Closed Betas wrote on Apr 11, 2012, 22:30:
Hooray! The exploitation of selling beta access is finally over.
This game can now die happily ever after. Thanks for trying! You encapsulated 3% of the original Tribes, the movement. and some aspects
of the weapons... Where you failed, was you only cared to monetize on the weapon/characters and destroyed the game play in doing so.. You failed to realize that 97% of your game is meaningless to the actual game objective.

In short, if you love running around doing meaningless frags over and over for years to come, then Tribes is for you. If you think Tribes Ascend is competitive, you better grab the fastest toon out there, because only the flag cappers and chasers matter.. Everything else is pointless and irrelevant.

Expecting Tribes to be a competitive game? Nope, just a money sink off an old established IP

ColoradoHoudini wrote on Apr 11, 2012, 20:26:
Anyone know if their are other maps we never got to try? In the beta, I haven't seen one large base yet for CTF. --indoor, I mean.

Verno wrote on Apr 11, 2012, 09:04:

Except that given the history of certain GOP members, that wouldn't actually surprise me to learn that about Santorum.

The Dems are totally free of their own embarrassing members of course

xXBatmanXx wrote on Apr 10, 2012, 18:25:
Ouch. Looking at the CE....this is going to be a very heavy micro transaction game. 3-4 of the items you get in the CE are 1x use. WTF!?

If it is going to be like that, why not make the game 29.99 like the others? Or free?

Beamer wrote on Apr 10, 2012, 10:04:

ItBurn wrote on Apr 10, 2012, 09:57:
They just don't get it. The problem was that it wasn't a game that PC gamers wanted to play. Those people think that the content of a game has no link with sales.

If people didn't want to play it then it wouldn't have been pirated like crazy.

You can say people didn't want to pay for it, but undoubtedly if piracy was not an option then sales would have been better. While we can debate all day what portion of pirates would otherwise buy a game (low), I don't think anyone would argue none would.
If a game is pirated a million times I think it's safe to say that's 100,000 lost sales. Bulletstorm was pirated more than a million times.

Jerykk wrote on Apr 9, 2012, 03:01:

Yifes wrote on Apr 9, 2012, 02:35:

Drezden wrote on Apr 8, 2012, 20:02:
On top of that his girlfriend is a fucking genius as well. Joss Whedon needs to start a Kickstarter to get Firefly back and on the air. *sigh*

Except a TV show like that costs a couple million dollars per episode. Plus, how do you expect Nathan Fillion to leave Castle?

I don't see Kickstarter successfully funding any sci-fi TV shows with decent production values. Sci-fi shows are prohibitively expensive to produce in general because of all the sets, props, costumes, make-up and special effects required. That's why Firefly was cancelled in the first place. Although it had a fanbase, that fanbase wasn't large enough to offset the production costs.

DangerDog wrote on Apr 8, 2012, 23:34:

Jerykk wrote on Apr 8, 2012, 23:21:
I can almost guarantee this will be a F2P multiplayer shooter. Probably just a slightly altered version of UT3 (or maybe UT2k4), ala Quake Live.

I'm actually hoping that by next year we see the demise of the F2P model, the greed is going to kill of most of these games anyway.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi2XGFAIPY4#t=10m18s

Beamer wrote on Apr 6, 2012, 12:55:
Disagreed. Plenty of developers have bounced back from projects that are bad. In fact, most developers start exclusively by doing bad projects; so long as those projects make some money then they can continue building towards good projects. But if the projects lose money then the developer fails.

Beamer wrote on Apr 6, 2012, 10:32:

Wowbagger_TIP wrote on Apr 6, 2012, 09:29:

Beamer wrote on Apr 6, 2012, 08:32:
What's most interesting is that these guys are guaranteeing they break even before they make the game, so there is 0 risk for the developer for the individual project.
0 risk.

All risk is instead shifted to the consumer. That's right, the publisher gets to make a free game, and if it does well he gets to take his cut. But the consumer does not get a cut of profits, at best he gets a game he wants, which he would probably get without risking $10 on something not yet made and loosely sketched out in something designed to take his money.

I wouldn't say 0 risk. If they don't deliver at least close to the expected game, then they've shot themselves in the foot and aren't likely to get funded again. That seems like a risk to me, and a pretty significant one if they actually want to be able to work this way in the future.

That's why I said "for the individual project." Yeah, there's risk for the developer as a whole, but that risk is always there.

Also, the spirit of kickstarter is to kickstart a business, so ideally people wouldn't be returning to that well again, or would expect less each time. I doubt that would happen, though, and businesses will keep kickstarting projects.

Beamer wrote on Apr 6, 2012, 08:32:
What's most interesting is that these guys are guaranteeing they break even before they make the game, so there is 0 risk for the developer for the individual project.
0 risk.

All risk is instead shifted to the consumer. That's right, the publisher gets to make a free game, and if it does well he gets to take his cut. But the consumer does not get a cut of profits, at best he gets a game he wants, which he would probably get without risking $10 on something not yet made and loosely sketched out in something designed to take his money.

entr0py wrote on Apr 4, 2012, 22:07:

Prez wrote on Apr 4, 2012, 20:01:
A 2D Shadowrun with classic PC-style gameplay? Oh yeah, I'm down with that.

Unfortunately they've got the limitation of accommodating the laggy jab-and-smear controls of tablets. So the gameplay can't require either precision or reflexes. But I guess a really old school turn-based RPG would work.

killer_roach wrote on Apr 2, 2012, 23:28:

Dades wrote on Apr 2, 2012, 21:51:

killer_roach wrote on Apr 2, 2012, 21:43:
Where your argument falls down is that you're assuming that, all things being equal, prices would have stayed in the $50-60 range otherwise. Considering the increase of costs in the industry, that seems highly unlikely.

Prices have stayed where they are because the market has grown significantly, not because big publishers are so nice to us. Let's embrace the alarmist view and say that without the publishers then prices would rise, so what? I would welcome paying more quality products and less for ones that don't merit the cost. People say the quality games are subsidized by the mass market titles but the publishers don't care to do that anymore. Everything has to move a few million units or there likely will not be a follow up at all.

Hate to say it, but whether you think it's the case or not, these major publishers stay in business because they ARE being nice to their customers. If not, they don't buy from them, and they go out of business. They have to maximize profits as well, yes, but without giving the customers at least their money's worth (if not more) on a consistent basis, they don't stick around.

killer_roach wrote on Apr 2, 2012, 23:28:
In terms of seeking fewer AAA-quality titles in favor of downmarket fare, it's all a process. Nobody knows from the get-go what games will end up being any good - even developers with established track records make the occasional stinker. The system in place rewards success and punishes failure, and we end up with a fairly wide variety of product as a result. Even better, if people don't think they're being served, they can make their voices known by supporting projects that are more to their tastes, or the enterprising can start their own studios in the hopes of becoming rich in the pursuit of an undersupported niche. Overall, I think the system is working far better than many would like to think.

Beamer wrote on Apr 2, 2012, 20:09:

Dades wrote on Apr 2, 2012, 18:42:

That's a pretty iffy argument. If it's an online game, then most likely your used copy is tied to an account and won't work anyway. As for maintaining servers, that's only done as long as it's profitable anyway, and then they are shut down, as we see happen all the time.

Preach it. Any business model where the price of simple operating expenses like servers isn't priced into the box is extremely flawed and can't be blamed on the customers. The servers and associated labour is often retasked from one game to another while abandoning the older software anyway. Many other industries deal with these things all the time and don't demand handouts from customers because they have to deal with resale.

Are the greedy console companies going to give people lower prices in exchange for their loss of rights? More sales like PC customers get? Fuck no.

I said flat-out it wasn't a particularly strong argument, but it is a distinguishing feature relative to the other industry verno mentioned.

Movie rentals aren't quite the same because rentals existed before the movie industry.

Beamer wrote on Apr 2, 2012, 20:09:
And things like halfpricedbooks aren't comparable to GameStop because they aren't publically traded with a market cap larger than virtually anyone actually making games.