Ahh i'm not one for debates lol.
Anyway i did read your last 4 comments at least, and i see no mention of what Byond should try and do next. So i don't know :(, I'll be takeing my leave now.
""""They offered all of their tools to make games, but they are simply limiting a "hub" and a few extra things for 24 dollars in a year. I get -more- from a 5 dollar membership in 08' with runescape. Lmao. They gave MUCH more for the 60/Year then byond does with the 24/year. I'm simply consulting the logic, not wanting things free.
""" -BY ZEWO For those whom aren't actually understanding to read between the lines (Teka123). I'm saying they should instead of restricting HUBS, and CUSTOMIZATION, and all these little things that are worth 15 dollars a year....they should actually learn to make money from HOSTING, PROGRAMMING TOOLS, GRAPHIC ACCESSIBILITY, etc. They give everyone who joins total access to make a game, and wide-site tutorials on how to do so...They just need to make a original game using their product, link the IP...and they can make money that byond should be making. DING DING. | |
Zewo wrote:
They just need to make a original game using their product, link the IP...and they can make money that byond should be making. DING DING. Hey you should know im not the brightest spark around here, How was i supposed to know you were saying that they should make a game, it certainly didn't seem like that lol. I'll be off now :) | |
You and everyone else whining about the membership change seem to have it stuck in your head that we all have some inherent entitlement to these things. We don't.
They are a service performed by Tom and Lummox, they give you the tools to create a game for free. Optionally, for an EXTREMELY insignificant price, they offer you a place to advertise your game, as well as the tools to maintain it and a community to advertise to. If you genuinely believe that $24/year is expensive, even just for the advertisement, I can do the math for you. At a pretty low price of $0.01 per view, assuming you get 50 views per day(FAR fewer than you would get for having a finished game on the front page), that comes to a total of roughly $175/year. I don't know exactly how many views the front page gets in a day, but assume a more realistic 1000 views per day, and you would have to pay well over $2000/year just in advertisements. Most of those would, anywhere else, be people who don't care about your game, but a far more significant percentage of those views on BYOND do, or they wouldn't be here. Why would they host games? BYOND is practically built around the player hosting their own games. Make more programming tools? Does the WHOLE LANGUAGE not count as a programming tool anymore? Graphic accessibility... Lol? I don't think that actually means anything. Unless you want 3d or something, which would be stupid. Tom and Lummox don't make games because they're busy working on BYOND all the time. If you honestly think that you've been granted some divine knowledge of how to solve all of BYOND's monetary issues, please, feel free to make a similar product and be wildly successful. | |
I don't understand how people can say a BYOND membership isn't worth anything, and then turn around and say that they want hub access. It's contradictory.
And I don't see how a $60/yr membership in runescape is "not much of a difference" to $24/yr--it's two and half times more! Not to mention the products aren't really comparable. You just solidified the point that $2 (or even $5) a month is really nothing to most people. Yea, the new site update is a big change, but BYOND needed to start moving in a new direction; one that hopefully does not involve Tom eating Ramen every night (despite how delicious it is). | |
Maybe someone should step up and make a game for the purpose of funding BYOND?
The community could work together and make a game, and then donate much of the proceeds to BYOND. That doesn't seem likely. However, anyone that makes a game and uses the subscription feature will be funding BYOND. There's a lot of things they can do besides what they've done recently. Basically, if BYOND had a simple library of art and sounds free for the developers to use, then they could at least make their game presentable enough to show to potential artists/players. Pro Membership - For additional cost, allow game hosting built into the hub, so one doesn't have to manage their server themself. It should be as simple to use as possible. All you have to do is provide a zip file for your game, and you'd have access to the file tree that the game is uploaded to, directly from the hub manager in a web browser (to modify savefiles, etc. in the directory of the DMB). Developers would easily pay top-dollar for this feature. You could simply limit this feature to listed games, and members who've paid the extra price for pro membership. In fact, I might make that a feature request to find out exactly how feasible it is. | |
Complex Robot wrote:
Basically, if BYOND had a simple library of art and sounds free for the developers to use, then they could at least make their game presentable enough to show to potential artists/players. This in particular would be fantastic. A couple of simple, consistent, public domain tilesets with some standard sprites would make the job of starting up a game much easier, especially considering how often new developers have trouble with acquiring decent art. Pro Membership - For additional cost, allow game hosting built into the hub, so one doesn't have to manage their server themself. This would be considerably more difficult to implement, and would require a lot more investment in servers, bandwidth, etc on BYOND's part. I could see it happening in the future, but only if the project starts being much more profitable. | |
I said nothing about wanting HUB access.
I'm simply saying they need to be smarter on how they make money. -Read- | |
Complex Robot wrote:
Maybe someone should step up and make a game for the purpose of funding BYOND? Extremely unlikely. No one would be able to agree on game mechanics, the method of programming, how it's programmed, nope, just not possible. The recent debates in the tutorial forums should be proof enough that. You'd be looking for a small team who are bored enough to do it, and rich enough to not turn around and say "well, we put all this effort into this game, and although we love BYOND, we also love not eating ramen every night, and we hate working in supermarkets. Yay! Money!" If it was me, I'd just add BYOND Membership perks to my game as a side add-on, just to encourage people to get into it. Presumably I'd be drawing in non-BYOND users via my own website to mingle with my current BYOND audience. However, anyone that makes a game and uses the subscription feature will be funding BYOND. This is true. But in order to use the subscription feature, they need access to the hub, and to have a hub you need a membership. Hence this debate for the hubs worth begins. Personally, the hub isn't just advertising, it's convenient subscriptions. Even if BYOND takes a portion of the profit, they still get the charge backs, not me. (IIRC!) There's a lot of things they can do besides what they've done recently. You are right. But a lot of those things will require community support. And our community is just not quite there yet in terms of banding together to help out. Something we're inevitably going to have to sort out sooner or later. Basically, if BYOND had a simple library of art and sounds free for the developers to use, then they could at least make their game presentable enough to show to potential artists/players. See, now you're starting to make some sense! You've twitched a memory of a discussion held a long time regarding the release of a free resource pack with the software. Something to help users get started with learning DM or at the very least, giving those like me, something appealing enough to make something with on the spot. (And I could probably make some pretty cool stuff if I tried. I used to back in the day.) Pro Membership - For additional cost, allow game hosting built into the hub, so one doesn't have to manage their server themself. I can't see that happening. Server management is just a hassle of developing a game. Doing that is adding an extreme amount of stress and pressure to what is essentially a team of two. Or relying on volunteers to manage it instead, and all it takes is a few people to fall off the radar for a while for that to become an issue. Then cost of multiple servers vs how much yearly membership we're talking. How badly some games are programmed completely raging out on one servers CPU and whatnot. It's just a lot of unneeded hassle for two guys trying to write some cool software. It should be as simple to use as possible. All you have to do is provide a zip file for your game, and you'd have access to the file tree that the game is uploaded to, directly from the hub manager in a web browser (to modify savefiles, etc. in the directory of the DMB). I can make this kind of thing and implement it on my own website. A few of the better former BYOND hosting companies on BYOND used to have these kind of features. I remember participating in discussions about them, and going off to write my own one once. But the problem with the above paragraph is: "A few of the better former BYOND hosting companies". That sentence mostly. Because I'm fairly sure most if not all went bust over 2009 - 2010 period. If they didn't, I certainly haven't heard anything from them in quite a while. Which leads me to believe this isn't actually as profitable feature as you're expecting. digitalBYOND's biggest problem was people skipping out on large server bills IIRC. Something BYOND doesn't really want to pick up the tab for. In fact, I might make that a feature request to find out exactly how feasible it is. Not very I'm sorry. | |
Tiberath wrote:
Complex Robot wrote: I could always donate some random icons and such to it... We really should get on this right away.... | |
It's not about love, it's not about anything of the sorts. I have faith in the sight I've been with for a long portion of my childhood life.
I'm just saying, they need to learn to limit the right things that equal the cost they are requesting. Enough said. They'd make more, and it'd be a reasonable pay.