Wow, that sets up real nice for a Star Citizen joke but I will refrain.
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Not in the funding campaign. Eventually, all backers will have the game and gameplay it provides. And ships is the only thing that will make a difference. Thatās why ship is the best stimul to pledge more money. People want pledge for them coz ship isnāt only capabilites - itās an in-game status. This is why SCās campaign was so much successful - people went crazy and pledged to buy this and that and another one ship.
That defeats the point of playing the game and appreciating where you came from if you can just buy your way to the top. In my opinion that was a very poor model and is the reason I will not be buying SC even on itās release. Thereās no point to playing if you can just buy your way to the top.
In EVE, yes you could buy whatever ship you wanted if you bought enough plex, but you if you flew it before you were ready(Example: An Idiot) you got laughed out of whatever corp you were in as you deserve. You could take a frigate and take out a battleship. There are consequences. In SC this isnāt the case, you donāt learn from being an idiot or paying your way to the top. You just āhaha Iām in a bigger ship so Iām stronger because I could buy itā through the game, just like in elite. Every ship should have somewhat of a chance in battle, I hate Eliteās style of ābigger is betterā even in speed and maneuverability! Itās absurd. In Elite you have zero chance of taking out an (player)anaconda in an Eagle or something. Even if they are a terrible pilot they just have to sit there and let their turrets plink away your shields while they gorge on shield boosters.
To be clear, the point Iām trying to make is not that a tiny should should always be able to take out the large ship, but that if the large ship is STUPID, they should be able to. In elite, this just isnāt the case. You can always get away in your anaconda from an eagle, or kill it, 100% of the time.
Iām a bit biased as a former eve player, but I prefer Eveās system of ship balancing of classes far better than Elites. This definitely isnāt the thread for it, but I needed to respond why I think SCās way of ship sales is a terrible idea.
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Itās not about opinions - itās about effective marketing. That model is proved to be successful in the funding campaign.
That sort of āeffective marketingā makes for terrible gameplay then. In fact, the idea of buying ships before you even start an arena game means that it ruins the balance of each battle in the first place. Which would you rather have? A game marketed fantastically they sells and makes a lot of money, or a well made game? You can very rarely have all 3. There are PLENTY of AAA games that effectively marketed and make a lot of money which are complete crap(CoD, newer Halos, etc).
I believe that sort of funding model is incompatible with the gameplay planned for I:BS.
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The development costs for implementing a single space ship is in the order of many dozens of thousands of dollars - your mileage may vary, but 1000 man-hours of work per ship is what youāre looking at. So if we make it Kickstarter exclusive ( letās say at a higher tier, $250 - thatās just an example - ), then we need to have 200+ pledges at that tier level just to break even. Because people are entitled to their rewards, so if for example we only get 100 pledges at $250, weāre forced to implement that reward ship anyways, so weād lose a lot of money.
Our research shows that the vast majority of pledges come from the first digital download tier followed by the beta access tier. The higher tiers donāt necessarily have that many backers, especially when you donāt have a high visibility / known names, which is our case. The consequence is that although providing ship rewards is a good idea in theory, practically this puts us at a high risk to lose money.
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None of this about SC is true, sky. The game isnāt released yet and none of those mechanics even exist, you cant possibly claim that SC is more like ED than EVE when we dont even know the important details about those mechanics. Furthermore, SC ship sales are ending when the persistant universe is officially released. I can tell you that just based on whatās already implemented there will be serious decisions to make about your fleet composition. I would argue that what weāve seen so far does an even better job than eve does, player skill is a far bigger aspect than it ever was in eve, you must learn to manually pilot your ship and aim your guns. Also consider that those bigger ships will take more players to run effectively, whereas in eve your bigger ship is always flown by a single pilot and without question has a price/performance curve where bigger ships are better, but do require smaller support craft to be effective. If every corp in eve could afford to, half their fleet would be titans with the other half being support. I do agree with your central premise, and if SC does turn out like that iāll be dissapointed.
As for scarishās suggestion, giving away ships would only work in a game as massive in SC where there is a planned universe where the economy will at some point be ālocked inā. Battlescape is a small arena shooter. I simply would not pledge for battlescape if it was using āships being soldā business model, BS is a game whose arena based game models mean selling ships inherently advantages some players within each and every round to an insurmountable gap. What im hoping for battlescape is that each team unlocks ships and assets as the round progresses, like any other large scale round based game. Im hoping that battlescape can be a competetive arena space shooter with some strategy elements that will rival Free Allegiance when that was a thing. The community and bussiness models around these two different kinds of game must be different.
Not to mention on the non-gameplay side of things, it would only work if we have 5 times more artists. Donāt underestimate the time, effort, iteration and finances that go into creating playable ships. SC have the fortunate ability financially to throw a lot of resources on this end.
I think you might be misunderstanding me which which is my own fault in composing my response. I am not trying to make any generalization about SC gameplay other than the fact at the moment, spaceships(and starting point) are bought with $$$. The comparison I made to elite was that, just like in SC, your starting ship was bought in the kickstarter. Thatās all.
The gameplay I talked about elite was meant purely for elite. I make no premise of understanding or knowing about any gameplay about SC. I havenāt researched it at all other than watching a video or two and watching damage numbers pop up. Thatās all. As far as gameplay goes, I was only trying to compare elite and eve.
Edit: After rereading my post I do make the assumption that bigger is better for SC. I donāt claim to know if thatās how it is, I just donāt like the idea that spending more money gives you such a huge head start ahead of everyone else because you can drop couple grand on internet spaceships. Plus, wheres the fun in even playing the game when you can just buy your next ship.
My way of justifying the head start to some degree is that itās the same as any game where you join other than on release day, people will have already built up their wealth before you ever played. Whether or not thatās worth the funding itās gotten star citizen is up for debate. im still only my original kickstarter $60 into SC, i also prefer to get stuff through playing the game, it will be boring if you already have all the ships. Then again, thats why the ship prices are so high, to make sure people are donating rather than just trying to buy everything at a good value which would legitimatley ruin the gameās economy, it needs to be that expensive because crazy ppl are willing to spend that much. You can put thousands into the game and SC gets ever more development money and you still wont have ābought everythingā.
Hopefully they will actually follow through on their promise to stop ship sales on release. Too many devs have been going back on promises lately.
Not pledge ships. Pledge planets.
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It worked in Warthunder - and it worked well. As well, it worked in Mechwarrior Online. So there are no real reasons it wonāt work in Infinity.
Butā¦but you will need to design these ships anyway. Nobody said they should be exclusive in terms of hull - PGI gave to thier backers regular Mechs with exclusive skins and gained >5 million bucks during original āFoundersā campaign.
And as we all know, skins take literally no resources at all to make. Thatās why they needed >5 million bucks to make a buggy and in my - personal - opinion not that interesting game.
If you have $5 mil youād like to throw at INS, Iām quite sure theyād be happy to follow your suggestions. After all, once you have a multi-million-dollar budget selling ships does make more money. Iām not saying you should put in the money, in fact Iād really rather you didnāt, I hate games where buying any sort of power is an option.
If you look carefully at the current plan - there already are exclusive skins. And no - exclusive skins for 4 different Mech chassis cost nowhere near to 5 million bucks. And no again - buying regular Mech for real money isnāt pay2win.
Except that, to my knowledge, the arena of battlescape is entirely different than warthunder.
As I understand it(more-so our own speculation/depending on funding), all teams will start at the same point and place resource extractors that pool into team points or whatever you want to call it. Then, you upgrade specific ships or build different ones. āBuyingā a ship and letting someone start with a capital ship in the beginning of the game rather than spending 2 weeks getting the resources to build one, for example, defeats the entire purpose of the game.
The main purpose of any game isnāt a grind but the gaming proccess - fighting, flying etc.
And now iām really afraid that I:B will share the fate of Starfighter Inc.
Battlescapeās āprocessā, as you call it, is EVEās nullsec distilled into a perpetually-resetting map. Your team builds up a power base, gears up to fight, and then tries to take the other teamās stuff. These fights are supposed to start from nothing and end with players beating each other up with battleships, before one team wins and it all resets back to zero for the next round. This all happens within the fight. All the research, all the resource gathering, all the construction, all of it.
Unless the devs plan to give us a World of Tanks-esque stable of persistent ships (devs, I beg of thee, please consider it), selling ships during crowdfunding defeats the entire purpose of the game.
It might could possibly work, a few years down the line, with the MMO. But it makes no sense for Battlescape as it has been described to us.
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@Scarish is obviously in the marketing business and I think that we should let him speak instead of trying to convince him that his view is wrongā¦
Can you tell us what you think of the reward tiers and in your opinion what is good or bad about them and why you think that?