Not a single contributor among all those players.
Point #4 is the big one here. If some reasonable fraction of BYONDers would just donate a few bucks, we'd be fine. The problem is, we have this situation:
Not a single contributor among all those players. | |
SHAME ON THEM!
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@Point #3
http://signature.ncomproductions.com/ I made this quite some years ago now. It's not as pretty as I'd like but it does a good job -- I'm not much of a 'make it pretty' person. There's a whole framework you can use if you want to fiddle with it yourself, the link is at the bottom of the page.  | |
I know I might get a "Shame on you" for saying this, but why not do some merchandise or something. Zazzle creates clothing and I'm pretty sure you get profit out of it. Plus if people wear clothing in public, it's like free advertisement, to an extent. I'm sure if I didn't know what BYOND was, and I saw someone wearing a shirt with a giant logo that said BYOND and had a quirky little slogan or something, I'd probably try and see what it was.
Just my two cents. I'll try to donate when I get some cash flow though. Been around BYOND long enough that I should donate some (Getting close to 10 years this coming december) to support the cause. | |
Also, have you ever thought about running the website, or certain posts through a translator, or having one of the talented people who are fluent in both English and another language. Portuguese especially would be useful and could see a further increase in users. There are quite a few Brazilian players around BYOND and players from other nationalities. Not having translations to other languages could be one of the reasons why you hardly ever see people who do not speak even a little english as members very often.
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I've suggested this a few times, though I don't think I've made it into a feature request yet. I always get the 'we had a marketplace sort of deal before, and it didn't work'. To which, my response is: It's a different time, with different wants and demands. Newer people with different interest on BYOND. Digital content(like memberships) aren't as appealing to some people as a $17 BYOND logo shirt would be. Still want one with a retro-styled BYOND logo.
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The problem with t-shirts etc. is that the margins are really small and the only people who will buy them are the people who currently buy Memberships. In return, we have another thing to setup and upkeep.
In other words, we can't just rely on the same people to keep contributing. To save this project (or at least meet our rather unambitious goals), we either need a higher percentage of people helping out, or we need to get the word out and bring in more traffic. | |
I have seen alot of people suggest this and I think give it a shot! what is there to lose?
I also suggested that it be a member perk to be able to upload images of their games as products for sale. Byond would get more revenue and members would also get paid for their work and get a new perk so buying memberships would be even more useful. EDIT: By the time I wrote this Tom had responded, I agree with Tom that it would be extra work and that we really need more people, however I think a small store would be really cool and at least bring in some revenue on top of everything else, put more irons in the fire so to speak. | |
The majority of BYOND aren't developers and probably aren't as much fans of the engine as they are their favorite games.
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Thats why I say developers could add art of their games so fans could buy their favorite games t-shirt and not just Byond stuff. Just a thought though.
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Someone mentioned earlier that BYOND should have some merchandise to sell. I don't think that'd be a good idea because then anyone who would've used their money to donate would have instead used it to buy things that Tom and friends would have to pay money to make, which would decrease profits.
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Toddab503 wrote:
1: Bring up more BYOND Top 40 game listing worthy games. If you look at the date each of the Top 40's hubs were created, even on a good day; you're likely going to be surprised how long its been. Sure, there are a handful of awesome games in development that could hit this and change things a lot, but no one knows when they'll be ready, that'll be a while for sure, and the more the better. I'm going to speak pretty freely about how I feel about this and how a number of fellow developers who've left feel about this: There are countless developers, myself included, who are disillusioned with BYOND. I don't want to list names, but I am not alone in this sentiment. Pretty much, it's gotten to the point where I have to design my games around the limitations and constraints of BYOND. I want to add juiciness to my games, but BYOND isn't capable of this over a network with a decent number of players. The same goes for Dynamic Lighting, responsive mouse controls, game physics and particles systems, or even some dynamically drawn graphics (because the time it takes for the server to send resources to the client!). And if I do end up with a game that theoretically does perform well on BYOND, I won't be able to find players for it. BYOND's community has significantly dwindled over the past few months, and outside of the community, BYOND is notorious for terrible network performance and terrible standards of quality; It is difficult to find players from anywhere with a BYOND game. That's how I feel about developing or continuing the development of BYOND games. This is why a lot of talented developers have disappeared over the past few months, and probably over the past few years. I'm only back in this neck of the woods because I saw an interesting contest that was posted on facebook. :/ I would not be surprised if the number of "talented" developers capable of outdoing the current top 40, with the time to do so and still participates in the community, has dwindled to less than a dozen. | |
D4RK3 54B3R wrote:
Toddab503 wrote: If you're that worried about a tiny fraction of the internet not playing your game due to the BYOND tag, then you're free to remove anything that links it with the BYOND brand. This concern doesn't make much sense to me. | |
A lot of people don't realize that with the BYONDexe, you can remove your self from the pager, the community, and even the branding of the development environment (aside from showing a brief credit).
It is true though, the "glitz" factor that makes a lot of successful games fun is missing from BYOND, and isn't easy to accomplish. I suppose the developers feel that your ability to trigger pre-rendered animations using its icon state animation system is enough (unfortunately, its not the same as computer generated particle effects, for example). | |
I'm sorry to hear that D4RK3. The truth is that BYOND is rather outdated (hence why I keep calling it a legacy project) although it does some things well (mainly those kinds of games that don't require twitch responses or lots of simultaneous graphical updates, eg; board games). We attempted to venture into areas we probably shouldn't have with pixel-movement, bigger icons, and so-forth-- the problem there is that the underlying engine fundamentally isn't built for these sorts of things but the features now advocate their usage.
I don't think that the community has dwindled so much recently-- certainly the ratio of good developers to users has declined since the heyday in the early 2000s, but that is probably more of a reflection of the growing demands for Internet attention than the software itself. People who expect BYOND games to be like WoW (or even Angry Birds) are going to be disappointed but I do believe it can still produce fun titles, especially for a single developer. I mean, making games is hard work and some of the stuff people have done here is flat out impressive. But I am sorry that working with BYOND is often an exercise in frustration. If it makes it any better, working on the internals of BYOND is the same way. I hope you stick around. | |
What I believe should be done is have some of the top games be come standalone, and have the developers post said games on popular online game sites (Kongregate, Newgrounds), and in the description describe BYOND and provide a link, so everyone who likes that game can follow the link and discover our little corner of the internet.
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NEStalgia is already standalone.
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1: Bring up more BYOND Top 40 game listing worthy games. If you look at the date each of the Top 40's hubs were created, even on a good day; you're likely going to be surprised how long its been. Sure, there are a handful of awesome games in development that could hit this and change things a lot, but no one knows when they'll be ready, that'll be a while for sure, and the more the better.
2: Bring up some games that have good, and fair BYOND Membership bonuses. It has been years since I've seen any game do this, and yes I could of missed a couple, but it still is necessary. Think about it. People frequently buy $3, $8, $12, and even $20+ Subscriptions to games on here for benefits and/or to support the game; just imagine what they would do if buying a BYOND Membership meant bonuses in MULTIPLE games. Plus, you get $5 for every membership bought your your hub or membership ads.
3: Create our own signatures, and other advertising images and resources that we can put in any blogs we post, forum signatures on forums we actively participate in, and so on. Don't like how BYOND will look to a new user? Put up a web page on your host, or even a free host, make it look good, link to BYOND on it, and make clicking the signature image link to your custom page. BYOND doesn't need to make the best looking web page in the world for us to make the new users like what they see; we can do it ourselves.
4: Donate at least $1-2 per month. This is a trivial amount that many users can do without even noticing. Several could do more, and if they do than fantastic, but if not that's okay; even if we have just 30,000 active users. 25% of 30,000 that is 7,500 users. If they all donated a dollar a month, BYOND would be exceeding its monthly goal with ease, and we all know at least a few users would donate more; so what we need here is the word out, and a way for users who lack paypal to get someone who does to donate a $1 for them, etc.
BYOND has done everything it can for a lot of people. It has changed many peoples lives, and several of those people are now donating a lot and doing everything they can to repay it. Now the rest of the community has the opportunity to repay it through relatively quick, and easy efforts on each persons part; so more of the community just needs to get half as motivated as the people posting in this thread and donating in general are to do so.