Talking With Customers (or potential ones)

379 thoughts on Talking With Customers (or potential ones)

1. I followed your blog with great interest all along the development of GSB but always thought “this isn’t quite my kind of game.” Then recently I tried the demo and indeed ascertained this isn’t quite my thing (I mostly suck at strategy and am more into RPGs). Thought about just buying it then because I find you’ve done a stellar job and I’d like to promote indies like you, but at it’s current price, it is a bit much for just-buying-it IMO. Next promo I’m definitely in, though :)

2. I have a very very very big back catalogue of games to play.

   GSB looks very cool but I haven’t even had the time to try out the demo. I guess that means for me personally, it looks like a cool and interesting game but (for me personally) not cool and interesting enough to jump the queue infront of everything else. PS Strategy games are probably about my third or fourth favorite genre, so it’s probably nothing wrong with your game or maketing, but with my own personal tastes and interests.

3. Last year I moved to a mac, and as interesting as GSB looks, I’m not interested enough to run a vm or reboot into windows.

4. I echo the first poster’s situation. I love your blog and your insights, and I want you to succeed. However, as beautiful a game as GSB, it’s just not “for me” right now. I tried the demo, and while it was fun, it also seemed like there was a lot of thinking and strategy required to succeed, which would have been great before I had two kids, but I just don’t have the free attention to put into this kind of game now. I would consider buying it at a lower price just to support you as an indie, but the current price is a bit more than I want to pay for, essentially, a happy feeling when I read your blog.

   It’s possible that a tight narrative would inspire me to play GSB and learn just enough of the stats to move forward, since (again like the first poster), I’m a sucker for a good story. However, I think then it would be a different game, even if it would be more “for me”.

   By contrast. I recently bought the Humble Indie Bundle, even though I had two of those games and only really wanted one more. I happily gave them $20 because it was supporting lots of indies, a few charities, open sourced game engines, and the philosophy multiplatform games.

   Thanks for the blogging, by the way. Long-time reader, first-time poster.

5. I should not post here, because I bought it. I really wanted to support your work. However I will tell why I don’t play your game:
   – The interface makes me fell that it is made out of cardboard. I don’t know why… maybe the look and feel, maybe some glitches, or inconsistances. It gives the feeling that you wanted to add a LOT of things, without polishing enough what was there.
   – I find the learning curve steep. Not that the game is complicated, but the relation with the weapons are not obvious and nothing ingame is made to teach it. I would have expected a step by step tutorial, starting with just a 1 or 2 ships, explaining each modules one after the other (with one mission each…). And slowly grow in scale of fights. Players could organise that with online challenges. But finding those if they exist is already a task for an expert. Same with the orders. That’s my main issue.
   – I felt cheated with the system to slow or acceralte the time: when I first saw the screenshots, the arrow poiting to the left let me think that it was possible to rewind the movie. Actually, it means that you slow it down. This is definitely not standard, and raised wrong expectations to me. (the standar icon to slow down, looks more like that : |>)

6. I have bought it by now, but I heard of it during the beta (through penny arcade). I decide not to buy it because it wa made by an indie developor I had never hear of before and who has not produced any big hits. I was afraid you would go bankrupt or something before it went out of beta. After a few months I suddenly thought about it again, and after checking up on it I impulsivly bought it. After first being somewhat dissapointed with the graphics, I returned after a few months and greatly enjoyed it.

7. I did buy your game, and the first 2 expansions. I love it, but hardly ever play it. In all probility, I won’t be buying any other expansions.

   The reason for this is the supported resolutions. I’ve got a big pc which runs the game perfectly, but I’ve hardly got any time to play games at home. Most of my gaming is done on my Samsung UMPC in the 2 hours I spend in public transportation every day. GSB seemed perfect for this, but unfortunately won’t run. The device supports only 800×600 or 1024×600, and GSB won’t run on those.

   Get this fixed and I’ll surely buy the expansions.

   @Anonymous Owlman
   Basically you’re saying that he could get you to buy the game by denying others lots of fun extras?

   You don’t have to get the dlc, you know. The game is complete and lots of fun all by itself. Since you already said you want to enjoy the game, maybe you’d better just buy the game and ignore the fact those expansions exist.

   I find it kind of weird you do have principles against supporting a hard-working indie-developer who makes a game you enjoy, but no principles against damaging said developers industry.

8. I have to admit, I was really excited about this game and have been following the development excitedly ever since you started. But when the demo came out, I guess it didn’t live up to my expectations. Maybe this is because I didn’t play enough, but the game seemed to be less about tactics and more about picking the right ship to counter whatever you’re up against. I guess the reality just didn’t live up to my imagined idealization of the game as “be Napoleon in space”.

   I might still buy the game just because I’ve enjoyed reading about you developing it and I’d like to support you, but $20 seems a little steep merely for moral support.

9. Also, I have a perfectly good copy of Dragon age lying around at the moment that I haven’t had time to play, so investing in new games doesn’t make sense at the moment.

10. I downloaded the demo and played it for a while and had some fun, but haven’t bought the game yet. I’ll see if I can articulate why that is.
    – The demo didn’t run super well on my computer. Maybe it’s because I have a sucky video card, but the screen would flicker sometimes. It looked like it was occasionally drawing a completely black screen. Or maybe the buffering wasn’t working correctly or something. I’m not sure. The game was still fun, but because of this I enjoyed it less.
    – I noticed some weird glitches. Like clicking and dragging to move around the map. Sometimes the mouse up event wouldn’t get caught, so I’d get stuck in pan mode until I clicked again. Again, the game was still fun, but this distracted from my enjoyment.
    – Maybe the demo was too short? What happened with me is I played a couple of games and won. Then tweaked some things and played a few games and lost. And then tweaked things some more and won a few more games. And then I was pretty much done. The whole thing was fun, but it didn’t really suck me in. I wasn’t hooked.
    – Like several others have mentioned, with a family I have a lot less time for gaming than I used to. After playing the demo and seeing how many weapon, armor, etc. combinations are I think subconsciously I decided I didn’t have enough time to deal with all that. I’m the kind of person who would want to find “the best” possible combination of everything. But I knew I wouldn’t want to spend the time necessary to figure it all out. Someone else mentioned some sort of tutorial/component introduction. Maybe that would help, I’m not sure. Maybe it’s just not quite my kind of game? I’m not sure.
    – Some one else mentioned the price. I think that’s part of my problem too. I want to say $23 seems a little high, but it really isn’t all that high. It’s not like I can’t afford $23. Maybe it’s related to how I’m guessing my experience with the game would be? That for what I think I would get out of the game it doesn’t seem worth the money for me? But that’s not necessarily it either. Because I think I would enjoy the game for much longer than a couple of movie tickets’ worth of enjoyment. So yeah, I don’t know exactly. But I think if there were some promotion or something where the price were lower I’d be more likely to buy it.

    Sorry. I know most of those reasons aren’t very concrete or logical. But I thought I’d try to help explain why I haven’t purchased the game yet. And again, I want to re-iterate, I think the game is fun and I think you’ve done wonderful stuff. But I just haven’t felt compelled to buy yet for whatever strange and bizarre reasons.

11. Because my only laptop of sufficient spec is an Ubuntu box and as much as I wish you well, I’ve not the time or inclination to set up a vm or duel boot just for a game.

12. I’ve recently been sorely tempted to buy it from Impulse (50% off at the moment).

    However a two things stopped me;

    one, you’re working on an expansion (so whats the point of buying a ‘complete’ edition if its not going to be complete in a few months time).

    two, one thing that puts me off the game is that it really is just two fleets grinding each other down. There does not appear to be any variation in *how* they fight. This is quite off-putting to be honest.

    On a third note, I don’t have any money coming in so buying things has to be justified at the mo, but this wasn’t the case a few months ago, so it didn’t affect my decision not to buy before now.

    BTW though, I really like 2D games like this. 3D isn’t all its cracked-up to be.

13. I nearly bought GSB after playing the demo. However, an hour on a friend’s full copy dissuaded me. For a game with such a narrow focus, I expected a lot better balance and more interesting missions. A giant swarm of fighters or blob of plasma cruisers wins every mission, and cheaper than fancy strategies. I didn’t feel any sense of advancement, in terms of getting more interesting/powerful stuff in-game or in my skill. I really wanted to like the game, but for these reasons I got bored very fast and decided not to buy.

    But the game is beautiful, with a lot of potential. If the campaign fixes the balance a bit and gives a greater feeling of variety and advancement, I will definitely give it another shot.

14. Cliff,

    Regarding GSB, i’m like many waiting for the Mac version, however if when it comes it’s only the initial game, and there are clear plans to port the campaign dlc to the Mac, then i’ll probably give it a miss since it’s the campaign mode which really appeals to me.

    Regarding Kudos (1 i think), played the demo, couldn’t get into it, couldn’t really discern the point of the game.

    Bought both Democracy 1 and 2, loved them both, would love a D3.

15. Ater trying out the demo I realised that it would need too much time to fully learn the game and really come to a point of kind of mastering it.

    Simply, raising a family reduces the available time.

    But, as hardy24 said, I’d love a Democracy 3 (especially with a third party added)

16. In the demo – I just made one random ship with random weapons and put this ship 10 times in each mission and guess what? I won all missions on first try on all difficulties. (If i remember well – that ship didn’t even have engines.. why buy engines when an enemy comes to you?)

    I was enjoying the show in the first battle, but after that, I just put speed on max and went to get a cup of a tea.. it was just repeating over and over again..

    Why would I buy it? for more repetition?

    (sry for my english :) )

17. GSB looks like my kind of game, but I haven’t even tried the demo. I just know I wouldn’t have the time to play it. Democracy2 I played two times, lost both times and lost interest. Rock Legend I beat on the first try, decided to go on after the end, my band disbanded, I got it back together, and got back to about the same “greatness”. So a beat that game thoroughly, and lost interest that way. I just can’t invest in such a game. :)

18. I wanted to fly pilot view in the space battle with a joystick

19. I bought GSB, but none of the expansions.

    The reason I didn’t buy the expansion is that it just seems like more ship and few more part. I enjoyed the game, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as I would have liked.

    I’m a big fan of 4x space game, from a former space empire player, master of Orion and galactic civ games and sin of solar empire. To me your battle and customization are great, they are on par or better than those games for most part. Not having the larger meta games does hurt, as a comparison if your a fan of FPS, your game is just a bunch of single shooting galleries type level thing nothing connecting them. If your an rts player, it just playing skirmish against AI, and not a single player campaign.

    When I look back at the 4x space games i play, i had fun making ships and making empire was fun, but combat was dull, with exception of Master of Orion 2 and sin of solar empire. The reason I think that is, you actually have more input during the fight of who to attack and movement, where galactic civ and other are pretty much auto calc and GSB is auto calc, but you can do pre adjustment to alter the calculations.

    As I write this, I guess I was hoping for fleet combat, but same time a ship I could call my own. A 2d version of starfleet command with larger battles is the simplest thing I can think of. That you create battle plan, but your flag ship is your own or like the battles in total war series but sci fi, and with ship and customization.

    Regardless you did a great job, and I will continue watching for updates and future games for potential purchase.

20. Because I believed, perhaps wrongly having read your blog posts on DRM, that GSB was riddled with nasty DRM:

    http://jedibeeftrix.wordpress.com/2010/03/20/drm-in-pc-games-%E2%80%93-how-to-get-it-right-and-what-ubisoft-did-instead/

21. Hi there,

    “I wanted a campaign wrapped around the battles.”

    That pretty much hit the nail on the head for me. I’ve been hoping some company would come along and pay you and your cats a fat wad of cash to build a tactical combat engine for a larger, turn-based 4X space strategy game. I’d pre-order that.

22. It comes down to time, frankly. I like to support indie developers and buy from them when I can, but when I haven’t even had time to try out the new Sins of a Solar Empire add-on or complete Dawn of War 2 yet, among probably a dozen other games, it’s hard to go looking for new games off the radar.

    Throw in that I also play RPGs and FPS games and I’m just buried under releases with no time to play them

    It sucks that gaming has such quality mainstream and indie circles… not enough time!

23. I played the demo and found the game overly complicated. I was overwhelmed by the massive amounts of information, only to later realize (again, this is from demo play only) that i can progress in the game fairly easily by doing stuff on random.

24. I was keen to like the game but in the end couldn’t manage it. I found from the demo that it was _very_ hard to correlate changes I made to ships to the success they had in battle. It’s a while since I played but I seem to remember it wasn’t obvious which ship was which design, either. There was loads of chatty humourous feedback in the game; if it had been more informative I’d probably have bought as it’s just the sort of game I like usually.

    In summary – while the screen was full of things going on, I couldn’t tell what was really happening.

25. A campaign wrapped around the battles would be nice, so I have some reason to care.

    Also something about the battles just felt like rock, paper scissors..and being able to replay knowing the opponent is going to do the same the next time.

    Another thing is the graphics/effects both didn’t feel exciting enough to me AND it was a bit hard to tell what was going on. Analytically, I can see you did a lot of work in this area, and I really can’t suggest any improvements. It’s a tough problem.

26. I bought it because it’s awesome :)

    Cliffski, if only more developers had your kind of cahones.

27. Cliff,

    I was going to buy GSB but I had been waiting for Supreme Commander 2 and I knew that would take up my Spring so put off the purchase and then when Steam announced they were making a Mac OS X version of Steam I stopped buying games altogether. When Steam did debut I erased my bootcamp partition and ended my Windows gaming completely. Between the games I’ve already purchased on Steam that have mac versions and the beta for Starcraft 2 I haven’t been lacking for something to play but I would buy GSB in a minute if you had a Mac OS X version.

28. I’d buy a gold edition for about $10 to $15 on sale via steam. even then I’d probably never play it, or at least not for a long time. As is I have too much stuff to play on steam.

    Right now although the game concept looks interesting the DLC extras are annoying.

    For examples of good DLCs, look at defense grid. I’ll be picking those 4 up.

    Another issue is cost. It is not a matter of cheapness, but of comparative value.

    Defense grid costs $10 now. Supreme commander is on sale for $11. Is your game twice as good as those? It might be, but really I have no clue, and I don’t want to download a demo to find out.

    Defense grid had a lot of great reviews. Supcom2 was trashed heavily, but I enjoyed the previous two so I picked it up.

    Are any of my friends talking about this game in various “what game are you playing now?” threads? Uh… no. If they were that might be more incentive to take a risk and pick it up.

    Anyway good luck, hope you figure out something that works.

29. I thought it would be an arcade game, but it wasn’t and I don’t like strategy games.

30. Simply an issue of budget. Everything about the game, from the game itself to the price is fine, I just have to pick and choose wisely. Your game drew the short straw this time around. It doesn’t mean I won’t pick it up in the future, but for now it’s on the back burner.

31. Before I saw this posting on bluesnews.com I had never heard of your game. Sorry.

32. I have limited time, and do all my indie game shopping on Steam.

    It’s not on Steam.

    Ergo….

33. 1) The name sounded lame.

    2) Not on Steam.

    3) Never heard of it.

34. I heard about the game and it sounded interesting, but there are so many games competing for my limited time that I did the same thing I always do…ignore it until I happen to hear how awesome it is. Sometimes that may come from a friend, or sometimes from a website I trust, but often, as in this case, I never heard that much about it.

    The sad thing is that I realize better than most how unfair this is. I am the founder of a game studio that made an excellent game for PlayStation Network. The game is hugely popular among the players that own it, and it seems like it had every potential to be a big hit. However I continually hear that people haven’t heard of it and they only buy games their friends have endorsed. It’s all about word of mouth but does that mean we should we have pushed harder on PR or game quality? Hard to say.

35. This may be almost as useful:

    Why DID I buy GSB?

    I’ll try to recall it in chronological order:

    1.Heard the name, and it was unorthodox and catchy.
    2.Saw screenshots, and it looked cool and unlike anything currently available.
    3.Read about the mechanics, and it sounded interesting.
    4.Told friends, and one said he’d seen it and was thinking about buying it.
    5.(Long wait)
    6.Playable Beta with preorder, only $20. From that point, I’m on board.

    It may be worth noting that I believe strongly in financially supporting creators (games or not, indie or not) that make things I enjoy. If I don’t, they might stop making things I enjoy!

    We did this exercise at Double Fine several times – “why did you NOT buy game X?” It’s fascinating and quite useful. Our informal conclusion was that the day-to-day development decisions had little to do with actual sales. It’s about the big things – art style, primary game mechanics, marketing, and word of mouth. That was a little sad, because you like to think in game development that every little thing you do will contribute meaningfully to a game’s success. Unfortunately, that’s probably not the case.

36. Cliff,

    The main reason why I didn’t purchase the game was:

    1. The strategy seemed limited. It was all about planing and then watching a show. I really felt that the game was limited in terms of play and strategy.

    2. The conclusion of the battles was not YEAH I just did ….. It was OK go back to planning mode and make a tweak or two. Not the I just (digitally) pulled of something.

    3. If it was on Linux it would have been an instant buy, since it is my main OS and I like to support people that support Linux. I pray one day everyone will support OpenGL and less DirectX.

    I really like the way the game looks and feels and I will pick it up when it goes on a big sale on Gamers Gate. You did a great game that I will eventually own.

    -Marc

37. @drew and AJ: It IS on steam, and has been there for quite some time.

38. The reasons I didn’t buy GSB:

    1. It seemed to expensive for what you get. ($20 is too much, for $10 I might have bought it)

    2. Strategic depth appeared shallow

    3. The variety of single player scenarios appeared limited

    4. The differences between the races appeared superficial.

39. I didnt find graphics appealing. Thats its basically. The game lost me at first screenshot i saw of it. I know its shallow, but i do want to experience a world along with cool gameplay. Its not all about gameplay. Immersion is another important factor.

    That said i’ve been playing EvE online for about 3 years now. Almost non-stop.

40. i’ll make this quick :)

    1. multiplayer would have made this fantastic, both co-op and multiplayer with some team play aspect to it – repairing, resupplying, using large ships to shield the sniper ships, defending bases etc.

    2. direct control of atleast some of the ships, or atleast some kind subtle control of the ships during combat (like actually flying a fighter, while other ships are controlled in a RTS point and command method)

    3. all in all i will buy any game that I can LAN/internet play together with my wife – its an instant 2 copies of the game bought :)

    also please make a fast paced stealth game where you play a humanoid ninja cat (preferably british shorthair)

41. I have replied already, but forgot a few things:

    – I don’t like being obliged to login to play custom games. I don’t have that often internet. The internet facility is great to share. But anoying when it is required to things that are built localy.

    – To my taste, there is much more emphasis on the ship design and not enough on the orders/placement. My feeling, is that with the good ship design, all the rest is more comestic than anything else. My heart leans toward something the other way round.

42. Hey Cliff,
    While your game looks cool, I don’t do alot of PC gaming anymore… If GSB were on the Xbox 360 – I’d more inclined to play.

    I also don’t mind 2d games, but a 3d version would be neat. I also am into more story driven games, so the lack of a full campaign ( nothing I read made me think there was one…) is a bit of a buzz kill too.

    But the big killer for me is that it’s not on the platform I do the majority of my gaming on… Looks neat enough – but I work all day on my PC, so I don’t game there at all.

    Good luck and I hope maybe we’ll see GSB on other platforms.

43. oh and one more thing… I know that getting a box game together on the 360 is hard, but doing a XBLA game for $15 or so with DLC content available would open up your game to entirely new market who’s probably never heard of it.

44. Honestly, your pricing for GSB pulls you out of the Indie corner and places you in the mainstream category. $40 is enough to purchase a plethora of current or semi-current titles for either the PC, PS3, or XBOX 360. And lets be perfectly honest, GSB might be a fun ‘indie’ game, but so are Defense Grid, Nation Red, Penumbra, Trine, Sol Survivor, Trials HD, World of Goo, et cetera. Even though not all of these are priced reasonably, they are often on sale at a much more attractive price point for a 1-man or small development team game. A few of them have even partook in the ‘pay what you want’ experiment.

    I’m not saying that is the only way people will buy GSB, but there are a decent amount of indie games available to the public, most to all being cheaper, sometimes by quite a bit. Some might argue you don’t need to purchase the DLCs for GSB, but I would imagine would be taken as a slap in the face to hear. I cannot think of another indie game that charges nearly the same price all of their DLC as the actual game. Defense Grid just released 8 new maps for their game priced at 50¢ each, and the prior 4-map DLC was free. Trine, Nation Red, and others have also added content to their games, free of charge.

    The point I’m trying to make is, if you insist charging $20+ for the base game (Steam, Impulse, etc.) and then another $18 for some additional content all released within 3-4 months, you are pretty much trying to compete with mainstream games. The difference is, they consist of a much larger development house with quite a bit more resources to develop their game. I’m sure you are pleased with all the work you have put into GSB, but your time and effort doesn’t mean much to the average consumer such as myself. All I see is a 1-man team trying to charge way too much for an indie game. What I am looking for is the right bang-for-my-buck and I don’t really care if it comes from the mom-and-pop store or the big corporation. Just because everyone has a dream, doesn’t mean everyone should or will succeed. I tend to think most consumers feel the same way.

    With all of that said, I did enjoy the demo of GSB. Was sort of a unique twist on a battlefield simulator crossed with some tower defense. But for what is offered, I would most likely never go over $15 for the game and DLCs, not in its current state.

45. I just bought GSB. I first played the demo about a year ago and thought “yeah, I like this” but I only bought it now because of your blog asking why I didn’t.
    Why the wait? I play WoW most of the time, and to be honest, anything else needs to be pretty special to pull me away. I like GSB, and bought it to support you and show my appreciation of what you have put together, but to be honest I don’t know if I will actually play it that much.
    This is not in any way suggesting that your game is any less than WoW, just that WoW got in first and sucks up most of my time.
    Maybe you are charging a bit too much for the time I expect to play, but I have much respect for what you are doing and am willing to pay to show that support.

46. I liked the idea of the game, but found i was just not having much fun because the computer played it for me. If I could at least give certain ships commands like:

    “Move to close range” / “fall back to recover”
    “Be more defensive / be more offensive”

    I’d have had more fun. I didn’t have much fun in the design phase, and not enough to buy it.

47. Despite not really liking the demo, I did buy during the Impulse Memorial Day sale – and so far have confirmed my not-liking.

    I am a strategy & rpg gamer, but I find GSB unsatisfying. It strikes me as more of a puzzle game, and one with insufficient feedback: I create a fleet. It fails. Despite the current state of the post-battle statistics, I find it very hard to determine *why* my fleets are failing, or how to improve on them.

    Last week I traveled on business, so had a couple of evenings I expected to devote to GSB – but after coming up with a few designs that failed, then a different few designs that blew away the tutorial and replaying it a few times to see how much honor I could amass, I found that design completely blown away in the first post-tutorial mission. Tweaked it, no luck. Tried changing to different weapons loadouts / ship size mixes, no luck. With no sense of how to improve, quit for the night. Same thing the following night – tried a couple of different weapons loadouts, different mixes of ships, still felt totally stymied by the first post-tutorial mission, quit for the night.

    The humorous descriptions on the various weapons actually hurt more than they amuse, since they force me into fine-grained analysis of the weapon statistics to choose weapons, but there’s no way to get a side-by-side comparison when I’m building a new design; I need to flip back and forth between weapons to compare one or two aspects at a time.

    I may end up buying the campaign anyway, since I (like several early posters) do get drawn in a lot further by strong narrative. I actually planned today to search for a “walkthrough” to get advice on ship design, but haven’t had a block of gaming time.

48. I didn’t like the title, so I didn’t bother to try the demo even though I buy similar games.

49. I have a mac, and as most people stated, I would buy your game only if there’s a golden edition with all the DLC at a reasonable price (for the mac obviously). But I’ve never tried it yet so I’ll check it out when there’s a mac demo.

50. I posted over on Blue’s News, but here it is again:

    Well, all this talk earned a demo download, since I happened to have some free time this evening.

    I stuck with it long enough to “get it”, I think.
    I won’t buy it because I don’t think there’s enough there for me beyond what the demo offers.
    I can see the upgrades and the honor points and the “goal” of beating larger fleets with smaller fleets and unlocking more “stuff”, but I didn’t really feel any compelling reason to pursue it.
    It might be something as simple as setting tiers for completion of a mission – Bronze, Silver, Gold-style affairs to give some sense of how successful your success was, comparatively.
    Beyond that, the demo simply doesn’t allow a person to get into the groove of progression, since nothing’s unlockable, and no enemy presented requires unlockable content. That is to say, “Oh man, they keep annihilating me, I need some new trick up my sleeve. Oh, hey, this EMP weapon is just 3000 honor points – that might do the trick.”

    However, even if I was “hooked”, the price point is higher than I’d be willing to pay. $9.99 is a pretty good point, and you might see a lot of takers. Heck, you could even do one of those “pay what you want” campaigns. I know there’s this concern that pricing your product at a value point could paint it as “cheap”, but this far out, every new sale is probably a sale you wouldn’t have ever had at the current price point.

    That said, would I buy it at $9.99? Would I buy it at any price? Probably not, because it doesn’t seem like the sort of thing I’d rather play than the other things rolling about on my hard drive or available for free on, say, JayIsGames.
    So, again, probably not your target audience. At the moment, I’m more into FPS, sandbox action, adventure, room escape, and retro-platformers.

    Unrelated to the question you asked:
    I liked the tutorial prompts that get you far enough into the experience to get started.
    I felt like the audio tapered off too steeply when zooming out.
    It was difficult to tell which ships were having certain effects. (For instance, someone in the tutorial mission kept hitting me with an EMP device and I was never entirely sure who.)
    It’s fairly straightforward to see how damaged an enemy ship’s hull is, but difficult to know how much (if any) damage is being done to the shields.
    I could have done with a few more lines at the top dedicated to my team’s chatter.
    Sometimes I wanted to keep watching a ship’s stats, only to have them disappear as I clicked to move my view. (Eventually I got in the habit of moving the view by mousing to the edges.)
    It seems more like a toy than a game. (This is not necessarily a bad thing.)
    I think I get the idea behind simply observing battles, and I think it’s a fine decision, but yeah, I guess it does seem a little like a whole bunch of foreplay only to watch someone else have the sex.
    Perhaps a change of title to more accurately reflect the gameplay, say, “Gratuitous Space Battle Manager” or “Interstellar Battle Fleet Tycoon”.

Comments are currently closed.