Category: gratuitous space battles

I had plans to do another GSB expansion pack, with a new race, much like the Nomads.

And then….

GTB has basically taken over. Combine it with ShowMeTheGames (which isn’t getting enough attention as it is) plus lots of home-life related building-stuff, and I just am not getting enough sleep. But I do have

• Lots of GSB players
• An artist willing to make new GSB ships.

I like to maintain control of stuff, so farming out DLC production to someone else is probably a ‘no’ right now. The thing is, the time taken to make new damage textures, new weapons, balance them, and do the whole package would be a bit of a nightmare.

So I was thinking, especially on this day that Team Fortress 2 goes ‘Free To Play’, that maybe micro-transactions are the future, and I should just leap into the market for them with GSB. I could get new ship hulls made, and designed, and have them sold as mini-DLC. Of course, the problem there is that there are minimum credit-card fees that I get charged, so anything below $4 is basically a disaster in terms of profit, making the whole thing unviable.

So I am scratching my chin thinking how viable it is to just do a bunch of extra base-race ships for GSB and sell them as a $4 mini-DLC booster pack. New federation, alliance, rebel and empire ships, by the original artist. That would take fairly minimal work, compared to the design of a whole new race. But would it make any sense? would there be a market for it?

Would you pay $4 for a bunch of new ships? I know a lot of people would not be interested, but there don’t have to be thousands of people for it to break even.

Here is a question for you. For how long after the release of a game do you think there should still be support for online features to that game?

I’m not talking MMO games here, obviously that should continue all the time any sort of subscription fee is being charged. I’m talking about games where you buy it once, and you own it, but part of the game is online. Like Guild Wars (although that’s all online) or, to a smaller extent: Gratuitous Space Battles.

Gamers are rightly angry when they suspect the servers for a game get shutdown just to encourage you to buy this years copy. EA are great at that, as I recall. The thing is, we can probably agree that if a game hasn’t sold a single copy in ten years, turning off the server is just fine. It’s silly to suggest otherwise. We also all know that most evil EULAs indicate the servers can be turned off when they fancy it, so it’s not a legal issue either.

What we lack, as an industry, is any sort of expectations or standards for this. If I buy Guild Wars today, and the server is turned off in 6 months time, is that just tough for me arriving late? Or is it understandable?

We could argue that as long as one person has bought the game in the last six months, the game should still be running, but what if that person bought the game in a steam sale or pay what you want deal for just $0.10. Still reasonable?

I guess to me, one benchmark would be profitability. If the server costs $100 a month to rent, and the game isn’t bringing in $100, it seems fair to axe it, although even then, what if 8 people bought it yesterday for $10 each?  It seems right now a long way off for me to worry about that. GSB made much more than $100 yesterday, let alone this month, and as a fraction of the server costs, it probably doesn’t cost $100 a month to run anyway. Also, the server is busy:

New challenges posted in last 24 hours: 48
Challenge victories in the last 24 hours: 143
new survival mode scores in the last 24 hours: 6
challengevictory: 170

This will not last forever though. When sounds reasonable to you as a gamer?

****Note: I can’t see the GSB server being shutdown deliberately before 2015 at this rate, so don’t panic :D****