[color=#009900]Ewan: we want to do a couple of parallel blog posts on FL and SS sales figures, because it’s been so useful when other indies have shared. You’re likely to see those after SS has left Early Access, when we have final figures to show. [/color]
Edit: Green is my favourite colour.
edited by babelfishwars on 1/5/2015
This has been a fascinating discussion to follow. I am trying to imagine taking a five-year-old semi-social web game (presumably even older by the time the content is completely complete, if that ever happens) and repackaging it as a standalone game (with, I can only assume, circa 1990 RPG style gameplay) with a AAA or even indie pricetag. Sure, every time FL pops up on Rock Paper Shotgun or wherever, there’s a few folks who say "I love the concept but I don’t like playing F2P webgames." Is that group larger than the current playerbase? Hell if I know; could just be the same bloke over and over again. But, well, if any game’s actual fanbase were really dwarfed by the hordes of wannabe customers ready to lay down cash and held back by just one element, well, surely we’d notice. For a start, there’d be rival games sucking up all that unclaimed capital.
Really, there’s nothing quite like Fallen London. It’s carved out this weird little niche at the centre of the Venn diagram mapping fans of webgames + speculative/horror fiction + modern English literature + world history + queer issues + fancy hats. It’s hard to imagine that the one secret to making Crazy Riches would be to replace this with a Venn diagram mapping fans of 1990-style RPGS + speculative/horror fiction + modern English literature + world history + queer issues + fancy hats… then subtracting everyone who already fit in the first diagram and doesn’t want to pay for it again.
You know… I can’t even imagine Fallen London qua Fallen London working as a standalone title. The dynamism its online status brings - the constant updates, the proximity to the developers, is such a large part of its character. Sunless Sea works because its standalone status was baked in from day one. Maybe Fallen London could have been developed as an offline game from the start, except it couldn’t, because A: it wouldn’t have had the capital, and B: without the experimentation and feedback years of being played online has brought, it wouldn’t be the game it is.
On a personal note, well, I’ve said this before, but if additional Exceptional Friend content or even, dare I speculate, a second standalone spinoff is announced, I will be there with a fancy hat adorning my blowhole.
I’ve taken a bunch of allergy medicine that tells you not to operate heavy machinery, but my laptop is a Surface Pro so I’m probably fine typing this. Maybe. I hope.
I’m a game dev - mostly big studio, not indie. I’ve been working in the "game exists and is updated forever" genre for about a decade. One game I worked on has been operating continuously for well over ten years now (creeping up on fifteen), another recently shut down after five years. When you’re sub, there’s always someone who comes along to tell you you’d be better off Free To Play with Microtransactions. When you’re FTP, people always say they’d like to pay a flat price, or a sub. There is literally no revenue model that will make every potential customer happy, but if you DO transition between models, it’s best to do it slow and careful while keeping your existing users happy (I know some producers who could do you a lovely powerpoint about user retention vs. acquisition). There’s some interesting demographic inside baseball that the bigwigs use to figure out whether to go Box+Sub, Box Only, or FTP at launch, and whether you should transition later. But FBG has figured out a monetization scheme that a lot of people in the biz would consider borderline miraculous.
You can’t really compare the business model for retail/episodic games with always online, always changing, updated frequently games. They’re very different models, and the kinds of studios that produce them are different.
So far, nobody has come up with a consistently profitable "buy a box and then pay again for any expansions" model that can sustain a game for as long as Fallen London & the Echo Bazaar have existed. You can argue that Guild Wars did it, but the original GW was known for being pretty much dead outside of PvP between box releases. GW2 decided that model was fundamentally unsustainable for a number of reasons, and did some different things as a result, with a model that kind of encourages a virtual subscription.
If there’s one thing the last decade of game industry analytics has taught us, it’s this: nothing kills an "updating forever" game faster than being easy to "finish." Adding a PvP or PvE endgame that requires hundreds of hours of personal investment and goals which are (almost by definition) out of reach of the vast majority of players is the most common "fix" for this. Most successful "perpetually online" games in the last decade have had SOME manner of time gating to their content, whether it’s raid lockouts, daily grinds, action limits, or what have you. Nobody likes 'em, but they have positive side effects on the community.
Box + DLC just does not have the revenue longevity of FTP+MT or subscription. The box+maybeDLC revenue model frequently involves CONSTANT LAYOFFS and COPIOUS WEEPING. Long-term streams from MT or subs give a studio some hint of stability, which is why so many corps keep dumping buckets of cash chasing the online dragon even when the vast majority of MMOs or browser games ultimately fail.
When I started Fallen London, I felt similarly antsy: I wanted to play more than 20-40 actions at a time. That is FOR SURE a problem, and I’m pretty sure Failbetter is aware of the issue. But there are a lot of less risky fixes that could ameliorate that problem without a complete business model shift, ways to give new players more flexible actions and more freedom without disrupting the overall pace of the game. For instance, I know that Storynexus’s bones would allow for a much larger action bank. If they kept action refresh at the same rate but let you bank 1-200 rather than 20-40 (and started new players at a hundred), that might increase the feeling of freedom while still time gating a bit. Or maybe give out a bunch of "action refresh" items to new players that can only be used early on. None of these would eliminate time-gating altogether, they’d just dull its sting for newer players.
Is there a way to eliminate all time-gating from an investment/reward structured game without destroying or disincentivizing the kind of return visits and loyalty that provide stable revenue streams? Nobody’s found one yet. If somebody came up with one it would revolutionize the entire industry. I know a half dozen studios who have done relevant experiments, and five of them no longer exist. That’s the risk/reward you’re looking at here: maybe someone will figure it out someday and get insanely rich, but if you try and fail you may end up losing everything.
I don’t know if any of this is even helpful. I’ve had to simplify quite a lot just to prevent it from turning into a scholarly essay on modern monetization strategy. I’m getting really drowsy, so I’d probably better go to sleep. Hopefully some of this was useful.
It was incredibly helpful! If you have time, later, I’d be very interested in seeing a longer blog post or summat on this subject.
[quote=Sir Frederick Tanah-Chook]
Really, there’s nothing quite like Fallen London. It’s carved out this weird little niche at the centre of the Venn diagram mapping fans of webgames + speculative/horror fiction + modern English literature + world history + queer issues + fancy hats. [/quote]
[color=#0066ff]
[/color]
[color=#0066ff]This is so spot on, Fred. Can I quote you on Tumblr? :D[/color]
[color=#009900]This thread continues to deliver! Thanks, CG.[/color]
[color=#009900]It’s worth mentioning that when I tweeted my blog post, I got a heartfelt positive response from a guy who used to run a (good, innovative) indie dev studio that went out of business last year.[/color]
[color=#009900]
[/color]
[color=#009900]
[/color]
[color=#009900]We did well out of increasing the action bank size. Our data and our intuition both suggest to us that doubling it again would take us past the point of diminishing returns, and people would get bored of repeatedly clicking the same button. Now we have such a giant amount of content in the bank, would be to add more variety early on - which is much harder, but it’s something we’re much better at now.[/color]
[color=#009900]
[/color]
[color=#009900]We’re also finding ways to improve the UI, to answer questions - esp for newbies - like[/color]
[color=#009900]
[/color]
[color=#009900]- what should I do now?[/color]
[color=#009900]- what’s all this Rostygold good for?[/color]
[color=#009900]- Phosphorescent what now?[/color]
[color=#009900]- what was I doing again?[/color]
[color=#009900]
[/color]
[color=#009900]…so people can navigate the landscape better. But our FL UI guy is currently very busy on Sunless Sea, so that’s been on hold.[/color]
[color=#009900]I have a very specific and familiar wince for exactly that, and a matching wince for whenever someone says ‘I gave up, too grindy’. And there’s a lot of room for improvement in FL (every time I go back to our five-year-old UI, now, I have a very specific third wince. Some of that stuff is placeholder.) But we have a unique magic that I don’t want to kill, and a community (that’s you, people) that does us proud. We want to grow that community, not replace it. I’m looking forward to making more box games, but FL is our home town.[/color]
Too kind - of course you can!
[quote=Alexis Kennedy][color=#009900]We’re also finding ways to improve the UI, to answer questions - esp for newbies - like[/color][color=#009900]
[/color][color=rgb(0, 153, 0)].[/color][color=rgb(0, 153, 0)].[/color][color=rgb(0, 153, 0)].[/color]
[color=#009900]- what was I doing again?[/color]
[/quote]I know this probably won’t happen due to complexity, but this, combined with a journal rework could be amazing not only for newbies. I’m thinking of a feature which storifies the individual character’s past actions (see storify.com for an example). We all know the limitations of the current journal system. I’d love to be able to go to a real and intelligent journal, which will show the story of my character in context (even just using snippets and not the full texts).
[color=000000]
I [color=000000]w[color=000000]ould def[color=000000]initely consider it[/color][/color] - depends what it was[color=000000].[color=000000] It[color=000000] [/color]would have to have a story hook, and not be just "here is [color=000000]another ad[color=000000]dition to FL", be[color=000000]cause th[color=000000]ere’s a lot of worldbuilding I haven’t explored in FL so I’m not particularly interested in buying something separate just for more [color=000000]lor[color=000000]e[color=000000] and at[color=000000]mosphere.[color=000000]
I[color=000000] would be more likely to buy something with a n[color=000000]arrower[color=000000], s[color=000000]tory[color=000000]- and character-based focus. [color=000000]My favourite [color=000000]story[color=000000]lines in FL have been things like the Wry Functionary[color=000000] and[/color] [color=000000]the Secret of the Plaster Face [color=000000](I also intend to buy the Reluctant Soldier one at some p[color=000000]oint) - I feel [color=000000]you [color=000000]have a [color=000000]gift for writing compelling characters that I want to know better, but the nature of the game means you[color=000000]'re never very closely tied to any of them, and [color=000000]you can’t make meaningful long[color=000000]-term allies of them o[color=000000]r get more than a handful of scenes with them[/color].
I loved the brief Clay [color=000000]Man and [color=000000]monster hunter comic that [color=000000]didn’t get printed in the end - I would definitely have bought that in interactive form. [/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][color=000000]Colourful characters, comp[color=000000]elling [color=000000]goals, the feeling we’d be with someone on a journey that lasted more than a ha[color=000000]ndful of storylets. Sunless sea [color=000000]is very unforgiving and doesn’t re[color=000000]ward you getting attached to people[color=000000]; I would really like something with allies,[color=000000] with friendship, with [color=000000]other characters we can care about without having to [color=000000]f[color=000000]ill in[/color] all the details of the story in our heads.
[color=000000]I think you’d have to sell it to me as "character with a s[color=000000]pecific[/color] compelling problem in a specific environment" in the blurb, rather than the atmospheric blurb of [color=000000]the main game. [color=000000](On the other hand, [color=000000]you may surprise me!) [/color][/color][/color][/color]
[/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][/color][/color]
Edit: Well, that formatting didn’t work. The top paragraph is Alexis’ post.
Edit: Bored at work. Sorry, I’ll behave. - Babel
edited by babelfishwars on 1/5/2015
[quote=Alexis Kennedy][color=#009900]Ewan: we want to do a couple of parallel blog posts on FL and SS sales figures, because it’s been so useful when other indies have shared. You’re likely to see those after SS has left Early Access, when we have final figures to show. [/color]
[/quote]
Cool, and thanks. [The offhand ‘90% of players pay’ in the comment preceding the one I am quoting is an example of the kind of data to which I refer - stuff that would make an excellent masters’ thesis project to analyse. I often do a bit in my head when thinking about Nex - a given chunk (say ‘The Gift’) on first glance always feels pricey, and then I run through some numbers and discover that FBG probably aren’t having peeled grapes hand-fed to them in their office from silver salvers. Or not often.]
[color=#009900]oh, wow, that was a typo I’m going to blame on our so-called moderator. 90% of players don’t pay. If 90% of our players paid on FL, I would have nicer shoes.[/color]
!!! :C
…oh, the OTHER so-called moderator! Carry on!
But seriously… okay, not -that- seriously… it just struck me that Monsieur Hat is advocating that Failbetter shift away from offering a very affordable, relatively no-frills product, in favour of an expensive, all-frills product, and justifying it with specific reference to the success of the affordable, no-frills Model T Ford. Not quite sure about that logic there. Of course, the Ford Motor Company later had to bring out the Model A in response to public demand for expensive luxury automobiles, so, damned if you do, damned if you don’t, I guess? I’m not sure the metaphor entirely holds up. Plus, Henry Ford was a contemptible Nazi. Sharing the pie between capital and labour? The man used slaves to produce war machines for the Axis. He was a leading racist and anti-labourist in an era already rich in human latrines.
(I was amused to discover, in the course of fact-checking this rant, that one of Ford’s associates was called "Childe Harold Willis." I like to imagine that his siblings were called Young Werther Willis, Jane Eyre Willis and Barnaby Rudge Willis.)
[quote=Sir Frederick Tanah-Chook]But seriously… okay, not -that- seriously… it just struck me that Monsieur Hat is advocating that Failbetter shift away from offering a very affordable, relatively no-frills product, in favour of an expensive, all-frills product, and justifying it with specific reference to the success of the affordable, no-frills Model T Ford. Not quite sure about that logic there. Of course, the Ford Motor Company later had to bring out the Model A in response to public demand for expensive luxury automobiles, so, damned if you do, damned if you don’t, I guess? I’m not sure the metaphor entirely holds up. Plus, Henry Ford was a contemptible Nazi. Sharing the pie between capital and labour? The man used slaves to produce war machines for the Axis. He was a leading racist and anti-labourist in an era already rich in human latrines.
(I was amused to discover, in the course of fact-checking this rant, that one of Ford’s associates was called "Childe Harold Willis." I like to imagine that his siblings were called Young Werther Willis, Jane Eyre Willis and Barnaby Rudge Willis.)[/quote]
I’m so glad you were able to explain this in a reasonable voice. I actually had to put a restraining order upon myself yesterday when I read Mr Chapeau’s original post. Had I written an answer, there would’ve been a lot of strong language in it, and this forum deserves better!
Here’s an excellent article about Mr Ford, for those who are interested:
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-71ce-Henry-Ford-a-life-not-for-celebrating#.VKq_dXv-kXh
And no more shall be said about him here.
[color=#009900]oh, wow, that was a typo I’m going to blame on our so-called moderator. 90% of players don’t pay. If 90% of our players paid on FL, I would have nicer shoes.[/color][/quote]
I’m ILL. Be nice to me or I’ll … I’ll… go on a non-moderating rampage. I’ll … encourage people to say rude things, such as: POOT!
I have no respect for anyone unable to figure that one out. Obviously, one is expected to hide it under one’s bed and whisper secrets of violence and misdemeanor and night, when the gas lamps burn low and the Bazaar hums.
[quote=RandomWalker][quote=Alexis Kennedy]
[color=#009900]No promises, but we are in fact discussing an increased op deck flow into the Exceptional Friend offering.[/color]
edited by Alexis on 1/4/2015[/quote]
Increased Opportunity Deck flow would be great, but I must admit that I prefer to only check FL every few hours, cycle through my alts, and then move on to other stuff - it’s not a good idea to leave it on all the time at work. As such, faster refresh of the deck wouldn’t do me any good.
I know I’m only one anecdotal data point, if we could have a choice of a larger deck or faster refresh, that be wonderful. I must admit that the one thing about the Gift that I wasn’t a fan of was the reward. Just dropping the card from the deck in favour of 10 echoes worth of random bits and pieces would have worked better for me. My problem with the op deck is sorting through the cards, trying to find the ones I’m currently interested in, rather than the refresh rate.[/quote]
I would definitely be interested in a larger deck, because while sometimes I can check more than once an hour, a lot of the time I can’t, or that actually takes up more energy than I’m willing to spend on the game and I quickly burn out and, uh, stop playing for weeks which is probably something that we want to avoid xP
Another monetization/gating sidebar I thought of while drifting off last night: ungated progress in any game with an economy leads to the original EverQuest. This is going to get a little MMO-specific inside baseball, but I hope it’ll offer some insights.
Consider these resources: time, skill, and money. These are all things that games can reward you for, and a lot of modern games reward you for all of them.
Cookie Clicker is a pure "time" game. The longer you play it, the more cookies you have. Yes there are some choices as to what to upgrade, but the main gameplay is "spend time, numbers go up."
Street Fighter is close to a pure "skill" game. Be good and win. But in some ways, skill is linked to time: you gain skill by practicing, by doing research, by memorizing combos. While some people may be more inherently talented, nobody is born highly skilled in fighting games.
There are scads of microtransaction games that are maligned as "pay-to-win" with varying levels of accuracy, so I’m not going to call out anything specific here. I will say that this is actually a very popular and deliberately designed game type in several specific markets.
Things get more complicated when you get into an online shared world where resources are accumulated (we call this an economy). At this point it’s a challenge to ensure that the person who can play twelve hours a day every day doesn’t just completely overshadow the player who wants to play an hour a day, or four hours on the weekends… the dedicated player should have more, but the difference shouldn’t be so overwhelming that it makes the more casual player feel like they can’t do anything cool. In games with skill-based combat, you also want to reward people who are proficient in that. And in games with direct monetary expenditures, you want them to be worthwhile but not unbalancing.
At one point, I was in a WoW raid that was one of the top 50 in the US. Almost everybody in the raid had a full time job, so we raided "only" 3-4 days a week, 4-6 hours a night. Every other raid group in our tier was on a 5-6 days a week schedule, but we made up for that with better skill and coordination. This was only possible because time-based content gating existed. Let’s say we played 20 hours a week. During that time, we spent 10 hours farming bosses we knew how to kill and 10 hours practicing new bosses. Raid lockouts are a form of content gating that prevent someone from "farming" the same boss more than once a week. So we could maintain a similar gear level to our rivals by just playing those ten hours. Some of our rivals were playing 40 hours a week. In a game without limits to what a given player can do in a week, our rivals could have spent their extra 20 hours farming and surpassed us in gear handily.
Fallen London is different, of course. There’s no twitchy-skill component to balance, and players aren’t really in direct competition. The Haves aren’t parading around the Have Nots in their super impressive armor, but many of the same principles still apply: if you don’t limit the number of times you can do X per day or week, you have to design with the person who will play twelve hours a day every day in mind. He exists, he always exists, and he’ll be a huge influence on your economy if you let him.
A side note: when time equals money/progress/xp, it actually disincentivizes players from reading. Often if I’m questing with a friend in an MMO I’ll get yelled at for taking the time to read the NPC dialogue. In this modern day of mods and FAQs and wikis, reading can be seen as wasteful, because that’s twenty seconds that could have been spent getting more xp/gold/whatever. In MMOs, the efficient player does not read, so modern games have been designed to be played with minimal reading, which hurts my heart. It hurts my heart SO BAD, you guys. There are people who read and we put as much stuff as we possibly can in for them, but when time is money, reading suffers.
As a result, the Venn diagram of "games where most of the players read a lot" and "games that have an economy" doesn’t overlap very much. In a shared world with unlimited, untimed "actions," a player who reads will always progress more slowly than a player who skips, so the words you put in front of them have to be worth falling behind for. If the player encounters too many non-worthwhile words in a row, they’ll just skip everything from then on and there’s nothing you can do to win them back.
This is why most of the reading-focused games we see these days are single player adventures where everyone gets their own little universe. Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us… we’re in a golden age for those kinds of games. At the same time, the studios making them are PRECARIOUS. Dragon Age 2 was released early for budgetary reasons, and people could tell it wasn’t quite ready. Double Fine had to lay off a crop of people a few months ago when a single project got cancelled. These are the BEST American and Canadian storytelling studios, and neither of them are really secure. That insecurity is the entire reason Bioware is owned by EA at this point… it offers them some small semblance of a buffer.
Interactive economies and shared worlds keep players coming back. They make them roll alts. Few people wax rhapsodic about the economy in an online game, but it’s a secret lifeblood. It causes some problems when time you spend reading is really time you could have spent accumulating, creating a weird tension between the two.
Limited actions are such a simple and clean way to reconcile these things. As long as it doesn’t take you more time to read than it takes an action to refresh, you’re not really sacrificing any efficiency by reading. Reading doesn’t make you fall behind in Fallen London. That’s HUGE. It’s practically alchemical.
Economies and persistent worlds give a studio a kind of security not found anywhere else in gaming. They create a home and family for players. The fact that Failbetter has managed to create one where words are a draw not a distraction is… borderline miraculous from the perspective of a lot of industry assumptions.
As a casual player I have to say I enjoy how FL works immensely. I bought SS because I love FL, but it turns out SS is not a type of game I enjoy at all. I left it to grow mold in my programmes folder…
Main reasons I love FL:
It’s well written, wide open sand box.
I can play it anywhere, on any device.
It can’t be played continuously for too long, which allows someone with no self control some time to sleep, and keeps me from becoming completely bored with it.
Basically it’s for casual gaming. If it becomes like a real game then it’s too demanding for me. I like FL largely because it’s a browser game.
New contents and seasonal events keep me coming back.
P.S. on money matters, I have paid for my main account a number of times. I used to subscribe, which is great for more intensive periods of playing, which I don’t do now. I do still keep nex around for some fate-locked stories I feel inclined to try. I appreciate that most FL contents are free. If the devs fate-lock a lot more contents I think it may discourage people. Some people who love indie games may have a tendency to dislike anything that feels ‘corporate’ or very profit-driven. If much of FL is in the paid content then it could put people off.
edited by Mirrorhouse on 1/6/2015
edited by Mirrorhouse on 1/6/2015
This whole thread is fascinating to read.
As a side note, I am still relatively new, so forgive me if I say silly things!
I haven’t been able to pick out quite what the alchemy of Fallen London is that has driven me to jump so far into the deep end of playing, to regularly draw cards on my phone, to regularly spend money on it over everything else that’s non-essential when I have never spent money on a F2P game and probably never will again. Certainly, given that 90% of players do not pay, it’s an alchemy not replicated for everyone!
The initial nearly unique thing is present and increasing queer-friendliness… the caring about diversity of fandom and character… race, sexuality, gender, it’s so endlessly strange in the best way to see fiction that’s closer to binary gender parity than almost anything I read, and while I wish for more non-binary characters, the fact that there are any and that I can play one – play a person like myself in a fantasy game – is glorious to the point of heartbreak.
The player community is similarly very friendly in such ways, which I don’t even get in my home community most days.
And the writing is amazing, as everyone says. I’m still busy being gobsmacked by the 12 Days of Sacks content. (Oh, that black card. Oh. Oh.)
Regarding the actions, it’s also kind of a benefit that I can’t binge myself out on it, even with an EF subscription and an alt. The limits mean I can pretty much fold Fallen London in with other things I normally do. Yes, some of my friends have quit FL because of the action cap. But on the other hand, with the cap removed, I wonder if I wouldn’t just binge myself out and quit. Who knows.
Plus the sheer interest in player feedback from the developers is really cool! :)
I am also super excited about the potential changes, and I also count myself lucky to have joined the community when new content started being fairly regularly released.
I love the idea of giving content snippets for EF types, and increase op card deck flow (though I know there are no promises).
And I won’t lie, I’m also reaching a point of frustration with the op deck limits, and the difficulty (and strangely outsized benefits) of removing certain cards, and suchlike. I kinda wish you could unlock improvements to the op deck the way you can have more cards in your hand! But I have no clue about feasibility of that.
I would also love to see Fallen London interactive fiction! I am not fully sure what was meant by that, but it sounds exciting regardless.