Possible Concern: many worlds will dilute the Nex

I just thought of something.

It is so very easy to switch between Cabinet Noir and Fallen London that you can play both games as a larger whole.

Nex are used mainly for two things, right:

  1. unlocking exclusive content in Fallen London, Cabinet Noir & Co
  2. accelerating gameplay through purchase of more actions (and in FL, cards).

But I’m realizing that already with two games at my disposal, I am much less often to use Nex for reason #2 above.

That is because it is now easy to fill up my entire coffee break playing these two games, where before my twenty FL actions was almost always “not enough” to sate my appetite (and fill out my entire break time).

Therefore my prediction is: as you add more games (that remain as easily switchable as CN & FL) people will buy less and less Nex, at least unless they want locked story content.

It simply is too easy to switch game once your actions in one of them run dry. Essentially, you’ve more than doubled my action allowance, FBG. And here the disjointed nature of your games work against you - it is as easy to switch storylet from one game to the next as it ever was to switch inside one game.

For which I thank you, obviously; though I am not certain you are being generous on purpose… In fact, I predict that you will want to tie actions to our accounts* instead of individual games. The purpose of having limited actions, after all, being that the limit should be low enough to trigger “wallet frustration”.

Thoughts? Do you agree? Do you disagree? What’s FBG’s thoughts on this (hopefully it’s not a new concern for you guys)?

*) Of course you could circumvent this by using multiple accounts. But you always could do this in FL… and having to track progress in one game twice is too much of a hassle (to me).

I’m obviously not with FBG, but I’ve assumed for a long time that they made the strong majority of their money on Fate-locked content.

In his podcast, Alexis actually confirmed what Gordon said above so I don’t think FBG (nor am I) really worried about it.

At the same time, that drop down won’t have EVERY SINGLE StoryNexus game on it either only featured ones FBG decides to post and some of those would not appeal to the same crowd as FL or CN so they will end up waiting/refreshing with Nex to stay with what they enjoy the most.

I also personally do not set out to make a profit with this, simply art for arts sake, so to say and as such I am actually happy that this happened because than I know the people that feel the same way.

This premise rather relies on StoryNexus games being the only browser games worth playing, and, indeed, the only pastime worth pursuing. I may be a serious contender for FBG’s Craziest Fan, but even I find something else to do in a break once I’ve used up my Fallen London actions - read the newspaper, do a quiz, play a couple of rounds of Parson’s Pubis, assemble a scale model of Chartres Cathedral out of petrified snuff, or something similarly diverting.

[quote=ZappBasker]
For which I thank you, obviously; though I am not certain you are being generous on purpose… In fact, I predict that you will want to tie actions to our accounts* instead of individual games. The purpose of having limited actions, after all, being that the limit should be low enough to trigger “wallet frustration”.

*) Of course you could circumvent this by using multiple accounts. But you always could do this in FL… and having to track progress in one game twice is too much of a hassle (to me).[/quote]

Huh.

I have never, ever been seriously tempted to spend money on extra turns when I can just wait half an hour. (I have, on the other hand, experimented with a second account.)

I have also never thought the turn limitation was designed to trigger ‘wallet frustration’, just to space out playing the game since spacing out an experience tends to make it stick in the head more. Interesting, these different interpretations of design choices!

I agree plus it helps with server load too. :) Though I must say I feel 10 minutes is too long so I will hopefully be changing that in my interactive fiction I think…
edited by Kitsune on 8/28/2012

I don’t know if you can change it (yet?) but you can make some actions have 0 cost. I’m vaguely planning on having a class of activities be free in order to encourage exploration.

Chrysoula - Only branches in Pinned cards. Opportunity actions/cards always cost 0 actions.

Which reminds me. With the SN setup, if your core mechanic is through Opportunity cards, a player gets up to three times as many choices as in FL. Action refreshes are even less desirable then.

Only by default, Lily. You can of course change Opportunity cards to cost an action. Or five actions. Or whatever.

(I was referring to whether or not you could change how long it took between action refreshes when I wondered if ‘it’ could be changed yet.)

Well I don’t know it is for us since I am waiting for the Developer tools still but it has to be possible to some extent because the beta authors have a refresh at like 1 minute while Cabinet Noir is set at 10 minutes though I could be wrong.

Thumbs up for your reply! :-)

Of course, FallenLondon and CabinetNoir are the only two browser games I am currently playing… blush

And in my workplace, playing Parson’s Pubis is sadly much less socially acceptable* than browsing the failbetter website…

*) I am lying of course. I have no idea what this game is about and I am not sure I want to know…

Perhaps unsurprisingly, we have thought about this issue in some detail.

We don’t see it becoming a serious problem for us.