development: A Far Green Country

[McSnaipa]

i was really disappointed sir jorb after this morning i saw what this updated brought: not much for the p2p affair, but for the fact the free option si so damn limiting. It basically says "yo dood, subscribe" and i feel it's not really right, knowing the past of this game.

edit: also after i choose the gender and the name, where the heck am i supposed to go?

[An_Infinity_of_War]

Reasoning my ass.

The door out is right next to the logout button. Feel free to use it any time. : )

But really you might as well fuck off if you're going to be so unreasonable.

[Duane]

i was really disappointed sir jorb after this morning i saw what this updated brought: not much for the p2p affair, but for the fact the free option si so damn limiting. It basically says "yo dood, subscribe" and i feel it's not really right, knowing the past of this game

Everything is up in the air I guess, but yeah, this is how I feel too. I'd burn out 48 hours in 5-6 days if the servers were always up.

[Brás]

Sure. Our reasoning with it was basically that we

A) Didn't want to sell power ups, or even utility items, as we felt they risk distorting the ingame economy too much.
and

Don't you think limiting play time distorts it even more?

[*]Verifying the Account was intended to emulate a simple one-time payment for the game, if you play it casually. Perhaps the hours aren't enough to actually be that, but that was the intention.
[*] Supporting the Patch was intended as a mix between donations and cosmetic items, i.e. token hats bought for the very concrete reason of supporting our latest game development, and getting something minor in return.
[*] Subscription was intended to be precisely that. Paying a low price continuously for full access to the game, with the option of giving us more if you feel like it. (And I'd also like to point out that a subscription for a year puts the price at $6/mo. Not ten, not fifteen. Six.).
[*]Buying Game time was intended as a way to perhaps give game time to others who can't or don't want to pay, or whatever, and basically then paying slightly more for what is effectively a subscription once added to your account, but with more flexibility in terms of who actually gets it.[/list]

Perhaps the numbers should be tweaked, perhaps the store layout can be improved, but the basic schema seemed and seems entirely fair to me, for which reason neither of us figured beforehand that it would be so much of an issue that it would completely overshadow the fact that we've spent two years working on the game, and that said game now looks, sounds, and feels beautiful.

We figured that the game itself would be the big thing here, and that's also where we've spent most of our energies.

Putting like that makes more sense, it's a shame the reasoning only became clear after the shitstorm - see this post:

viewtopic.php?f=39&t=39686&p=530756&hilit=cheated#p530756

Although I still dislike the subscription idea, if the numbers were tweaked I could buy it (as an idea, as for actually buying the subscription it won't happen since $1 is almost R$4 right now). Increasing a bit the play time of free accounts (and thus of the $15 plan thingy too) seems like a good idea. I have no idea what your costs are as to make any suggestions on the subscription prices, and although $6/mo doesn't seem much, if you think about how long people have been playing haven it becomes quite a big price for a game as years of subscription go by. Perhaps discounts for year-long subscriptions?

[chaosfire220]

As everyone in this thread stated, I think the reason the community took it so badly was just that you didn't announce anything prior to release.
All that was said was "we're thinking of a way to monetize the game, that doesn't fuck up everyone's experience". 24 minutes/day kind of fucks with it.
I believe a one-time purchase of $20-25 dollars would be fair, or a sub fee of $5 for people who don't want to commit the $20-25, as well as cosmetics on the side.

Until then I won't be paying the $10/month as that's a bit too much for the server's stability and whatnot, and yes, I know that if everyone subbed you could have better servers, but that's an investment you should've made from the get-go, stable servers are expected for something that costs money.
Another good form of monetization would be Patreon, I'm pretty sure you would have gotten far more in donations on it than you will doing these subs, or at least you would have, before this whole debacle.

[mattgravy]

Saying it like $6 a month sounds alot better, if i could of done it like $6 a month but for a year instead of the $72 payment at once (less I've got it wrong) then I would of played for 48 hours and snapped it up, guess I'm gonna have to wait till JSA comes through, being unemployed sucks -___-

[Necroliter]

I wasn`t going to dive into this shit-flow, but seems like Jorb is reading, so here are my small ideas.

1 - Right now game subscription is on the level of WoW (12Euro per month), and despite all my hype, the game itself is not. While i can understand monetization (never expected in in game like HnH, but ...) - it will be nice to make some adjustments to the pricing.
2 - Increase base play time to, maybe, 60h or even more. Else you will never get new players to fanbase, cause 12h is definitely not enough to realize how awesome HnH is, and people rarely pay for cat in a bag. (I will compare with WoW again here - they give 30 days of free trial)
3 - Free play time and verify play time are definitely not enough for game like HnH. Maybe it was intentional, so people who want to play it go and get subscription, but for me it looks more like trolling or bad joke. So either make it reasonable or confirm it`s not a realistic option for players.

I wish you success with your games, Jorbtar, but also i wish you don`t hit your small fanbase with the brick to the face. I played every world of HnH since W4 with my friend, but not sure i`ll be able to play HnH2 with this prices and without possibility to test new changes, etc (cause 12h and stuff).

[bmjclark]

I think this would of largely been avoided had it been announced a while ago. It just seemed really odd to not even see the shop acknowledged when the game went from a free to play game to a monthly sub game over the course of 8 hours. Honestly the activated account's numbers seemed off enough that i thought it was either a joke or just not ready to be implemented yet and just a placeholder for the future. That being said, i am glad to see the game being monetized, does this mean we'll get to see regular updates?

[jorb]

1 - Right now game subscription is on the level of WoW (12Euro per month)

That's not true, though. Subscription can, as stated, be had for $6/mo.

[jorb]

That being said, i am glad to see the game being monetized, does this mean we'll get to see regular updates?

Glad to hear it.

That's the idea. I have it in my head to try to do bi-weekly patches.