None of the replies up to now have liked the idea of a subscription fee for the game, or new game. If you are curious about how many people would be willing to pay then just make another thread with a pole (as you can't alter this one) giving the two choices. Link it in this thread as well. I'm guessing that most will not be happy to pay a subscription.
I'll admit I'm in the minority opinion. But actually given several of the louder responses express concern that Eleon is actually not pushing as hard as they could, a subscription model allows the players to actual send a signal to the devs - do more or we stop paying. Up front means there is no way to do that - once they've got the money, there is no incentive to do anything afterwards. So you'd think a distrusting gamer would actually prefer a subscription model, where you can drop the game after a month if it sucks. But yes, I admit, that's not the popular opinion.
Cool assessment of the strengths / niche of EGS, and the difference to DU. - DU states their influence of EVE online even on their self description, at the 'jobs' section. (That is the section, where they have to be most candid about what they want to achieve, and who they want to be. - - Since they are searching people for their team, and those contenders will be gone if the description doesn't match. - - -And... DU, they could have EVE ex-employees?) A few thoughts: - DU's monetization model caters to different players. Which will want different gameplay. E.g. for me a subscription would have been a giant no-no. I bought the game when I was down, on search for work. To invest for this stuff, monthly, on top of my running bills...? Nah. But I had plenty of time, to tinker with stuff... - Which means, you also get other players with this payment model. Other types of people you play and fight with, with more or less time on hands, and different expectations what a game should deliver for them. Other money making methods also have drawbacks. Free to play (to pay?) has a soft influence where the effort is put in - You get beautiful skins and hats faster than actual gameplay, because it keeps the oven running hot. - Dual Universe seems to have investors of some kind, which tend to wield (undue?) influence To keep 90 people working full time, while the game is only just at the beginning- - You can't just rely on the 'truly awoken' players to pay an extreme amount of money. Somebody had put the millions in, up front, and 'he'/'she'/'they' probably want to see a result at some time in the future. '10x'? - Ten time the investment? Putting on pressure to perform, or cutting the losses. And it might add another layer of 'executive meddling'. Basically: 'Cool Idea's from a person even further away from the gameplay and development process, but with massive influence.' - "Put a dog in there! Everybody loves dogs! And a dancing donkey...!" - High pressure to keep up apperances and gamer enthusiasm. You rely on others to build sandcastles, to make your playground look cool - But at the same time, you have them to pay a monthly fee even to enter it. They really seem to make their point on their website, that the players will deliver the content, and the Devs the resources for the players to create. If the playerbase of DU ever dwindles, for whatever reason, -ingame or RL- - then this game is deader than a dodo. People with a day job, that still should have enough time to invest into creative building? With highly fiddly blocks and stuff...? - It could easily end up that you have a very few select expert builders, concentrating only on that, and everybody buys their ship models. Which is cool, but for the game-at-large it slows down the development of their ingame world. ... But you need to keep those players busy and interested... Players draw other players... which pay the running bills for your large team... It could be even worse than the treadmill that Star Citizen is in right now? - A 'version 2' change of groundwork is much more work than expected. Always. To get to the goods, you will have to wait even longer. An EGS 'version 2' even with the old team and resources would need a long windup phase. Because - Even if you know what you want to do, and where the pitfalls are, you can't just take code and translate it. Stuff works differently, and ironing out all those pesky little stumbling blocks of another game engine will need time. A lot of it. ('how do they name the function x here?! Why can't I do just 'y'?' ) ... Time, which really means money. ... Which you won't make much, if you don't get investors (see above) or your old product is gaining enough traction that it 'only' needs some less complex updates here or there to grow. (Kerbal Space?) - There are other game studios, with the same business model, who had success. Maybe emulate them, instead of the newcomer with the deep pockets. Your profile pic is from Subnautica. If any development boost is needed, then maybe take that game as a reference? ... Developed in a 'smaller' team, in early access, on a seemingly modest budget (but still a bigger team?) ... Included gameplay 'meat and bone' for the Streamers, which became their inofficial sales people. Which got more people interested, fuelling the game's growth... EGS seems to be mostly not well known yet. - - On every 'space game' people tend to think of other games first, and it is constantly compared with other games, even if the gameplay is vastly different! (But, Subnautica has a much smaller scope, but that done really well. Hard to do with EGS, since it seems to strive for 'freedom among the stars'.) - I'm not sure, if more pressure is the way to get stuff going faster. Likely, it will just break more. Sorry. You forget the EGS marketing fubar that the dropping of the early access logo left on steam reviews. It was just a name change, the game and its development is the same. - Players weren't amused anyway, because it evoked too many fears. - Or, what happened to other games with some business decisions (Epic game store?).Steam included a way to hide such protest votes, because of their influence. Even if you already paid, players still have a lot of leverage. And - - The Devs seem to be motivated, and definitively are long-term committed (5? years now?) - - So it's probably the marketing/sales...? ... If the flower grows too slow, I guess it won't help if you try to yank it up a bit... Can you link a video with a nice planet...? - Asking for a friend (To be honest, I have trouble finding some footage. :/ Their space view, canyons and atmosphere effects look nice, but the planetary textures...?! Biomes? They have a higher terrain shape resolution, and -seemingly - very deep voxel surfaces. Tech is impressive, yes, but the looks...?)
Somebody said "subscription" ?... no thanks. I will not touch a game with this model even with a kilometer long pole
This is just a devs thing. As I keep bringing up Minecraft and 7 Days to Die, they inform their community what they are working on. They even upload videos of what they are doing. Great communication, so their players are happy to wait for changes. Here we get "It's on the list." and that's it.
In modern computer game development, the concepts of "number of developers" and "business model" have nothing to do with the quality of the game and the final result - this has been fully proven by the releases of recent years from all sorts of famous companies with their "AAA" \ "BBB" \ "CCC" projects. It also does not affect the development speed of the game (welcome to Star Citizen). Empyrion's success and niche is the current development strategy: - a small team of friendly developers - good communication with the community - voluntary help of volunteers in additional game content and refinement of basic features This is the way! (c) Mandalorian P.S. For the past two years, I've been looking forward to a miracle from Dual Universe - and waited for a buggy lagodrome, created to drain money every month. Minus one hope.
Another concern I would have with a subscription model would be the armchair "developers" coming out of the woodwork and causing even more delay.
Subscriptions make sense for MMOs with constant development. They need to run servers that allow thousands of players to connect at the same time to each server. They need to maintain regular content and tech updates. I don't mind paying a subscription fee for that. It makes far less sense for a game like this where it's single player or run on private servers. A subscription based model just doesn't work for many game types, including empyrion.
To be more accurate : both Unity and Unreal are C++ based engines (the source code), but the main "scripting" language for Unity is C# (can be Javascript, Boo etc) and for Unreal it's still C++. If someone wants to use C++ in Unity, they can do it by making C++Dlls then access these with wrapper functions that have to be made in C#. In Unreal there is no need to go that extra step and that can make a difference performance-wise. I think @Needleship 's post was on point regarding how unefficient it can be to change code base compared to keep refining what already exists, but I think we agree on that anyway. Neither Unity or Unreal have "native voxel engines" and both require using plugins, some of which that even work on both engines. The whole idea of Early Access is to get the money upfront, based on trust upon what has been advertised. I hardly see how a "distrusting gamer" could accept that a developer uses the Early Access "upfront" to get started, then just leave the cake half-baked and opt for a V2 "subscription". I think @ravien_ff described it accurately in a post.
Don't really know how to vote because it's highly conditional. Empyrion 2 would be great but, only after they finish this one. Unless it is subscription based, then I won't touch it. As ravien_ff said, it makes sense for MMOs but, for a game like this, it will cost Eleon dearly both in terms of income and playerbase. Contrary to popular belief, competitive online gamers is actually a tiny minority of the overall gaming community (more than half of the world's gamers don't even have reliable internet access). Casual/hobbyist gamers tend to avoid subscriptions and microtransactions like the plague.
Sure, the number of developers isn't everything. As you say there are plenty of awful "AAA" rip-offs as examples. But if it was "nothing" as you say, the market would be dominated by one-person teams. Team size doesn't guarantee a good game, but on a big ambitious project like Empy, there is going to be a huge array of tasks to do, which will take years unless you have the people and hours to get them done at a good pace. I share the love of the small team succeeding, but saying team size isn't correlated with completion time is fantasy.
To be honest, I still haven't seen most of the points I raised addressed - that we've got good value for money from Empyrion, but if we want a game with all the features that are often discussed, the project needs a major change in direction and pace. We haven't been ripped off by Empyrion, it's obviously been good value for money. But if we want the features and polish that constantly is requested in this forum, the devs need to upgrade the team. That costs money, and a commitment to some sort of specific goal from both the devs and the community. Other people want to express a general sentiment on where we "should" be, but I'd like to focus on what will actually deliver the features and polish. People complain a lot about those things, but rarely have much constructive to add beyond a demand for the features themselves. It's just not going to work - same action same results. The strange obsession with the one paragraph suggesting subscriptions seems to be crowding out actual discussion about how the game could improve its path. It's a little frustrating. Or perhaps many people feel the game is on the path to its full potential in a reasonable time frame. I don't agree, the game could be much more than it currently is, but I think at least that would be consistent.
Different Genre - MMO: SWTOR Development started in October 2008 (I joined in Dec.2008)- Two Year before that a Team of 12 Fulltime Writers took on to write the Storyline. The Team -120 Programmers- were from the two of the Best Game Companies of their Time: BIOWARE and LUCASARTS. It took them THREE Years to finish the Product, a FULL Subscription Game at this time with more than 1 Million Subscribers in the first three weeks. (All Extensions since have been FREE) The game is in its 9th Year and has now over 8 Million Players/subscribers. https://mmo-population.com/r/swtor Not so its predecessor SWG: For each character you wanted to create you had to buy ONE GAME COPY (I bought 4 Copies)- For each Game Extension we had to pay. Still... EGS needs to be finished FIRST...than run for a few Years...and after some time considerations may be started for a "V 2.0".
This is just speculation, as no one knows how they manage their budget and if they do/ do not hire specific "talents" for some time or particular aspects of development. What is needed is more time, either with a bigger team or not. We also have to understand that - in the spirit of what you wrote - the game can't be "everything everyone asked for" because no game does that - not one game. Sure, "everything is possible" but in the actual context, seeing how even big studios fall short on many apparently "basic issues", I'm far from being convinced that having a bigger team would "force" results. It would cost more, and that's about the only certainty we can have.
Increasing the size of the team always leads to the forced search for additional funds to pay these new disinterested team members. Obligations to find money finally turn the production of a game from an interesting task to a hard, annoying job. Commitments to deadlines do the same. As a small example - the wonderful game Astroneer, where they also decided to expand the staff of developers and attract new people. As a result, these new people spoiled the very idea of the game and turned it into an online shop with holiday hats and other useless stuff. All effective managers who reduce any game project to increasing the size of the team and coming up with sophisticated models of making money should burn in hell.
SONY did it with Star Wars Galaxies, EA does it with SWTOR and Disney does it with Star Wars as a whole today....
I don't know that specific situation so it's a little difficult for me to respond. But it does sound equally plausible that they were unable to achieve the goals they set out in the project, had to take on more people to realistically achieve them, and found their playerbase was unwilling to understand the true cost of things, and so the end result of a desperate search for revenue was a crappy hat store. Again no-one is saying team size is everything, but if I understand correctly you appear to be saying its nothing. Sometimes its necessary to get all the tasks at hand done, and gamers would get what they want more if they supported that a little better. Games take work and cost money. It's not clear that team size is the problem in these cases. Those are all publishers not studios, ones not exactly known for labours of love, and I'd suggest that Eleon could increase its staff size ten fold and still fit in those company's broom closets. It's not a danger of them becoming like that any time soon. It is a danger they don't deliver the features both they and we want in a reasonable timeframe, and I submit the years of repeated popular feature requests in the suggestions section as good evidence of that. Again not blaming anyone, I don't have knowledge of why we're on that path, just want to stimulate everyone to have a realistic discussion about the situation and how it might change.
I get the sense you agree that there are some features that have been desirable for quite a long time, but haven't been achieved. If this was a giant studio, I'd say that it would be no sure thing that a lack of resources was the problem. But as we know Eleon is unusually small, and given there have been few suggestions as to other causes, isn't it reasonable to assume this may be a strong factor? I mean I'd sort of like a level of assurance that it is the problem from the team before we all throw money at it, but what else do people feel the problem is exactly? Before dismissing this I think it would be good to actually present the other hypothesis for comparison and subject them to at least as much scepticism.
@Needleship Thanks for the detailed comment. I'd like to respond, but at the moment I just feel bombarded by mildly hostile comments on both discord and here, and your comment is quite detailed, so I'll have to get back to you later.
In my opinion, it's hard to say why features have been on the list for so long. I don't see lots of communication from the devs. We usually just see what they have changed when an update comes out. As was pointed out to me, with regards to the crosshair, when they were in the process of changing it, they asked peoples opinions on the change. Most of the feedback was negative and the current crosshair was better. The devs totally ignored the feedback and went ahead with the change anyhow. As far as I know there was no explanation for this. Feedback is a bit sparse with Empyrion, I feel. Maybe they should take a page from the 7D2D team and have Q&A sessions, then they can tell people what is feasible or not.
