I want to buy Fallen London, and I’ll pay you a AAA retail price to do it.
Why can’t I pay you a lump sum to play your game how I see fit and enjoy the narrative on my terms?[li]
I love story games. I love Sunless Sea. I don’t love 20 turn increments.
As you advance from needing to start up and get going to being "found out" and noticed, I think your flagship product’s business model is starting to hold it back.
I want to pay you to enjoy your prose and imagination. But I don’t want to do it on a browser for 20 minutes at a time. In fact it’s so torturous to try to do so that myself and many others that are right in your target audience are unable to pay you for your product.
While I would love for this to be an option, I can’t see it happening.
Free to play games work by having relatively well-off regulars give money for perks and extra content while the majority of the players spend very little, or nothing at all.
The income is disproportionate - most of the money comes from a small handful of people, ‘whales’, who give far, far, more than the cost of a AAA title every year. If FB said: pay £60 and you get everything (or even £60 / year), then they would take a massive hit on their income - they’d lose the whales, and not get enough sales from everyone else to make the game cost-effective. It also removes incentive to continue to create new content. It’s just how these games work.
It would also devalue all the effort that people have put into the game up until now.
Don’t think of the game as a AAA title. Think of it as an MMO. Think monthly subscriptions, exceptional friend. Think of regular events, and difficult grinds, to keep people coming back. The opportunity deck and actions are built into the game from the top down, and cannot be removed from the game without killing it. edited by RandomWalker on 1/3/2015
Argh. My reply didn’t send.
I think, from my limited knowledge of storynexus, what you’re asking for is near impossible anyway. They’d have to completely rebuild how it works. I suppose they could do something like a sunless sea build, and use fallen London content, but I suspect it would take as long as creating a new game without the constraints of pre existing content. I’d rather they made another completely new game, or a boat load of new content, than worked on a delivery mechanism for stuff much of which I’ve already seen.
Which I suppose ties into my preference, as an old player I’m always going to care more about fresh content than a new wrapper… edited by babelfishwars on 1/3/2015
Always interesting to read about the business side of things and I am glad the company is doing well.
The Gift is lovely indeed. I wish it had more of an impact on the game. If that card remained a fixed storylet to generate MW (soul trade style). Or if it gave, say, ten time more MW (Aunt style). At this point I don’t really care about the Making Waves. But it does feel somewhat weightless.
One thing to consider, Fallen London is a place some of us live in. For years. We would not be able to do that if it was a novel.
that’s very interesting, thanks!
Looking forward to the new things of 2015! (and I want to reiterate that The Gift was a really great thing. At the end the writing is what makes the difference)
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Great post and all perfectly understandable! There’s one thing though:
I could’ve told you that ;-)
I think that is exactly your target audience with Fallen London: not typical "gamers" (whoever they are) but people who value the QUALITY of your writing above all else, and are willing to do the worst grinds imaginable just to unlock that next part of the STORY! It might not be the largest target audience in the world, but they are YOUR target audience because there is no other game like Fallen London (I’ve searched, believe me!).
So, giving EF more value would be exactly the right move: currently, there is hardly any incentive for those players (like me) who’ve been around for years and have played it all (sometimes repeatedly) to subscribe for more actions when, most of the year, there is not much to do with these actions (except grinding for Cider etc. which is not everyone’s cup of tea). But a guaranteed steady trickle of new content for EFs would, I think, persuade the larger group of those seasoned players who’ve already spent Fate in the past (and some of those who haven’t done so yet) to make their EF subscription more or less permanent.
I hope with all my heart that you’ll have the last laugh! edited by Rupho Schartenhauer on 1/3/2015
I agree about your comment on EFs… I am another long-term player that was never too attracted towards the exceptional friendship. Yes, it gives a couple of nice moments and a boost of 40 actions when you wake up in the morning, but it does not have a strong appeal, at least not enough to renew it every month - I prefer to support Failbetter by buying all the new contents when they appear.
This new idea could change my approach towards EFship indeed.
Completely agree. I recently let my EF subscription lapse for this reason, but will happily renew it if there will be steady, albeit even small amount of new content.
[color=#009900]re: the last laugh[/color]
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[color=#009900]The thing is, you know, those industry consultants are right. Content takes a lot of work and time to make, but also, you can’t just hire twenty writers and sell twenty times as much of it. It has to fit into what’s there already. It doesn’t scale, so we’ll never be rich, but like I say, safety first, profit last, and we’ve found our niche with you guys.[/color]
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[color=#009900]re the Gift and its impact[/color]
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[color=#009900]The Gift was encouraging because it got a rave response although the economic impact was minimal. Economic impact is always difficult. A small reward leaves some players disappointed, but a large reward overshadows the actual point of the story. With the Gift, we just did the very best job we could - and applied some extra QA, editing and review processes we’ve worked up - and hoped people would like it for the narrative more than the rewards (though it still has unique rewards, just not big economic effects). The clear response we’ve seen, and what I’m seeing again on this thread, is that people like that approach[/color]
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[color=#009900]re EFship and small amounts of monthly content[/color]
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[color=#009900]This is good to hear - thanks, folks! In the past it was basically impractical to provide a steady monthly stream of regular content, but a slightly larger team and a better process may now make that possible. You’ll have noticed that Fallen London has had a lot of updates over the last few months.[/color]
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[color=#009900]re big spenders - Random Walker’s point earlier -[/color]
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[color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]We do have our share of, ah, articularly exceptional friends, some of them legendary, but f[/color][color=#009900]or the record, we’re less big-spender-dependent (Adam and I loathe the term ‘whale’) than many free-to-play games - because our monetisation mechanisms are so much less aggressive. It is a consideration, but the bigger consideration is that even a modest amount adds up if a player sticks around for the long term. And we’re interested in the long term.[/color]
I’d be absolutely fine with extra content for Exceptional Friends. I pay roughly twenty dollars every couple of months for Exceptional Friendship and Nex to support the game; I’m certainly not going to say no to a little bit of extra stuff.
Speaking of which! Are there any plans to go ahead with the boxes of Extra Stuff you were talking about in that survey a while back?
[quote=RandomWalker]While I would love for this to be an option, I can’t see it happening.
Free to play games work by having relatively well-off regulars give money for perks and extra content while the majority of the players spend very little, or nothing at all.
The income is disproportionate - most of the money comes from a small handful of people, ‘whales’, who give far, far, more than the cost of a AAA title every year. If FB said: pay £60 and you get everything (or even £60 / year), then they would take a massive hit on their income - they’d lose the whales, and not get enough sales from everyone else to make the game cost-effective. It also removes incentive to continue to create new content. It’s just how these games work.
edited by RandomWalker on 1/3/2015[/quote]
[li]
This is an argument which leans on the presumption that the current business model must be the best one because FB isn’t bankrupt yet.
But one of the fundamental rules of business is to offer your product to its whole customer base. If there isn’t an offer there can’t be an exchange of goods.
The classic proof of this is Henry Ford. He sold his cars to his entire potential customer base by altering his business model so that they were built and priced so that everybody could afford them. His profit per machine went down but his gross profit went WAY up. His example is also not coincidentally that which killed class warfare populism in America. Ford proved that the pie to be shared between owner and worker is not static but rather can grow.
FB can grow their pie.
If I am willing to pay $30 up front vs another player who is willing to pay $150 over a period of two years but I represent 90% of the potential player base then $309 =$270 which is quite a bit more than 1$150=$150. Obviously the math gets even more lopsided when you factor in both time value of money and the fact that in reality substantially less than 10% of this game’s potential audience is shelling out.
MrChapeau, your business model relies on them rewriting their entire game to be feasible as a pay-to-own game. That would mean they’d have to do nothing but that for over a year. In the meantime, they’d go bankrupt.
So no, your model does not allow them to “grow the pie.”
You also presume that maximizing profits is their endgoal. Mr. Kennedy himself has stated that profit-seeking isn’t the company’s first priority. Their model works and suits their goals.
[quote=Snowskeeper]MrChapeau, your business model relies on them rewriting their entire game to be feasible as a pay-to-own game. That would mean they’d have to do nothing but that for over a year. In the meantime, they’d go bankrupt.
So no, your model does not allow them to "grow the pie."[/quote]
[li]
Mr Kennedy’s prerogative is his. It’s not for me to tell him what to do with his business. I am merely making the case that I’m not alone in not being offered a product I want to buy.
Meanwhile, while they rework the system don’t you think they’d keep the current one up doing what it’s doing, and then I presume offer the new version of the game for free to people who have bought a certain amount of nex or more… rolls eyes
I understand that nobody likes the idea of something they love changing, not that this is ever going to happen, but yeesh. FB are making SS happen, no?
In reality most people engage in confirmation bias. You guys don’t want to see something you love change, and Mr Kennedy perhaps doesn’t want to spend a substantial portion of time rewriting something he’s already spent a great deal of his life on.
Who am I to tell him he is wrong to move on to the next thing? I’m just trying to speak to the man and tell him a larger audience is itching to pay him for his superb products.
But stop releasing the new content that gets/keeps people paying? Stop supporting it? FL takes time and money to maintain and support regardless of new content. And if you look at the SS combat debates - running two concurrent versions is unfeasible. Won’t happen.
[quote] a larger audience is itching to pay him for his superb products.[/quote] "a larger audience" = you? Bearing in mind they have to take into account the risk of losing all the people who love and pay for the current model - the ‘larger audience’ has to not only compensate for that but be greater than that, and somehow have the same longevity (how would they keep selling it in 5 years time?). It’s a huge gamble.
Confirmation bias applies to yourself, also.
I started playing Fallen London because it was a browser based turn limited thing - it kept me company in a miserable job. Perhaps were it less niche it’d be lost among the mass of ‘normal’ games.
Anyway - ‘the man’ has been spoken to, and the man has responded. They’ve considered it, weighed the pros and cons, and would prefer to improve the current model than create a new game with similar content. I’m cool with that - an improvement on something I already like a great deal is much more promising to me than something I might not enjoy one bit. Woo for me, boo for you. ;-)