Discuss the massively-multiplayer home defense game.
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1. Do you have a single example of a game that absolutely required a healthy multiplayer community to be playable, that didn't have it's playerbase increased during a sale period? Awesomenauts has had it's player numbers dip down quite a few times, but each sale on Steam or the Humble store always draws in a decent new batch to keep the community alive.
2. You are the consumer. He is the merchant. He sold you a product, it's not up to you to market the product for him or keep it from dying a premature death. You have every right to expect him to solve it for you since you paid money for it. The 'No Sales Ever' thing is an experiment on his part, at your expense, since if the game fails as a result of that it hurts you. If this were a singleplayer game, the only person it would hurt is himself. But since you have a vested interest in keeping your product playable, you actually have to market his game for him just to have new people to play with due to his experiment. Hrm.
Well... it would be fine to be morally principled about that if your game was a single player game, where the player's experience didn't outright require participation from other people.
But you made a multiplayer game, one that is dependant on either a maintaining of current players or a slow but steady / periodic large influx of players, via planned sale periods. Applying your 'No sales, ever' rule to a game like this seems like it does the exact opposite of the intended effect. You wanted to protect your players to ensure they don't feel like they've wasted their money in buying something at $16 when it's $5 for someone else later down the line. But all you're actually doing is effectively ensuring they aren't getting the full worth of their purchase price that they could have had, aren't you?
Without a steady flow / explosion of players from time to time, the amount of time and fun they could have had with your game dries up as older players leave and no new ones take their place at an even ratio.
Or am I wrong in this? People playing the game, has the game been growing instead of shrinking?
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