Sale?

thoth · 2014-06-10 23:40:43

I know this is a touchy subject, given Jason has spoken so publicly on this concept.

However, I for one would like an injection of new players. And I'm sure Jason would not mind an injection in his wallet as he creates the next game which we'll all spend money on. In that case I move that we as a community vote on such a matter and then let our benevolent dictator see our votes and do as he pleases.

That being said, who would like to have new blood in this game?

You might post here with an 'yay', or a 'nay'.

AMWhy · 2014-06-11 06:38:08

Yay. I doubt it will make a difference though...

walter-white · 2014-06-11 06:54:35

Most of the active players have already spoken out that they would like to see a sale of this game to entice new player, however Jason has made his point clear and does not seem to be changing his mind on the subject, which is really disappointing as it is the demand of the play base. I cant see myself buying another of his game as although fun, i want a creator who is open to suggestion to increase player happiness and keep the game alive for a little longer.

mala · 2014-06-11 07:18:22

i don't think this is gonna change anything but...

i'm ok with sales, promotions or whatever it takes to give this game a new life

thoth · 2014-06-11 09:43:53

And I certainly think Jason makes a good point about how people tend to buy games they don't even play. I am totally one of those people who collects games (mostly on sale), I buy the humble bundle weekly, I am constantly buying anything in steam on sale that works in ***linux***. Despite owning over 200 games now in my steam account, I constantly want to come back and play this simple game. Perhaps it's time for another community run server? I have some resources I might be able to dedicate to this. Any interest?

Pohaku · 2014-06-11 10:08:01

It is Jason's intention that this game die a natural death. It's plainly obvious to anyone that unless new players come in, it will be dead in a few weeks. It is also obvious that the only way to get an influx of new players is to make it pocket-money price and run a Steam sale. Jason knows this already, but hasn't so far responded to any suggestion that he do so.

He's either letting it die because that's what he wants to happen (it's as much an 'art piece' as a game I guess), or he is refusing to change his mind about something he has already said publicly. Either way, he's putting his own principles above the enjoyment of people who've paid him to play his games, which is why I too wll not be buying another of his.

cullman · 2014-06-11 13:30:35

I dunno....he's given us the source code restriction free. Anyone could run their own server if they wanted. How is a sale going to be better than free. He intentionally has made a very hard game without sales. I hope my version will get people excited about it again. I will do marketing and make it much cheaper and/or free - so hopefully that will help.

Pohaku · 2014-06-11 14:11:38

TCD is the kind of game that you don't know you're gonna love until you play it. If a hundred people play it, then maybe ten will love it. If it costs £3 then several hundred people will play it, because £3 is less than the cost of a beer.

At £12, it's too much to get that market of players who will spend a few quid on a game just to see if they like it, but who will only spend over £10 on something they are pretty damn sure they will play.

I hope yours takes off too, cullman.

cullman · 2014-06-11 14:19:17

Pohaku wrote:

TCD is the kind of game that you don't know you're gonna love until you play it. If a hundred people play it, then maybe ten will love it. If it costs £3 then several hundred people will play it, because £3 is less than the cost of a beer.
At £12, it's too much to get that market of players who will spend a few quid on a game just to see if they like it, but who will only spend over £10 on something they are pretty damn sure they will play.
I hope yours takes off too, cullman.

I dunno, I agree with Jason's original sentiment, which is this game takes like 10 hours to even understand the basics - so getting a bunch of people to pay $3 to try to play for 2 hours and give up, does nothing for the game or his reputation. To me (and most people), I think spending 10 hours before I know I will like a game is way more expensive than $10 or euros or whatever. That's why I am also thinking it needs to have a easier, pseudo-tutorial start so people can get a feel early on what it's like to have some success without the crushing defeat at the hands of experts over and over until you get the hang of things.

Last edited by cullman (2014-06-11 14:19:43)

mala · 2014-06-11 20:16:08

cullman wrote:

Pohaku wrote:
TCD is the kind of game that you don't know you're gonna love until you play it. If a hundred people play it, then maybe ten will love it. If it costs £3 then several hundred people will play it, because £3 is less than the cost of a beer.
At £12, it's too much to get that market of players who will spend a few quid on a game just to see if they like it, but who will only spend over £10 on something they are pretty damn sure they will play.
I hope yours takes off too, cullman.
I dunno, I agree with Jason's original sentiment, which is this game takes like 10 hours to even understand the basics - so getting a bunch of people to pay $3 to try to play for 2 hours and give up, does nothing for the game or his reputation. To me (and most people), I think spending 10 hours before I know I will like a game is way more expensive than $10 or euros or whatever. That's why I am also thinking it needs to have a easier, pseudo-tutorial start so people can get a feel early on what it's like to have some success without the crushing defeat at the hands of experts over and over until you get the hang of things.

we all learned the game "the hard way" and that's one of the reasons why we are still here, we were looking for something new, frustrating and disturbing and we've found it.

Part of the success/early death of the game is due to it's difficulty, and there's plenty of peoples out there looking for something really challenging, the only problems is that they don't even know this game exist.

If not a sale, how about plain and simple advertising?

thoth · 2014-06-11 21:04:18

I'm with mala here, plain old advertising would certainly do the trick.

And to Pokahu, yes, but the occasional gamer who happens to like looking through all our houses to see if one is easily defeatable is exactly what this game needs. That is the first M in MMO, which is Massive. At this point it's an asynchronous multiplayer game among how many people?

Off-topic and On-topic all at the same time --> maybe there should be a stats page detailing some cool stats (i.e. how many houses were robbed (today, week, month), deaths (day, week, month), longest walks (perhaps with animation showing the longest breakin [with death|without]))

Killer Mosquito · 2014-06-12 17:45:58

Maybe I'm wrong about this... but I read a lot before I bought castle doctrine. I know that doesn't make me an expert on this game or Jason Rohrer. But, Jason seems almost more like an artist than a true game designer with his mentality. Video games just happens to be his medium. It seems like, when he created this game, he never was in it for the longevity and replay value. He wanted to create an experience with the perma-death and risk vs. reward aspect of the game. I mean absolutely no ill-will with this statement... but it doesn't surprise me to see that Jason isn't making an effort to increase sales. The way I see things, this piece of art is finished, and it's time to move to the next project.

He set out to create an experience, and I'd say it was a pretty useful exercise. Between the arguments about fair vs. not fair with clocks, trying to define what cheating was, and the all-out paranoia with dual accounts... it was pretty amazing what this game was able to invoke in people. Once again, absolutely no finger-point or blame here, just making an observation.

As much as I hate to admit it, it seems like this game is slowly on it's way out. There just aren't that many people that play it anymore. I wasn't expecting to spend 15$ on a game I'd only be able to play for a few months... but I'd be lying if I said I didn't get my money's worth of enjoyment out of the game.

That's just my perspective on things, as ignorant as it may be.

thoth · 2014-06-12 17:51:38

Ya, I have no hard feelings toward Jason at all, hats off to him as an artist.

But a sale or two would be a nice way to inject money in his wallet without over inflating the population to be unmanageable.

For example, lowering the price to 99 cents would present a massive influx of people meaning Jason would spend more time 'admining' this old game to make it worth it. But a few sales would influx some new users every now and then and put hard cash in his pocket, to whom I salute again! And make this game still fun for his old user base, without making it unmanageable for him at the same time.

jordi13 · 2014-06-13 08:22:11

Hello all, I would be OK with a sale but I also agree with other people's comments here.
Would a sale just be a re-play of what we've seen so far? (I bought it on the Steam sale) Have loads of people play, realise it is really hard and tough, then leave after a few days/weeks/months? He made it open source after all.
I love this game, I even bought another copy to give to my friends and family to try, which they never did!:(
I will keep playing as long as there is two of us.

thoth · 2014-06-13 08:47:34

ya on the open source thing, I'm kind of thinking we should get a community server going again. Didn't someone have it working so that you could load a house from castledraft?

iceman · 2014-06-14 11:43:41

thoth wrote:

ya on the open source thing, I'm kind of thinking we should get a community server going again. Didn't someone have it working so that you could load a house from castledraft?

Yeah, I actually finished that a week ago. If someone starts a community server, I can set up the game for that server and release it.

thoth · 2014-06-15 00:24:41

I can put up a server, I happen to work with a webhosting company, and I also happen to have 5 static IP addresses at my house. Anyone know what kind of bandwidth is necessary? I imagine most of the processing load is all the hits on the MySQL databbase.

FreeLove · 2014-06-15 01:16:31

Killer Mosquito wrote:

As much as I hate to admit it, it seems like this game is slowly on it's way out. There just aren't that many people that play it anymore. I wasn't expecting to spend 15$ on a game I'd only be able to play for a few months... but I'd be lying if I said I didn't get my money's worth of enjoyment out of the game.

For what it's worth, I concur with this statement.

Also, as an ex-lover of another game abandoned by its developers, I am, at best, cautiously optimistic about the odds of long-term survival. Honestly, how many video games are eternal? Video game consoles don't even last very long. Cullman, and anyone thinking about resurrecting this game has to answer the question: What are you hoping to accomplish? Six more months of solid TCD gameplay? 100,000 new gamers (with what lifespan? all gamers move on)? Constantly maintained existence?

(don't get me wrong, I'm very supportive of any effort anyone makes to bring more excellent games like this into the world, I'm just not expecting more than maybe a few months of traffic and then an exponentially increasing amount of effort as time goes on)

Some ideas about answers to the above question:

Tactics Arena
www.tacticsarena.com

This game is SO dead... and yet, log on to its free-to-play server (running since 2006), and you'll be able to find a live game against someone at (almost) any time of day. I first found this game through advertising, and I suspect whoever maintains the site/server has long since stopped actively promoting this game. The last announcement post was from, like, 2009? ...and yet, it's still going.

Subspace / Continuum
http://www.getcontinuum.com/

This is a good example of a game being hefted onto the shoulders of a few rabidly-devoted fans/players. I vaguely remember when this game came out on a CD, and was played across 56K modems (in the best-case), and I kept tabs on the "community" several years after it was played on practically a ghost server, with a player population dwindling down to less than twenty. Since then, it created the site, linked above, intended as a catch-all to help any new player get up to speed and get in the game, and there are tutorials everywhere. I think the game was re-coded from the ground up, and was basically saved by a handful of devoted programmers that put a colossal amount of effort into it over several years (basically, until some people finally came along and stepped into important roles to maintain the damn thing). However the case may be, it's a very simple game that's still alive.

cullman · 2014-06-15 15:07:46

FreeLove wrote:

Cullman, and anyone thinking about resurrecting this game has to answer the question: What are you hoping to accomplish? Six more months of solid TCD gameplay? 100,000 new gamers (with what lifespan? all gamers move on)? Constantly maintained existence?

I've illustrated my plan on a bunch of other threads. I have a few things I am going to do : Make it work on mobile. Make it easier in the beginning. Make it cheaper. And market it better.

I am hoping to have it building on the iPhone in the next week or two, we are pretty close already.

iceman · 2014-06-15 15:13:37

I think he's asking what you will consider to be success, not what you're trying to do. Will you be happy if a thousand people buy it? If ten thousand buy it, but nobody's playing after a week? Etc.

cullman · 2014-06-15 15:28:28

My definition of success would be having a long term continuing game that doesn't cost me a fortune to run. The above are the steps I hope will get me there. If it works great, if it doesn't - it doesn't.

thoth · 2014-06-15 19:54:41

well after doing some back reading on iceman and cullman, sounds like you guys are going strong. I will definitely belly up a server if anyone wants to start beta testing, sounds like iceman's is ready now? Cullman, if yours is ready I'd be happy to host for you as well.

mala · 2014-06-15 20:04:50

cullman wrote:

I am hoping to have it building on the iPhone in the next week or two, we are pretty close already.

what what what...?

seriously?

iceman · 2014-06-17 17:07:48

thoth wrote:

well after doing some back reading on iceman and cullman, sounds like you guys are going strong. I will definitely belly up a server if anyone wants to start beta testing, sounds like iceman's is ready now? Cullman, if yours is ready I'd be happy to host for you as well.

Yeah, mine was just a simple client change, so you can set up a normal server, just give me the reflector URL/any passwords, and I can give you the link for the download. It's not flawless, but it's definitely functional.

thoth · 2014-06-17 17:35:43

I know Cullman is closing his source, and I can respect where he's going with that. But I kind of want an open to carry off onto github, so I'm forking MrPhils:

https://github.com/Thalhalla/CastleDoctrine

let me know if anyone wants commit access inside that group. And any chance Iceman you might share your changes with us?

Last edited by thoth (2014-06-17 17:35:59)

The Castle Doctrine Forums

#1 2014-06-10 23:40:43

Sale?

#2 2014-06-11 06:38:08

Re: Sale?

#3 2014-06-11 06:54:35

Re: Sale?

#4 2014-06-11 07:18:22

Re: Sale?

#5 2014-06-11 09:43:53

Re: Sale?

#6 2014-06-11 10:08:01

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#7 2014-06-11 13:30:35

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#8 2014-06-11 14:11:38

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#9 2014-06-11 14:19:17

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#10 2014-06-11 20:16:08

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#11 2014-06-11 21:04:18

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#12 2014-06-12 17:45:58

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#13 2014-06-12 17:51:38

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#14 2014-06-13 08:22:11

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#15 2014-06-13 08:47:34

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#16 2014-06-14 11:43:41

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#17 2014-06-15 00:24:41

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#18 2014-06-15 01:16:31

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#19 2014-06-15 15:07:46

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#20 2014-06-15 15:13:37

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#21 2014-06-15 15:28:28

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#22 2014-06-15 19:54:41

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#23 2014-06-15 20:04:50

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#24 2014-06-17 17:07:48

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