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Xendran -> RE: =AE= AQ3D KickStarter is live! (11/30/2015 4:46:22)
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quote:
Small companies don't have an option beside making their games hardcore P2W,
On the contrary, this is usually the reason that small companies stay small. They fall into the quick-cash trap of P2W but tend to not retain any players other than whales after a period of time has passed.
Dedicated players, often affected by sunk-cost fallacy, will continue to dump hundreds and thousands of dollars into the game regardless of the state it's in (often hoping that it will "get better"). With these players being pretty much all that's left, it causes the game to then rely on these players and this business model to stay alive, but without actually gaining new players, often losing the majority of the old ones. This leads into a vicious trap, where you rely on whales to survive, but in order to go from that to truly prospering you have to make changes that will directly remove every advantage these players paid for, causing most them to either leave, or continue playing but not pay any more. This basically means that you're stuck with just scraping by, or rebuilding from the ground up and suffering losses from an unprofitable product for an unpredictable amount of time. This rebuilding is also more difficult than building a brand-new player base, because of the name of said game now being associated with P2W and whaling. Not to sound pessimistic, but when you think about the places that are most likely to spread a game around by word of mouth (Reddit, Youtube, Twitch), all of those places are very much against the microtransaction (and often macrotransaction) style used by AE. This puts them in a really difficult situation.
Epicduel could become a totally legitimate PvP game that has depth, strategy, and variety, but actually convincing new and old players that this is the case is going to be another thing entirely. Convincing them that P2W won't be implemented is then another layer on top of that, and if it is then added in after the fact you can expect amounts of backlash that cannot be recovered from, especially given that this is well beyond a second chance (And would be directly contradicting any previous claims they may have decided to make).
The shining paragon of the opposite of this is Path of Exile, who started out as a small company working out of their parent's garage, used initial investment to get their prototype made, and then made their future money through an MTX system that is explicitly not P2W. They have now upgraded offices, massively expanded their staff, and are releasing their 4th expansion, which is separate from the 3rd and 4th entire acts which were also added, as well as new challenge leagues every couple of months.
When these guys started, they were nowhere near the size of AE. Good business ethics, extreme emphasis on direct communication with the players, and some of the fastest customer support in the industry (even back when they basically didn't even have a real support department), and they skyrocketed from basically nothing into a very profitable company with only 1 game released, and no P2W. A good part of this system being successful is definitely the very large amount of personal, direct communication with players. It feels like you are supporting a group of developers, rather than feeding money into the corporation-machine. Now, i'm not necessarily saying that this was some genius decision that they knew was going to be what people in 2015 wanted. In fact, in interviews they said they basically had no idea how it would turn out, and were completely blown away by the amount of people who actually purchased supporter packs on their release. Now that the game has been around for almost 4 years though, it's a good case study of how their MTX system works. And it works.
Marketing and business is tricky stuff.
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On the subject of 2d vs 3d: 3d is immensely more manpower dependent than 2d. I cannot stress how much of an obscenely impassable roadblock not having enough manpower for a 3D title truly is, unless you want it to straight up look like unpolished trash with a severe lack of visual flair.
With 2d, you can spend not as much time on it, and end up with a more unique product. With EpicDuel the unfortunate issue is that it's simply got no innovation and is based on a few archaic mechanics that if modified could massively change up the game. The removal of passives was a regression that could have gone the other day and sparked new life into the game, offering drastically different effects to builds and modifying skills so that even with only 12 skills per class, you could use those skills in different ways based on your passive loadout.
I'm currently working on a 2d PvP game that may be somewhat reminiscent of EpicDuel in ways, and one of the ways we've ramped up the way the combat is interesting is by doing things like passive skills that define your build, rather than builds that define what passives you pick. More types of damage, more status effects, more things that can happen to you or you can make happen to your opponent. This is combined with a front row/back row system and an Action Point system which allows manipulation of position (including things like taking damage if you get moved back while already in the back row, because you physically slam into the barrier), and allows you to take multiple actions per turn.
Interesting things to kick it up a notch is exactly what EpicDuel needs. Right now there's nothing to play around, nothing to think about. No guessing, no logic work, just find a routine and stick with it.
Showing builds is also a fairly damaging thing, because it means bad and good matchups are immediately obvious, and you don't have to play around things with uncertainty because you can straight up see their skill tree. This is literally the same as being able to see your opponents entire hand and deck in Hearthstone.
Think about Hearthstone for a bit in this regard. There's always that rush when you're fighting something like a warlock for example (Unless playing a deck that has good matchups vs both warlock decks of course). Pacing out that early game and testing to see if it's handlock or zoo. Playing around whether they're acting like they have molten giants, sunfury, or argus in their hand, etc.
This kind of counterplay and thinking about possibilities that may or may not even exist is what keeps your mind going in hearthstone even when it's not your turn. There's more to it than just looking at the board and responding to it, you have to respond to what they're trying to do with their board, play around what they likely have in their hand based on that, etc.
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