You're probably looking at this title wondering what I mean. I'll be very blunt.
BYOND needs to stop micromanaging developer projects. It's one of the reasons why most experienced developers do not come on here anymore. Right now, a certain user who I will not name, said it best: BYOND is trying to be like Steam and a Gaming Engine at the same time. Because of this, BYOND is heading into a bad situation, and we can all see that. No new feature will stop that. So, this is what i propose:
1. Remove the pager/engine connection
Most players who want to play BYOND games have to use the BYOND pager. On top of that, they need a BYOND account to play the game. This is utterly dumb. Not only does it discourage new players from joining, it hurts the engine as well. You can say the webclient is a better alternative to bypass this, however, the webclient isn't up to par (it's being developed nicely, but it's going to take awhile) and most people use Dream Seeker anyways to play.
2. Allow people to use BYONDexe behind a paywall
Very simple. BYONDexe is only available right now if Lummox deems your game "acceptable". That's one guy's opinion. You might have a different vision of what is fun. If Lummox doesn't think it'll work, he won't give you the program. I would say give BYONDexe out for free, but it would hinder BYOND in profit. Hell, BYOND membership exists, how about we make that relevant again and include this as a perk? There's a big issue most developers have with this, and that would be to surplus of fan-games. This leads to my next topic, and probably will be a very controversial one:
3. Remove the HUB
That's right, I said it. Developers, BYOND should NOT have to market your game. They are an engine, not a marketing tool. It's YOUR job to advertise games. Not theirs. With the removal of the HUB, BYOND wouldn't recieve backlash from copyrighted IPs. Only the developer of the game would. Fan-games happen in any engine, and this is what most engines do to combat it. Why should BYOND be any different?
I'm sure you guys can come up with more ideas, but for now, I feel like these 3, albeit big changes, would improve BYOND for the better, rather than hinder it. You decide (To Nadrew/Lummox, do not lock this thread as soon as you see it. I want to get a discussions started with BYOND members and see if their in support of this).
ID:2148071
 Sep 15 2016, 10:51 am
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Sep 15 2016, 10:56 am
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Ss4gogeta0
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Rip thread. so many stupid ideas...
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+1. The way I see byond in its current state is more of a hobby to lummox and not an actual business. Lummox is an developer not an publisher. The way it feels now is that we are tied to the BYOND website and Pager which is a mess, we need to get away from all this shit. Let us use BYOND engine and leave this place. So we can go make our own websites and games the way we want to.
Remove HUBs, Remove PAGER, Stop telling us what to make. Make BYOND a standalone ENGINE(BUSINESS MARKET HIRE SOMEONE JESUS.) with a Simple Forum for BYOND ENGINE development nothing more nothing less. Done. | |
Why is HUB being used as an acronym? Or are you shouting hub at me?
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TBH I agree with all of this. The real problem is that we're at a stage where we'd be starting over at zero. Our existing community keeps us alive with ad revenue, but it also keeps us from growing because of the cancer that is the hub.
Except for this: You might have a different vision of what is fun. If Lummox doesn't think it'll work, he won't give you the program It's less about what Lummox thinks is "fun", and more about whether Lummox trusts you to actually follow the licensing agreement. For the most part, the people running fangames are all giant, untrustworthy pieces of shit, which is why they aren't getting access to BYONDexe. It's not about what you are making, it's about whether Lummox thinks that you will actually disclose and share the percentage of the revenue that BYONDexe's license agreement requires you to. Anybody that's complained about not being granted access to BYONDexe, here's why: You are a piece of shit. It's not about prejudice based on what you are making. It's just because you are a piece of shit. (EDIT: Don't take the above as gospel. This is my editorialized opinion, not speaking from experience of what Lummox has said. We don't talk about BYONDexe considerations, so this is of course my own interpretation and does not represent BYOND's official stance.) | |
You can already disconnect from the hub, pager, and key systems if you want. That's entirely up to the developer.
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Well it's about damn time.
It's been a while since we had ourselves a good ole "BYOND needs" thread. Let's skip to the part where we all call each other names and the thread gets locked. [edit] Nevermind, 3 responses in and Ter is already calling people pieces of shit so we're on the right track. | |
You can't disconnect from the pager (BYOND installation, splash screen, and splash advertisement) unless you acquire a BYONDexe key for your published hub.
A bit of controversy that's come up in the Discord is the fact that fangames are monetized by splash ads, even though the fangames themselves can't/shouldn't be monetized at all. In order for a fangame to not have splash ads, it has to only be distributed by BYONDexe, which is conveniently not available to fangames. Conspiracy!? | |
You can actually remove the need for the pager by using client/authenticate, but this won't remove the advertisements (you'll use a Guest key), but yeah, to be fully disconnected you'd have to use the standalone.
This is where other engines charge for licenses, but instead BYOND has a free-to-use version that has the ads and whatnot, not entirely unlike other engines with free versions that show their logo all over creations made with them. We could definitely remove the ads from things, if said things utilized absolutely no part of BYOND's bandwidth, no hub, no medals, no scores, etc etc... Of course we'd have to tack 'Made with BYOND' all over those things unless they paid a license fee, if we wanted to continue making enough money to exist. | |
This is where other engines charge for licenses, but instead BYOND has a free-to-use version that has the ads and whatnot, not entirely unlike other engines with free versions that show their logo all over creations made with them. Unity, Unreal, Game Maker, and probably many more of the most popular game engines today don't charge for building a standalone game; and none of them force advertisements into anyone's games. I know that Unity has a revenue cap for their free editions, but it's so high ($100k+) that you might as well spend it. Unreal takes a 5% of all your earnings after the first $3k. BYOND always takes some amount of all your earnings (from subscriptions or hub credits), and always shows splash advertisements to all non-BYOND members not using a BYONDexe build. I know that you have to pay to get rid of the Unity splash screen, which is only shown once, every time the game is started. Some people like having "Made with Unity" as part of their splash, too. I wouldn't mind having a "Made with BYOND" splash that you could pay for the option to remove (BYOND membership benefit? Of course, I would personally prefer to keep it in). We could definitely remove the ads from things, if said things utilized absolutely no part of BYOND's bandwidth, no hub, no medals, no scores, etc etc... Of course we'd have to tack 'Made with BYOND' all over those things unless they paid a license fee, if we wanted to continue making enough money to exist.As far as I know, BYONDexe requires a hub page in order to work, and includes hub integrations like server listings and subscription checking in the (optional) launcher. That might need some tweaking before it could be offered to games that agree to not use any of the hub services. So if you want to make a game using the BYOND engine that has no ties to BYOND at all, you'd need to only be able to distribute it with an equivalent of BYONDexe, and your access to hub services would have to be limited; all the hub-related procs and vars, e.g. world.SetScores(), client.IsSubscribed(), etc., would have to be disabled. Ideally, this would just be a simple compiler flag. | |
Unity and other larger engines also have millions of dollars in capital to piss away by offering things like that. BYOND did that for a long time, remember?
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EmpirezTeam wrote:
Well it's about damn time. I know what you mean by the annoyance that are these kind of threads. I couldn't really point it out any other way besides being blunt. If you ask me, it's a better idea than bringing back blogs or whatever dumb feature this site had in the past. Is it a big change? Yes. Could I be talking over my head and dreaming the impossible? Absolutely, I'm not going to sit here like any of these other users and say "It would work, you need to believe and put money towards it!". Right now, the formula for BYOND has been the same for awhile. We're not exactly "dying" but we aren't getting better. Why not try to change it up? Hell, if it fails, we can go back to the old formula. | |
Ter13 wrote:
TBH I agree with all of this. The real problem is that we're at a stage where we'd be starting over at zero. Our existing community keeps us alive with ad revenue, but it also keeps us from growing because of the cancer that is the hub. I actually wasn't talking about fan-games on that one specifically. I meant original games that he doesn't view are "up to par". I agree fan-game developers have ruined the chance of it going public (being someone who did make a fan-game, their community is very childish. Hell, I can even stoop to their level at times.) | |
If you want to make a game that doesn't have a splash advertisement and doesn't require downloading the BYOND suite, you either have to make it with BYONDexe (requires a published hub and Lummox's approval), or else you simply can't use BYOND. So, as usual, the bottom line is: if you don't like what BYOND provides today, then definitely consider using something else, such as Unity. I'm pretty sure Tom said almost exactly this, multiple times.
BYOND's belief seems to be that games that aren't eligible for BYONDexe wouldn't benefit BYOND enough if they were distributed standalone without splash ads and a link back to the site. If BYONDexe were put back behind a paywall (e.g. BYOND Membership benefit, or a one-time payment of $50-$100 per hub or per key), without any hub- or content-related limitations, would anyone actually pay for it? | |
I meant original games that he doesn't view are "up to par". Name one that got declined for the EXE, including the developer's name, and I'll quote a piece of shit's name. I know of two, and calling those games original is laughable. The developers? Pieces of shit. | |
[edit] Nevermind, 3 responses in and Ter is already calling people pieces of shit so we're on the right track. I'm weak. | |
Ter13 wrote:
I meant original games that he doesn't view are "up to par". That's the thing, I don't know. What I'm saying is Lummox is a good guy. However, every human has emotions, and if one day Lummox said "Fuck it" it would fuck over many original games (not fan-games that look like original games, which is what I think you were alluding to in your post) then again, if he did say "fuck it" he's probably not work on BYOND again. If a certain user pissed him off, he could bar them from the exe as well. That's what I'm referring to. I'm not trying to start arguments. I'm just giving my opinion. It's like the kid at school who has cool Japanese candy. He'll give anyone a piece if they ask, but if they step on his toes (whether it be just different opinions or worse), he won't give it. Why not just put the candy in a vending machine? | |
In terms of feasibility, it isn't realistic to consider such large changes all at once. This only results in vague speculation and doesn't actually get anywhere. It's best to think of the most immediate small changes that will move things one step closer to the goal. That way, even if the goal seems unreachable, improvements can still be made.
The hub's existence is only a symptom of the underlying problem. Suddenly removing it will only make things worse. A far better plan would be to make the BYOND hub obsolete. It might make sense for BYOND worlds to have built-in features that allow them to function as hubs themselves. This means the communication between a game server and its chosen hub server would be handled automatically. This would open up all kinds of crazy possibilities. Many hub servers would be games at the same time, and some might be listed in hubs themselves. It would be an interesting experiment to see if a decentralized, distributed hub system would become more popular than the official one. If so, BYOND would have less to worry about and the community would have a lot more potential to grow. Do you think something like this could work? | |
WorldWideDuelist wrote:
if one day Lummox said "Fuck it" I agree with WWD. If Lummox ever says "fuck it", we're all fucked. | |
It is within Lummox's best interests to approve as many original games as possible for the BYONDexe--remember, he gets royalties from these games. So long as the game doesn't violate copyright, that is.
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