Bitcoin Forum

Announcement (http://polimedia.us/trilema/2013/introducing-smg-the-ministry-of-games/) (on Trilema), asset page (http://mpex.co/?mpsic=S.MG) (on MPEx).

If you are looking to invest (as a distinct endeavor from trying to find the next Internet HYIP and "get in at the ground floor") and understand the risks, this may be interesting to you.

Neat. I will keep an eye on this.

In a Fiat style IPO, a bank or other large trading house fronts the company all of the shares and then sells them into the market, no?

That's not the distinction contemplated here, no.

"Game" can mean a lot - are there already some products in the pipepline that you can talk about?

Directly from MP:


He's being mean though, I don't see that in the question at all.

Hm, maybe a differently worded question: Which kind of games shall this business produce? Gambling aka. games of luck? Games based on skill? Feeding alpacas on your little farm with carrots that you bought for Bitcoins in a microtransaction and posting every fart of said animals on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Diaspora, the hidden wiki and Bitmessage?

Games can reach from board games to the movie "Saw" or analyzing stock markets, so I would really like to see at least a bit more specifics, even if the business doesn't exist yet. I guess at least the idea for said business exists after all and I suspect/hope it is more concrete than "let's do something with games - first let's collect at least 1k BTC and then let's see what we do with it!"...

Just as a benchmark: Anyone raising more than 100k EUR in my country has to publish a prospectus (which is causing quite a few discussions atm. as businesses want to collect money without telling their investors what's going to happen with it) - your IPO is for ~1 million EUR and will even be considered failed if you "only" raise 100k EUR in BTC. Outlining the business plan and idea a bit more concretely is something that can be expected for these sums I guess.

Amazing!

Looks like this narcissist Mircea Popescu's one stock wunder-bazaar is starting to collapse and all he can do now, is invent some bull shit "company" to steal more bitcoins from you all. LOL!

WTF is "Fiat style IPO"? Let me guess, you invented a "standard" LOL! (read: Hi did not understand how it's done in real life).

Truly amazing! LOL

It is hilarious how you bring your failed ROTA into the picture. Funny fact is, that the members of that failure of yours, did not dance after your tune as you expected, but kicked your ass when you attempted to steal 150? BTC from some poor guy who did not know, what a scumbag you actually are.

He is going back to his roots, porn. So we might see a happy ending here!

Why the personal hatred towards MP? The MPOE stock seems to be doing just fine, I don't know where you get the idea that his "bazaar" is starting to collapse?

At least it's a stock that is not at the meta-level of bitcoin. Seriously, we need more of these than just yet another mining bond or exchange.

Now if MP just wouldn't piss off developers on a regular basis I might invest :)

I'm not sure the distinction you propose makes any sense. Is WoW a game of luck or a game of skill by your definition? Sure, skill plays some part, in that if you can't play you can't play. Discipline also plays a part, in the sense that if you spend 10x as long farming you can more or less do what other, more skilled people do anyway. Finally, luck certainly plays a part, as in you get whatever rare drops on the first try, other skilled people spend a year farming for.

More importantly, why is it so important to establish conceptually what is or isn't a game? If people play it, that's all it takes (also known as the "I know it when I see it" legal standard).


There is absolutely no EUR involved in S.MG so all this is about as relevant as the weather.


From what I gather the thinking here is that nobody is ever convinced by more text. People go by the names involved, and possibly, sometimes, maybe, by a fifty word blurb. If that's not good enough then it's just not good enough; the asking for more text is basically an invitation to roleplay "Internet Businessmen, the MMO" on whatever forum. I don't think MP has any patience for that.


That little bit of wishful thinking "idea" has been hot since the days zhoutong wasn't even a thing yet.


For my curiosity, make a list of ten companies where management regularly pissed off developers versus ten companies where management regularly catered to developers and then compare their business results. I'll even contribute a starting name for each list: EA and 3D Realms (Apogee Software) respectively.

"Because Bitcoin - at least the English speaking section thereof - consists principally (by headcount) of poor people who aim to turn whatever change they had left over from their latest McDonalds visit into a fortune of the future"

Maybe this is accurate considering some of the securities I see getting funded.

But no......

If MPOE-PR is involved in anything, I am staying the hell away.

I invest in people, not in ideas.

My involvement is basically posting here and trying to learn from them. Sorta just like you. I guess I'm the only "Bitcoin community" person in MPEx huh.

Thanks for clearing that up.

Well I kind of laughed at the name choice
But who am I to tell lol maybe its a pun on mtgox Magic the Gathering and it goes up like lightning
If they show us a product line might look at it :)
But would treat this as a game development and design startup company designed for bitcoin that funds people to create projects
Maybe expanding to an online arcade for bit games someday but that is an optimistic view until results appear

Isn't this just another way of saying that there is no business plan whatsoever?

I wouldn't mind investing based solely on the reputation of a CEO, when said CEO is someone like Elon Musk (obviously that's what happening with SCTY and TSLA atm), or even friedcat (if we want to keep it at bitcoin level), but I don't think MP has this kind of reputation or track record yet.
Perhaps if this venture does well on the middle to long run, and if he wants to start something else in a few years, the he could consider doing it this way, but right now, even the with the "relative" success of MPEX, it seems presumptuous.

Is S.MG going to focus on a certain niche of games (beyond using Bitcoin)?

Not so far. In general specialization occurs as a result of competitive pressures. There being no competition, specialization doesn't make sense at this point.


No. While I appreciate the stubborn display of "she couldn't possibly have meant to say we're not good enough", that's exactly what is being said: that there's no perceived benefit on MP's part of discussing the business plan here. You are cordially invited to open the eyes and ears and shut the mouth, basically. Take it as a learning experience, this is how things are done sort of thing.


You may be entitled to your own opinions (maybe, if you prove you can form strings that aren't self contradictory), but you are certainly not entitled to your own facts.


This misapprehension seems chiefly the result of you being new around here, and so your perspective is flattened on one end, the so called "more than 100 years ago" effect. There's nothing wrong with that: if you manage to survive in Bitcoin on the middle to long run your estimations of things will necessarily change to better align with reality.

Which reality has this unspeakable way of being "presumptuous".

So, basically you're saying that there is a guy who's trying to run a new business. He, of course, has a solid business plan, is asking for investors money, but is reluctant to tell anything about said business plan? That's preposterous.


There is no misapprehension, MP has obviously managed to run one venture which does OK, and that's pretty much it.
I'll concede that in bitcoin world, managing to run a venture for more than 6 months and not scamming the hell out of every noob is actually the exception and it does put him above 95% of wannabe "entrepreneurs", but I still don't consider this a good enough of a track record to invest solely based on reputation.

Now, as you said yourself, you're entitled to your own opinions. You obviously have a great consideration for him and it's enough for you to consider investing solely based on his reputation, but as far as I'm concerned, it's not the case at the moment, and I guess that I'm not the only one thinking that way.

That's not exactly what I meant. I meant this statement made, arguably not by MP (but he has his own), but by you:


That's before hiring any, without any results yet, which might make it a bit more difficult convincing them to work on this project. Now I am a tech guy myself, and I see the humour and partial truth in this and can put it into context. However, you might have blown up some bridges already to hire the developers you need.

I hope I am wrong though, since again, I think this is exactly what we need to make the Bitcoin economy viable.

It is interesting to note that as far as I know it does have a complete monopoly on game investment in bitcoin by default
Less an arcade site or two that accepts bitcoin so a potential oligopoly in that market
(I do not know their development strategy but assuming a game company arcade seems logical if they enter the market)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=174724.0

As a bitcoin game developer and designer it has a monopoly
Whether that amounts to dollars and profits remains to be seen and really depends on if you believe in leadership or let the leadership prove itself.
Whether they can find game developers who know how to make good games, and whether they can make good games people will buy is another question.

Is S.MG going to focus on a certain niche of games (beyond using Bitcoin)?
Not so far. In general specialization occurs as a result of competitive pressures. There being no competition, specialization doesn't make sense at this point.

Whether this strategy is a good one or not depends in the end it is about money and fiat to fund games the fact it is denominated in bitcoin makes it fundamentally no different than a game design start-up, what does matter is the lineup.
Bitcoin has a lot of IPO's it really comes down to leadership and performance and your trust in the person.
That said it is interesting just because its not a mining fund or along similar lines but is a shot out at left field
By left field I mean a whole new area of exploration and so is worth monitoring

There was a question I did have
Are they going to focus  on online gaming (Arcade Sites) PC Gaming (Actual unit's in stores) Something along the lines of a MMORPG (World of Warcraft), or is the type of gaming still uncertain.
Each has different risks so seems like a fair question to ask and it is called the ministry of gaming but what will be the first Ministry :)

Anyways thanks again
Also Does the IPO member have a bitcointalk account to answer shareholder/potential stakeholders questions?
(If there primary language is not English, do they have an account in a subforum in another language and let us use translators instead)
Should not assume we must make them learn English :D

I'll settle for the bolded part. Here's the dilemma: if people don't know/don't care about that statement then you can hire them. If everybody knows and cares about what me/MP says then you can always find people to hire because you're the only thing so cool on the Internet that EVERYONE knows and cares what you say. Either way....


The "boxed game" distribution model seems pretty much dead in the way the VHS tape is dead: nobody's arguing with the folk keeping their VHS collections around, but nobody is releasing anything on VHS anymore.

On the practical side, looking at the marketplace it'd seem the item mall model is coming out victorious. You can't argue with the victor and so S.MG is open to having BTC-based item malls as a revenue model. On the theoretical side, looking at the strengths of BTC and so forth it'd seem RCE is the best fit. S.MG will try to promote that within reason.


I have no idea what you mean by that?

Does the IPO member have a bitcointalk account to answer shareholder/potential stakeholders questions?
(If there primary language is not English, do they have an account in a subforum in another language and let us use translators instead)

I have no idea what you mean by that?

I meant who is  the IPO's owner and do they have an account on the forums here on bitcointalk if their primary language of communication is English and how will they reply to our questions in English Italian French Chinese etc :)

For example your MPOE-PR so your asset is MPOE on Mpex when directing questions regarding that asset you reply in English here on the forum
My question is if there an official S.MG-PR representative account and what language they will communicate to us in

The reason I ask is since the reply was a bit weird in English so was wondering what their native tongue is
Either that or its quite colorful

Directly from MP:

Quote
When I IPO already existing businesses teh forum complains that it's unfair the owner of already existing businesses gets to be the owner of said already existing business, instead of simply gifting all the pre-existing value to whatever random oaf feels inclined to "invest" fiddy cents. When I IPO businesses-to-be teh forum wants to know if there exists the business already. No, it does not, that's why you get to participate in a variable-float IPO rather than a fixed float IPO.

He's being mean though, I don't see that in the question at all.

Let's see here.


If you mean MP, no he doesn't have a forum account. You can probably chat him up on irc (https://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=bitcoin-assets). He's fluent in English and a few other languages (perhaps not Chinese). He also keeps a blog (http://www.polimedia.us/trilema/), which mostly gets English posts these days (but a lot of articles in Romanian).

I'm the designated forum PR person, which is why that first link in my signature is there.

Gotcha thanks for the info
Maybe put it in the offering if any investors have questions for him directly so they know where to look for him
That or assemble a FAQ sheet and cut down a few questions right off the bat so you can cover the rest and ignore answering old questions or point to a conveniently pointed FAQ :)

So did the IPO sell out already?

Has anybody started a pass-through for this yet?

It's not sold out yet. People have been putting bids in since the asset became available, there was one share sale Tues (something like 15%), and another today (about 70%). The last one will be Monday the 10th.

Oh, I see. I noted that there was no ask, so I thought it was all sold already. Seems to be going pretty fast.

In the news: the IPO was successfully completed last night. Total of 88,096,605 shares sold (S.MG's current float), with 8,799.0657479 BTC raised (S.MG's current capital).

Full details here (http://polimedia.us/trilema/2013/smg-ipo-succeeded-other-statements/).

That's no way to manage an asset! Where is voting with unsold shares, shipping costs as assets, 'cash kitty' randomly being found, and opinion polls of "do you like the manager"?!

MPEx is not sufficiently technologically advanced yet. Still working on AJAX out of control includes so we too can be hacked into and have random people change the passwords of random accounts like the other "exchanges" in the "business".

8 btc per vote ... I guess that is one way to keep frivolous votes from being posted.  :o

I think it could be said that if the result of the vote isn't likely to create at least 8 BTC of value for the company there's absolutely no point in bothering with it at all. It is after all a game company in the sense of making games, not in the sense of being a game.

Is there any known person associated with this company who has any experience in the games industry?

I wouldn't invest in this share without knowing what they planned to do and who they had hired.

But then there are plenty of folks who mindlessly put lots of money in an unknown entity.

Just like there were thousands who paid thousands of guilders to buy the latest tulip bulbs in 1637. ::)

tinus42 I think you need to look around :

-There is a better raffle if you're willing to sell your signature space : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=223474.0

-http://polimedia.us/trilema/2013/kings-bounty-the-legend/ is one exemple of a blog post written by the owner of MPEX and speaking about games.

There are others. Take the time to read and you will understand that there is no "unknown entity"...

Please read thoroughly before speaking about tulip bulbs.

I'm just not CEO-awed like many people are.

Even when someone like Warren Buffet promotes a stock you generally lose because he likely promotes stocks which benefit him the most.

Look at what someone does instead of what someone says.

No.


Would you invest in this share if you knew what they planned to do and who they had hired?


Check your assumptions will you. Things exist that you don't know about without being necessarily unknown for that reason.


Actually I can't recall the last stock WB promoted. What was it?

That's all I need to know. Basically this is a gamble, not an informed investment. Q.E.D.

ha!

Taken from the BH website, which makes mpex.co look like an art student's final acid trip:

If I invest in a company I'm looking for management skills from the management, not technical skills or detailed knowledge that their underlings should have.  The majority of management skills transfer between ANY two areas of business if the companies are of a smilar size (some skills are needed more in small companies, others more in large ones).

MP is effectively the CEO/MD of MG.  The only skill-set that matters much is whether he has the skills needed to be the person in charge.  EVERYTHING else can be hired.  The decision of whether to invest or not rests solely on whether you:

a) Believe he CAN fill that role well (i.e. is capable).
b) Believe he WILL fill that role well (i.e. will deal fairly and honestly with investors and put in the effort needed).

Whilst it WOULD be a bonus if he already had experience running this type of business that's all it would be - a bonus.  If he's capable of filling the first leadership role then one of his first hires (or consults) will be someone with the industry-specific knowledge.

A large proportion of business failures are ones where the leader has MASSIVE knowledge of (and experience in) the industry/sector.  They fail because their experience and ability isn't in the role of leading a company.  Open two threads promoting 'businesses' on these forums and you'll almost certainly find at least one such - quite probably two (you may have to check back in a few months to be sure about the failure bit).

I'm not making any comment on MP's ability in this post - purely othat you're not even looking at the right thing to measure, so arguing over the measurement itself would be a total waste of time.

Trick question is trick question.

But I guess now you're in a fine position to appreciate the heap of lols that were had over @ MPEx Fortress what with all the countless comments of the website business forum experts collected over the years. Obviously Berkshire doesn't look professional enough, and if only they added CSS....

You are going at it the wrong way. Building a but-ugly web site that makes even blind eyes hurt, will not make you in to a good businessman.
Acting like a arrogant pompous ass, every changes you get, will not make you a good businessman nor give you understanding of finances.
BTW, your blog read like a diary of a sociopath.

Mircea Popescus business plan is directly from Southpark

He has no idea what happens in #2 or #3 and last one needs a fat question mark because his reporting "standard" (LOL!) is one big joke and has already blown up on investors face (see S.DICE saga https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=101902.1740)

I feel like S.MG is unprepared at this moment. Mainly due to the general consensus of the game community in regards to marketplace models, and if you fully represent S.MG, some of the things you've stated are contrary to the reality of the game industry. I don't want to rehash what many individuals smarter than I in the game development community have already analyzed in depth (http://www.bogost.com/blog/cow_clicker_1.shtml (http://www.bogost.com/blog/cow_clicker_1.shtml)), so I'll briefly reference the attached article as needed.

Item malls are secondary revenue streams and have failed plenty of times due to this new developer mantra of "Fuck the user as long as we get paid." The reason games such as Team Fortress 2 have been successful in applying the mall-model is due to a previously developed user base surrounding a quality game. Sacrificing quality for revenue always leads to disaster, one may profit initially, however this always catches up to you (see NASDAQ:ZNGA).

A quote that really hits home:

In recent years, massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) frequently have been accused of doing little more than compelling players to keep playing; amounting to "brain hacks that exploit human psychology in order to make money"

This insults the user, and ostracizes would-be fans from what could be a very successful brand.

You stated:

I don't think this metaphor applies to video games in the way the above individuals were pointing out. Of course no one buys VHS's anymore, but they still buy movies. Games are still distributed, Lord British (Richard Garriot), of Ultima Fame still creates old school point and click RPG's alone at his home, and has quite the audience. He has enough of a fan-base, albeit niche, in order to continue his independent developments, likely indefinitely.

At every game meetup you'll find some schmuck preaching about how his new "item mall micro-transaction revenue model" is going to revolutionize the game industry, attempting to recruit developers blindly to work toward a vision that has already been proven a failure by those much smarter than him.

If Mircea is trying to develop a game in house, why not start with a quality game first before moving onto revenue models? With nearly $1 million (USD) raised (or will be raised) from the IPO (extrapolated from the initial 15%), Mircea has more than enough capital to compete with AAA titles.

Taking the metaphor literally, it still doesn't apply. Companies still release products for dead consoles, (games are still being released for the Dreamcast), players still buy them, the cycle continues.


With your logic you should have Miyamoto, Inafune, and Kojima all lining up to head up the lead design role for S.MG. Alas they are not, I understand the quote was meant to be slightly humorous, however all three of the listed individuals were once novices, and during the infancy of their tenure, they certainly faced failure on a daily basis. At one point in time their names meant nothing.

Most designers and developers worth hiring who have the potential to reach this capacity care most about their artistic vision and how those leading them affect the realized version of that vision.


That's not entirely true...(I'm referring to the "If people play it, that's all it takes"). In fact many game critics and highly regarded designers would completely disagree. The anecdote of one playing ET for the Atari 2600 is the classic example of something that can be played that is far from a game.

What makes a game? Johan Huizinga answered this long ago before any of us were born: http://www.nideffer.net/classes/270-08/week_01_intro/Huizinga.pdf

This has subsequently become a standard in the game development community, a very good read for anyone claiming to be a game designer.

By not making this distinction you are again insulting the player, the one person you'd best not to insult. The player may never know or care about the distinction, but they will feel it in the game. This distinction allows the designer to create an experience that is fun, rather than depending on "brain hacks." It is subconscious by nature.

The user originally asked:

You replied by insulting the would be player:


Come on. Really? The article I referenced at the beginning of this post by Dr. Bogost, analyzes the distinction you are willingly ignoring. I'll start with a quick quote from the attached article by Dr. Bogost:

"Non-trivial effort to play" is the key phrase here. This distinguishes the "brain-hack", from legitimate forms of play.

By ignoring the distinction or an effort to find a distinction, you are not doing your homework, and a disservice to the end user. This goes back to, "I know a game when I see it." I can't implore how critical it is to have well-thought design in the play experience. Nintendo in the 1980's with the release of the Famicom (known as the NES in the west), focused on a fun play experience. A young Miyamoto, was given the task of designing "fun" games, as opposed to trying to drop a flood of games on the market to produce cash flow. Instead, he brought us Donkey Kong, Mario, Metroid, and The Legend of Zelda, all in under a decade. He focused on fundamentals - fundamentals that you seem to be ignoring based on what you are saying.

The user above was clearly comparing Farmville to say a game like Dark Souls.

Farmville's mechanics can be broken down into a very simple "click the cow" action, whereas a game like Dark Souls or Nethack require strategy, tactics, and skill.

Cow Clicker (referenced in the Bogost article), was created as a satire of games like Farmville. You are given a Cow on your Facebook games page, and you are allowed to click it every 8 hours. You can post that you've clicked your cow, trying to get your friends to click it, to gain the in game currency, Mooney, which you use to buy decorated cows. You can pay real cash for all this to go away, bypassing the gameplay entirely. (All of which is described very well by Dr. Bogost in his article). The game became successful, as many people didn't realize it was satire. As well people who wouldn't be caught dead playing Farmville, started playing Cow Clicker because they understood the comedic and satirical nature of the game. All of this was merely an experiment for Bogost, who created a "Cowocalypse" where everyone's cow was raptured...essentially killing the game: he never intended it to be a "real game".

That's all a game like Farmville amounts to, clicking a cow every 8 hours, or paying money to make the tedious gameplay optional. What kind of game is that?

However Harvest Moon, the game Farmville and others are inspired/based on, is a lot more fun than Farmville, came out nearly two decades ago, and still has a cult following. Why? Because the design is superior, and not following the "fuck the player" mantra.

In contrast to Farmville, despite it's difficult nature, people pick up Dark Souls just to submit to the challenge.

Yes, at some point there will be someone who defeats a world champion at Street Fighter by button mashing, but the probability of that happening is very slim.


This is as easy as going to a list of defunct game companies (like the glorious Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Defunct_video_game_companies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Defunct_video_game_companies)), and picking your lot.

I'll cater to this curiosity, but 10 of each is a large number as you'll see below.

So I'll compromise, I've interleaved a few companies: successful companies that cater to their developers and companies that piss of their developers and have felt the repercussions in business results.

EA)
Okay so you started us off with EA. They do regularly piss off their developers, and had good business results...until recently. EA was extremely successful over the past decade, but as stated above with Zynga, the "fuck the user (and additionally fuck the developers)" mantra will and is catching up to the company. EA is successful by essentially buying fans through acquisitions: Maxis, Bioware, and Popcap to name a few. This definitely is a valid business tactic, until the developers who made the IP successful jump ship due to frustration (Will Wright as a prime example).

The most recent CEO resigned due to issues involving long term fan base growth, rather than financial reasons.

News: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22801311 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22801311)

Mojang)
The studio that grew from the success of Minecraft. Notch hired staff, including his management (and Officers etc.), based on their ability to contribute to his vision, and making the process "fun". There have been a few hiccups, but one could argue that the company caters to developers on all fronts, (for example: their physical studio setup, lack of deadlines, freedom in adhering to the designer's artistic vision etc.), and maintains profitability vs. company size. (Minecraft has over 10 million purchases as of now if I am not mistaken).

Atari (3 Failed Subsidararies)
Atari's console the 2600 has the exclusive rights to quite possibly the worst "game" on the planet: ET. I don't want to lecture on what has been thoroughly discussed, someone else can beat the dead horse.

This product (ET) is a microcosm of some of the bad decisions Atari took in terms of growing a great development staff. Atari instead focused on making money off of the licensing process, rather than moving quality games. This contributed to the dark age of games, where companies that had no business developing games were getting published by Atari and sent to market. This is the exact reason how ET made it to shelves. ET should have never made it to shelves. (See the legend of the landfill filled with ET cartridges: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial)).

Kojima Productions)
This formed from the division of Konami that became "The Metal Gear" team. The original Metal Gear Solid was a hallmark for the video game industry at the turn of the century (the late 90's early 2000's, Metal Gear Solid was released in 1998), and has grown into an extraordinarily successful franchise. Before Kojima had his own dedicated studio, Konami gave him free reign to develop the first Metal Gear Solid. There were barely any restrictions to the allocated resources. This was essentially unheard of during this time period, as few designers were given this degree of freedom with the amount of resources allocated. Metal Gear Solid is nothing but revolutionary, and is the product of not only experimental freedom, but sheer hard work. Many will argue Metal Gear Solid did for video games what Citizen Kane did for film.

Double Fine)
Double Fine is a company with a lot of heart. Tim Schafer's company known for Psychonauts and Brutal Legend, is the epitome of a company that caters to developers and succeeded against the odds. Double Fine was formed by Schafer after gaining experience from being a lead designer at Lucasarts, spearheading projects such as Monkey Island, and Grim Fandango. During the production of Psychonauts the company technically failed: Microsoft who had originally invested in their first game Psychonauts, backed out of the deal completely. Double Fine was left in a state where they were developing a game without a publisher, and had acquired much debt due to Microsoft pulling their original investment deal. The company was so broke due to Microsoft's decision, there was no money to pay anybody. After this news was announced to the staff, Schafer expected everyone to quit, and began talks with his leadership staff of liquidating the company and filing for bankruptcy. The following day, the staff still came into work and continued working on the game. It took several months before Majesco picked up the publishing rights to the title. This was in 2004-2005, since then Double Fine has become successful on it's own accords, and currently maintains profitability.


http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/cc/Tim_Schafer_and_Cookie_Monster.jpg
Tim Schafer negotiates a publishing deal.


Lets switch it up:

Team Bondi)
Team Bondi is kind of up in the air as to their treatment of developers. Some said the loved working there, others state it was hell, putting in 80 hour weeks etc. etc. Either way the company catered to them monetarily, and with technical resources. They eventually made a game with revolutionary facial capturing technology (see L.A. Noire), however this took them a nearly 8 year development period. During this period they burned through cash like the Joker in that movie everyone likes. A simple Google search can easily bring up the problems Team Bondi faced, and their subsequent forced liquidation.

Rockstar)
Rockstar treats their employees like shit at times. Some will claim to work 60+ hour weeks, rarely see their families, and suffer from anxiety disorders, etc. Yet Rockstar consistently produces hit, after hit, after hit. They push the bounds of both the technology, ethics, and mechanics of games. Between the production of GTA: San Andreas and GTA IV, EA bought Criterion Software, the makers of Renderware, which powered the GTA III era of many of Rockstar's games. EA promised to honor a grandfather like clause for all Renderware licensing, but reneged on this promise. This motivated Rockstar's development of RAGE, and licensing Euphoria. Some say EA was trying to sabotage old Renderware contracts in order to cripple older IPs for easier acquisition, but there isn't a lot of substance to these claims. It wouldn't surprise me if evidence surfaces in the future.

Valve)
Valve is kind of an anomaly. Gabe Newell was one of the first 100 employees of Microsoft, making him a millionaire in the 90's. In 1996 he left to form a video game company. Half-Life was made, Steam was invented to play/distribute Counter-Strike 1.6, and the rest is history. Valve is a lot like Google for games, they have intense cashflow and a relatively small staff, so they always maintain a surplus in their budget. This creates an R&D wet dream, and one could argue, with "disposable" cashflow one can afford to pamper the developers.

This doesn't even scratch the surface.

It's in Mr. Popescu's best interest to recruit the best developers/designers possible in regards to game development, and keep them close, perhaps loyal. Maintaining a good relationship with a team that always makes the playoffs is far easier than trying to reconstruct a new team every season.

When I spoke with Mr. Popescu, I asked if a team brought him a game he believed in, would he manage them without compromising their artistic vision, and he said in fewer more concise words, "sure, as long as they have a product."

S.MG has a lot of potential, but it seems you are a bit unprepared at the moment. I hope S.MG takes a more traditional route, and helps to invest in delivering quality products to shelves, and a quality team, rather than trying to invest in profits to impress investors (the EA route). Developers need management, they aren't managers, hence how could they manage themselves? Many designers and developers realize this, but no leadership team wants to be onboard a company funded by dreams.

As stated, I agree wholeheartedly that most Indie developers that fail, or even most studios that fail is due to poor management, hence the inception of S.MG, but I would argue that you have mismatched priorities. You seem to be focused on the revenue plan, and less on the question "will players become fans?"

Many game companies have brought in defacto management, who have good leadership, and failed. Traditional leadership doesn't translate well into the game industry, it never has, it never will. Zynga has been the most recent company to prove that. The good leadership translated into great initial profits, but with the decline of a true fanbase, their business model completely buckled underneath them.

My opinion alone may not matter, but I can guarantee any game developer/designer worth hiring will have the same concerns. People can argue all day, "the underlings don't matter", but in a game company they do.

many lels indeed, no doubt. BH HTML source looks like a zen circle painting.


one more giant lel behind that link. glad I dumped all my S.DICE shares and put them into AM; my BTC30 loss due to napkin accounting was more than recovered.

I think you are perhaps reading a little more into one (vague) sentence than is warranted.

The comment referred to games already established. If we are acquiring an already published title which is built around an Item Mall model, S.MG will not force a change to that. This is just plain common sense, as it's not too likely for such changes to be economically feasible anyway, in most cases.

If we are developing de novo, the preferred model is RCE. I thought that was stated sufficiently clearly, but perhaps not.

All these considerations aside, the actual concrete solutions in actual concrete circumstances will bow to those circumstances as much as practicable, we're merely discussing generalities here, and perhaps a lot past the point where it's worth it.


I'm confused as to what you mean by that? Everything starts with the revenue model, this isn't fanfic.


If competing with AAA titles was a matter of capital only (and $1mn at that) Paris Hilton would be billed above Angelina Jolie and Coindesk would be a competitive Bitcoin company, with relevance and marketshare. Sure, people with ideas (ie, fanfic) often misrepresent their inability to compete within the business in terms of not having money, because they commonly don't. Money is not really the issue, however.


Sure.


I think again you're probably going too far on the interpretative journey. My statement was simply a refusal to go into detail. You can't read into that some detail of your own choosing and then argue with it.


No, I am simply doing what PR does since time immemorial: refusing to answer questions when for whatever reasons my employer considers it pointless to entertain them.


While I can appreciate your own aesthetics and the fact that the brain exists principally to recognize patterns in the environment, be they actually there or not, at some point you'll have to notice that all you do at the computer as long you're not typing is move the mouse and click the mouse.


There's no argument here, is there?


Seems there's no argument.


As long as we agree that the definition of quality is "people are willing to part with their own labor in exchange for this" then absolutely.


Well depending on what your take is with BTC, S.MG is funded by almost 9k of such dreams. Either way really.


Why do you suppose the revenue plan and the players becoming fans are divorced topics?


Probably worth pointing out that the OP is naturally confused. S.DICE was keeping its own accounting, by its own standards. Which, I guess, were indeed ill advised, in retrospect. Had they followed S.MPOE/MPEx standards closer they would perhaps find themselves closer to the position in which S.MPOE/MPEx finds itself, which is to say the only public company of that age in BTC.

I guess you are not only "naturally confused" (what ever that means in your sick head) but you are utterly delusional.
This mess you call "MPOE/MPEx standard" is a joke and has nothing to do with proper financial reporting.

I can understand why you think it's a new and shiny standard - you have no idea what bookkeeping and reporting are so you invented something you can understand. Because of your delusions of grandeur, it's very hard for you to comprehend that you are wrong. News flash - this delusion of yours will not make you right. Your reports are only a part of the picture. You obviously have  no idea how to put together the rest of it so it all adds up.

PS! Try pulling your head out of your ass. Maybe fresh air can help.

Maybe I am, but I literally just finished an article in GameInformer on microtransaction/RCE video games, titled "Red Flags". Perhaps not the best magazine to take gamedev advice from, but the fact even GameInformer is touching on the issue, means it's pretty mainstream.

Maybe I did read into it a bit too much, but it feels like you guys took a quick look at the marketplace, said "RCE based games seem to be the winners!" and are running with that without further research.

Maybe I'm underestimating the depth in which MP's research has gone into this, but with some of the blanket statements you've made, it definitely isn't showing.


Why is it preferred? Because it seems more fiscally sound based on what you know about the game industry as of right now, or because it really is the best option?

The RCE model is something most will cite in their essay: "What is wrong with modern video games?" Why MG is pursuing this model when so many reputable industry giants have flat out stated the many flaws in this system baffles me completely.

Are you really too cool to stick to fundamentals? You happen to be taller than everyone else and can dunk, so you have no reason to learn to shoot free throws? One day you'll be at the line, in a tied game, with no time on the clock, wishing you had practiced more free throws.

You're confused because you have never worked for/with a game company. There's no way in hell you can convince anyone with a brain in the game industry that a revenue model is more important than a game that will sell. That's exactly how the Atari brand failed multiple times.

Squaresoft (of Final Fantasy fame), made several games before creating the first Final Fantasy. None of these games sold. They had a solid revenue model, solid business plan, solid team. Yet no one wanted to play their games. Okay, so they give it one last shot, an RPG: their Final Fantasy. The game sells very well, generates a pretty big fanbase. It alone saved the company from imminent doom.

What do I mean by this? You can focus all day on your revenue model, solid business plan, etc. But if your game sucks, no one is going to willingly play it. In game development the traditional business process is in reverse, you start by making sure your game won't suck, then do everything else.

You have no way to prove to anyone what you develop won't suck. So lets suppose your game does suck that you spent a year, maybe 2, or perhaps 3 years, and some thousands of BTC developing. Any and everything you planned for it, including your RCE model, and overall revenue plan is irrelevant.

Then you join the ranks of Team Bondi.

You can dodge details all you want, but from the gist of what you've posted it sounds like you're creating a business plan around, "fuck the user as long as we get paid."  


It's not particularly divorced, but they hang in a balance for a game company. There will be many a decision that helps the revenue stream, but hurts the fanbase. They oppose each other by nature. Ideally everyone would love a healthy fanbase and revenue model/stream to refelect one another, but that's rarely the case. Every time someone has the bright idea to merge the two topics, they may end up making a bunch of money, but turning away a long term fanbase (EA), or growing a large happy fanbase but going defunct due to lack of revenue (Sega).  

Why is Nintendo so successful? In short it's because of long term fans. People who grew up with Super Mario Bros. on the NES are buying Mario Galaxy for their kids today. They didn't always put the fans first, but it was certainly one of their top priorities.

At the end of the day you'll be given choices that are divorced, "do I piss off the fans, or do I hurt the cash flow". There has to be a balance.


Creating a AAA title requires intensive long term labor, and large teams. Mainly due to issues revolving around structuring the game engine for the title. You either have to purchase licensing (which is $1 mn off the bat), or you have to spend n years developing an inhouse engine. As well, you usually have to put together resource allocation which amounts to a small-med animated film depending on the game: voice actors, animators, concept artists, motion capture, etc.

Lets say John Carmack didn't have access to capital, or any leverage at all. Carmack, I would say is a very skilled programmer. You ask him to develop a triple AAA title. There is no money to be found. He can't recruit a team based soley on "dreams". It'll take him a decade to create everything on his own.

The monetary budget reflects the scope a game may reach.

Yes, they can still create a great game despite lack of funds, but the scope will be drastically cut in comparison to something like Alan Wake.

So let me rephrase: MP has both the capital and leadership ability as a producer to congregate a team together capable of creating a title to compete with current AAA titles.


I'm pretty sure you said

That either means you literally don't know, or you don't care. Perhaps you don't have to know or care because you aren't designing the games. But it is an important distinction to make.


So at some point I should also look at a masterpiece painting and notice it's just oil and pigment on a canvas? Is a good book just ink on a piece of paper? Sure that's all it is, but at the same time it's much more. The whole is more than just the sum of the parts...

You clearly asked, even if rhetorically to deflect "going into detail", "why is it so important to establish conceptually what is or isn't a game?" while spearheading the PR for a game company. You represent S.MG no? S.MG = Video Company. No game company worth mentioning, in their right mind, would say such a thing, even as a joke. That was my point.  

Every year at the GDC, you'll have schmuck saying the same thing when arguing "games aren't art" which has been debated for years, becoming the new micro/monolithic kernel flamewar for the game industry. Yes your brain is just making you click a mouse or press buttons on a controller. What your brain does in between seeing the screen/hearing the sounds, and pressing buttons is what matters, not the action itself.

Like the painting, gameplay is a representation of something else. Play as a cultural phenomenon in itself is a representation.

You refuse to acknowledge this simple fact. However as your team comes together, if any of them are worth anything of value to the industry, someone will bring it up.

Edit:
John Carmack not Richard Carmack. Yesterday twas a long day.

7 Posts and very well written

yep, thestringpuller should obviously be hired as consultant by MG

Well honestly, it's preferred because MP says it's preferred. I asked him why and he said "that's complicated" after a pause, which means there's about 50-50 odds he'll at some point write a Trilema post about it.


Why are you in Bitcoin when so many reputable industry giants have flat out stated the many flaws in this system? Because reputable industry giants are idiots, perhaps? Because they have different incentive structures than actual functioning markets? Who's to know.


No but look, this is mystiquizing. Nobody goes "let's make some cool shit" and then, after the cool shit is made, has meetings to establish if it will be sold as a Broadway musical, a make your own adventure book series or a line of branded sodas. The revenue model is established first, the thing that will sell is made within that model. Anyone is free to feel creatively superior to reality, but it's just a feeling.


This is additive tho'. You're acting as if doing the business homework somehow automagically prevents doing the creative homework, as if brushing your hair guarantees you can't brush your teeth and now you'll get gingivitis AND DIE!!!

It's not a this or that. It's doing this well, and doing that well.


Well yes, actually there is a way. Have a little patience now will you.


Not really. In a well managed project the incentives are so aligned that this never happens. If the situation is of that nature management has already amply failed, and the designs weren't in all likelihood too bright either.


Only if what you mean by "fanbase" is people who want to use but not pay. If that's what you mean we disagree: the free-as-in-beer-and-only-free-as-in-beer types are NOT fans. They may call themselves fans but it's a misnomer, like calling strippers chaste or politicians leaders.


At that time we were discussing, generally, what games S.MG may in time own/publish/distribute. There's really not much constraint, at the present time, like it or not. Maybe in time.


Yeah well, sorry I can't be bothered to join that debate. I really don't care if they are or are not. I don't think anybody sane cares, for that matter, much like Moliere's bourgeois is pleasantly surprised he speaks in prose but doesn't really give a shit past that.

Now don't take this the wrong way, I understand you feel very strongly about all these topics, and in many places you raise interesting points.

I don't believe the distinction between the type of game/revenue model is that black and white.  You can't, for example, design a game, seperately determine a revenue model and then assume that the two will fit.  Some revenue models fit certain types of game better than others.  As an extreme example consider a game developed with a total time to play-through measured in the 10s of hours.  If the game is great then it could do very well sold through app stores for a small one-off fee - but it would fail dismally if you tried to sell it using a monthly-subscription model.  To a significant extent the revenue model is coupled tightly to some aspects of the game.

There are also massive design decisions which have to be made in terms of game-play.  If you're going with the item-mall idea then you first need to determine which model of it you'll use.  All of these comments are my own views - not based on forum discussions.  I see item-malls as being split into two types:

1.  The model widely used - especially by all the Chinese companies - where players basically buy success.  The vast bulk of revenue in these games comes from a very small number of whales.  To be successful (at generating revenue) game design has to focus on ways for the whales to be able to compare their strength to other players and, ideally, bully those who haven't paid much.  That allows the whales to stand out (and see clear benefit for the cash they've handed over) - and also keeps operational costs down by driving out those who won't pay as they can't compete or achieve much.

2.  Item-malls aimed at taking a smaller amount of cash from a far wider user-base.  That means ensuring that no massive difference in progress/strength can be easily bought.  It also means having to appeal to players via actual content/game-play rather than just "if you spend some more money you can be the strongest."

Type 1 is what so many gamers object to.  Progress is achieved through use of a credit-card not a brain.  As someone who has played a LOT of games over the years (and continues to do so) I don't like type 1 from a player's perspective at all - because they don't provide the challenge I'm looking for.  But that doesn't invalidate them as a means of making a profit.  And that's where thestringpuller is, I think, going wrong.  As a game-player I far prefer type 2.  But investors in S.MG (should) want whichever will give the best return on investment - the company's focus should NOT be on "what will make the most players happy" but on "what will make the most profit for our investors".  And I'm VERY certain MP is on the side of investors not players.  

None of which to say the two (pleasing investors and having satisifed players) are mutually exclusive - it's just that it's far easier to develop something that focuses on one of them than to try to deliver to both.

There really are a lot of different definitions for the word "game". Maybe we should be thinking more along these lines:

https://i.imgur.com/wBw2DpJ.png

You have just lost The Game. And so have I. ;D

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_%28mind_game%29

I think through the workings of forum magic, what was originally a distinction, contrast and opposition (RCE vs Item Malls) has been conflated into a nonsensical identity (RCE = Item Mall).

For the record and for everyone's benefit: RCE (short for real cash economy) is a Bitcoinesque way of running game universes where instead of the developer/operator playing Bernanke and issuing endless quantities of game "gold", the available gold is strictly related to funds deposited by players. Thus being an efficient hunter is more important than being a BIG hunter. There's few examples of such games being developed, specifically because pre-Bitcoin there were a lot of problems with handling of game currency. Bitcoin superbly resolves all these, and it'd be ridiculous for it not to be used for the one purpose it's actually been made to satisfy. We're like a bunch of people using a hammer for anything but nails, currently.

Item Malls are mostly unrelated, offering the player base the option to buy more or less gameplay-enhancing items for USD. We generally agree it's not a great model, which is why the specification was made that as far as possible we prefer RCE (ie, a completely different model) and I think re-reading the discussion with the distinction clearly in mind will be very helpful.

My point wasn't that you were going to use item-malls - but that deciding upon a revenue model does also restrict game-design choices and so can't be decided upon entirely seperately.  I used item-malls as an example because that's what the other poster had posted at length about.

RCE, for example, pretty much rules out single-player offline games.  RCE means games need to either be player vs house or player vs player - as the key resource has to be both limited (in terms of creation - not in terms of some maximum ever issued) and redistributable.

I totally agree that Bitcoin and an RCE model are an obvious pairing - isn't there some gambling-based MMO that already does that (which isn't an argument against someone else also doing it)?.

Oh damn I was reading the thread and just lost the game also what is this a movie trailer or a Game fancy he-he

When it comes to design choice the discussion here is interesting I know a fair bit about games myself but as the plan on design is still being discussed will with-hold for now.

Regarding the models both have benefits there is also the members vs non-member model where certain parts of the game are not accessible to non-members such as runescape with free servers and paying servers.
While not one of the two mentioned it is worth distinction

I guess outsourcing is also an option
Example being help S.Dice make some alternate games on their site as Abu noted

MP sez:


So I guess it was appreciated.

This biggest one of these right now, and most successful (that I know of) is Spiral Knights. The in game currency "Energy" is used to play the game, and can only be purchased. Energy can be traded on an open market for goods and other things, but all energy spawns from users purchasing it.

Another less successful game using this model is Diablo III. All items can be traded for fiat, thus all the items correlate to a real cash value.

The reason there are few examples isn't because there "were a lot of problems with handling of game currency", but because once the mechanic is introduced it creates optionalism for the players:


Bitcoin doesn't automagically solve this issue, it solves the payment issues in the background, but not the mechanics themselves. When you add any kind of optionalism to a game, you're essentially saying "I've added a cheat code activated by money", no matter how you try to dress it up.

Spiral Knights did RCE well because they utilized economics inside the game as opposed to game subscriptions. Buying Energy amounts to buying subscription time. They didn't make it a gameplay bypass.

I understand the desire to cash in on the whole MMO cash cow:

World of Warcraft went live in 2004. A monthly subscription is/was $15.
That means for every player that plays a year, they generate $180 of revenue.
Multiply that by the peak 15 million actively subscribed players: $2,700,000,000/year

A lot of studios joke about how in the morning the Blizzard developers and managers would collectively first grab a wad of cash, throw it on the floor and roll in it for the first two hours of their work day.

I know that there are some standard deviations in there to get a more "reasonable" number (they had specials, yearly deals, etc. that changes this generalized number), but this still clearly shows the cash to be made from a successful MMORPG.

Now lets be generous and say 1/10th of those 15 million players have been playing the past 8 years:
That's $2.16 Billion they've made from that group of players.

Again I understand the desire to capitalize on such a product, but don't let this blind you from other important issues.

Bitcoin is it's own financial space, the financial giants have no reign here, what they say generally doesn't matter in relation to Bitcoin, because they've never used it. The ones that have still haven't used it as extensively as say MP.

What game industry legends have to say about the game industry definitely applies to any and all games.

To answer your rhetorical question: There is an invaluable educational value to Bitcoin if you're willing to sit and listen. As an anecdote, I've learned more from MP and others about business, than the so called MBA's learned during their "education". I've applied a few of MP's models to physical businesses that has been met with success.

MP wrote in his FAQ:

Everyone yearns for the pre-September days of computing. And alas here it is. Unfortunately it seems inevitable, the flood of college students will come and dilute the intellect, but hopefully not for awhile longer.


Are you saying the revenue model is merged in the process of developing the product? Or are you saying that you figure out what you're going to sell and how to sell it, then you create a product within those bounds?

That just seems like it over complicates the nature of selling games. Lets take the anomaly of Minecraft for example, and I use the term anomaly because there was a lot of luck involved in its success. But Notch started by first demoing a prototype on an IndieGame forum, much in the structure of this one. He got good feedback, so he continued developing it. Eventually he started charging 5 dollars per download. Unexpectedly the game was an overnight success, so he took the numbers to someone he thought best fit the role of "Manager". At that point they sat down and discussed what you described above. From this they made a simple authentication server to track purchases, similar to the functionality of Steam.

Yes, I understand it's an anomaly, but games tend to follow: "lets make cool shit now, if people like it we'll figure out what to do". The whole concept Valve popularized of, "Keep coding and the rest will take care of itself", is a sound plan. This is why you're likely confused, you know from a realistic standpoint this generally doesn't work, but in the world of games it tends to defy reality's logic.

This is why there is a mystique surrounding the entire process. You could argue the reason it worked for Mojang is due to it being an anomaly, but they aren't the only ones who took that path and succeeded.

Isn't this the same way Satoshi got Bitcoin started?

That's exactly what I was trying to say in so many words. If you have a great game and a poor business strategy you go up in flames. If you have a great business strategy and a sucky game, you go up in flames. You definitely have to do both well.

No, but I know that when business hands start trying to do creative work it ruins the creative process in the same way when artistic hands start handling money they get paint all over bills.

This is very hard to do with games generally due to the fickle nature of gamers.

Lets take Legend of Zelda for example. The first 3-4 grew into a snowball of a franchise. Then, Ocarina of Time Comes out on the Nintendo 64, the first Zelda game to be done in 3D. A critically acclaimed success people still rave about today. A year or two later, Majora's Mask, the spiritual sequel, comes out. Fans are disappointed, the game is still well designed, uses the same fundamentals used in Ocarina of Time, but it just didn't catch on with fans. Still financially successful, but fans are now on the fence with the franchise. Okay, so Miyamoto takes a step back and says, "lets mix up the art a little, go back to the cartoon-ish roots". Windwaker is announced for the GCN, and fans go fucking bonkers, foaming at the mouth in anger. Game is still excellent, and critically acclaimed, still didn't hit fans the same way as OoT. Fans state clearly, "We want a more realistic approach", so Twilight Princess comes out, fans again foam at the mouth.

The moral of the anecdote is not that you can't please everyone, but that fans are fickle and sometimes it's a "certain place / certain time" aspect to garner both commercial and fan based success. This is why I said revenue and fan-base health hang in a balance, rather than naturally align. I applaud your optimism, but don't underestimate the fickle nature of a neckbeard gamer, nor his ability to get a large portion of the fanbase foaming at the mouth in rage.

This reaches back to what I stated above, sometimes the fanbase is too fickle to please at some particular time. You can have healthy sales but upset fans, and the fanbase dwindles over time, the two do not correlate. Revenue from direct game sales generally correlate to how many people purchase the game, in the same way the box office numbers correlate to how many people paid money to see the movie. It doesn't reflect how many people walked out the theatre pissed off, in the same way healthy game sales don't reflect the attitude of the fans.

The recent reboot of SimCity is a perfect example of this trend. The game was financially successful, however you'd be hard pressed not to find long term fans who have given up on the franchise due to their disappointment in the reboot of the game. Some fans who have followed the franchise for over 20 years, being long term buyers, will likely not be buying anymore Maxis games. This is a problem, a problem that EA caused by putting too much emphasis of milking revenues from a new model they applied to SimCity relating to DLC.

S.MG won't initially have this issue, as there are no games out there to have fans, (yet). But like a good drug dealer, your income is on the "come back": recurrent customers. As a game company produces games, and people become fans of those games, they also become fans of the studio. You don't have to put as much effort of convincing as many people to buy the game since there's already loyal fans who will buy the game despite what anyone tells them.

As I said, ideally you'd like for the revenue and fanbase to align, but it rarely ever does, thus it leads to difficult compromises.

That's definitely good to hear. Giving open doors to the game development community is a good way to bring in worthwhile talent. Indie developers generally know they'll make terrible managers, that is why S.MG has so much potential. S.MG needs a good development community to surround it, the development community needs people to tell them when they're fucking up. I would say it's Win-Win if the attitude stays this way.

Which is why I called it a flamewar, no one truly cares. It's a debate for neckbeards to get into so they feel they are standing up for something they believe in: a fruitless and unproductive endeavor.

Take what the wrong way? Sounds like a compliment, and I appreciate the discourse. I don't particularly feel strongly about these topics one way or the other, just trying to illuminate some of the fundamentals. Again you gotta make your free throws: they're free points.

Curious, what points did I raise in particular that were interesting?

Actually, Project Entropia/Entropia Universe is both the largest and oldest. Spiral Knights is some F2P java thing.


I think presenting D3 as an RCE clearly shows you don't understand what RCE means. It's not a matter of "correlation" to cash value; by this standard WoW makes the cut.


How would you know this?

Understand, the discussion here is asymetrical. We're in a position to say X is Y because Z, as we're working on X. You're not in a position to say X is Y for non-Z, because you're not working on X. The very most you can say is K says X is Y for non-Z, for any value of K in the set of people working on it (to which the answer obviously is, "that's why K isn't working for us, he doesn't have a clue").


There's some dressing up going on here, but it's not on the side you're pointing to.

First off, any game will forever remain a game, distinct from the player's life. That alternative where the player *becomes* his level 80 Warlock and lives forever a life of pixelated adventure distinct from his dreary, ramen-fed real existence is a point of fiction, possibly with mental health implications, especially if taken so far.

Second off, any game will necessarily meet your definition of "optionalism", in the sense that ANYTHING can be purchased with money. Name any game you consider escapes this so called "optionalism" and I'll show you how to hire somebody to play it for you.

The significant advantage of RCE over all other game implementations (absolutely all, including D3, WoW, FF and literally any other RPG) is that it removes the problem of farming. In your run of the mill mmorpg, built on the inflationary-minded "every action has a +EV result" the inescapable end point is a deluge of "currency" without value. In the RCE game some but not all activities are +EV, and this adds a layer of depth and richness to the player experience that can't be put into words. It will be put into facts, and you'll see it first hand.


How would you know that?


I think on one end you are confusing public opinion with forum agitation, and on the other Nobody Cares what FanFic Says. It's a rule. People who try and please a public are neither artists nor ever successful, and it occurs to me that probably the greatest service S.MG offers developers is complete immunity from having to ever listen to Internet people.


Well you've probably written some of Bitcointalk's longer posts (outside of the mentally ill and criminally minded, obviously).

Second Life?

Sure. They went the same route as Eve, except using real money to fund the economy. Eve seems to be more successful, and it's emergent gameplay seems to be far more profound and captivating. Perhaps this is what you're describing?

Yea Spiral Knights is free to play, but it funds the in-game currency through "real cash" in the same way Entropia does. It was the only thing I could think of off the top of my head without Googling.

I've seen it first hand, in production, in an experimental environment, for the purpose of such discussions for companies (like MG I suppose) to evaluate player behavior. It's very easy to control the cashflow in the game. Handling the game currency isn't the issue, it's what players do with it, which you can't control. Sometimes this is good, sometime this is bad.

It was a bad example, I apologize, but it's been cited many times as an RCE game, in many discussions on the subject. Usually people think you incompetent when you use less than the best examples, like calling Kenny G a jazz musician in front of Miles Davis.

https://i.imgur.com/6zR1x.jpg


An RPG by design requires grinding, some force it by design. You can't beat a boss, you grind levels until you're strong enough to do so. Farming, (if you're defining it as the act of grinding mobs for the sole purpose of acquiring loot), on it's own accord doesn't inflate the economy. When it's combined with mass sell-offs, like anything else, then the economy in the game tanks due to inflationary reasons. This I completely understand. Final Fantasy XI suffered massive inflation due to Chinese farmers selling Gil as a business. The only option Square had was to delete some billion+ Gil to force deflation.

This occurred due to 1) drops not being finite, 2) the currency not being finite.

Bitcoin will definitely solve 2), and I assume you're going to limit 1) as you see fit.

Definitely, but isn't this more due to the finite nature of resources in the game (money included)? When a player has to efficiently utilize "what I got" instead of endlessly farming to "get what I need", it creates another layer to the game due to the absence of farming.

However I would argue there will always be some form of farming, perhaps not on the scale of WoW or FFXI, but perhaps for small things. But then again you can make everything an "elixir", and increase the anarchistic capacity for the gameplay, which I would say creates some profound and emergent results.

Programmers may tell you they will write everything from scratch, but there will always be copy-paste.

I've already seen it first hand...not your product in particular, but definitely the experience you've described.

Ha. That gave me a good laugh, thanks for that. Very true. But that wasn't my intention to illustrate. Critically acclaimed success in a piece of art has an element of timing involved. For this reason actively trying to please the public is very much a moot endeavor. But at certain points in time someone develops something cool like Minecraft and everyone loves it. Repeating the formula never works because the timing no longer exists. "Right place right time" sort of thing I suppose.

That's usually the point of a publisher, even though the author still gets sent hate mail. C'est la vie.

I like to be thorough when it comes to my profession, even though I've been out of the industry for a few years. I am also very much enjoying the discourse.

I've been a gamer almost all my life, and I got into coding because of gaming. I've written several games including a fully playable nethack clone. And it always shocks me how few people in the industry really understand game design. The massive screwup that was Diablo III is a testament to that. It has been suggested many times that a great way to learn game design is to study the massive number of failures that comprise Diablo III.

You want to understand game design? Listen to a Dio or Gene interview when they talk about how to treat fans and get into the industry (here's one (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgGGKMBROTA)). Then you will understand game design.

D3 is actually a great example for this thread because it shows that billions of dollars and a (really huge) team of very experienced developers still has the chance to fail. I'd like to contrast this with CSR racing, which makes $12 million a month right now, and had a small team of (relatively) inexperienced developers.

I don't want to see S.MG fail but it is obvious to me that Mircea is in way over his head on this one. I don't know what he is thinking. He can't code and he thinks tech people are a lower form of life. He has no idea what he wants to produce or how to do it, but he expects people to come to him with completed projects. All I can say is that this will be an interesting company to watch but I liken it to a gold exploration company -- I wouldn't even consider investing until they pour their first dole bar. Good luck S.MG, you will need it.

This is completely false, for the record. It is impossible to control the cashflow of fiat gold in a game even if you are exceptionally gifted in the field [of finance]. Absolutely nobody ever involved in game production to date was, and consequently this impression that "it's easy" and a solved problem simply belies a lot of Dunning-Kruger effect (ie, people are too clueless to even realize how clueless they are).

For that matter if you ask any fiat, inflationary economist they'll tell you the exact same thing: it's easy to control the cashflow in a country and mostly a solved problem. It never happens to be the case, in spite of actually gifted people in the field [of finance] being involved. So no, by no means has there yet existed an MMORPG which correctly handles the game gold problem, and I'm pretty sure unless this project succeeds there won't be for a long, long time (because people who grok this sort of thing are usually spending their time elsewhere, and it's a quite unique and incredible alignment of political and financial interests that has happened to declare the village of Gameville the site of what will be a famous battle, so there's all sorts of high value bipedals the likes of which Gameville's never seen before swarming around it - the windup to the "George Washington slept here" cultural phenomenon).


Ehehe, good pic.

But yes, it's true, using less than the best example to make your own case is usually construed as incompetence ("he either doesn't know the field enough or doesn't understand the problem enough to pick the better example") whereas doing the same to represent the opposing case is usually construed as at best incompetence. Way of the world.


This is an intricate point, because it's made out of completely different things which you improperly conflate.

So, first off: a BAD design requires grinding. That's all. It has nothing to do with RPGs; a bad marriage design requires marriage grinding, a badly organized job requires job grinding, a badly designed RPG requires RPG grinding.

Second: farming is the act of playing half the game. If the flow of gameplay can be divided into two portions, portion A and portion B, where A is perceived by players as extraneous to their enjoyment of the game, then A will be outsourced (to Chinese businesses, of course) and the game is broken. This is exactly what farming proves (to the hardheaded idiots who think "they solved currency" above): the game is badly designed.

Third: farming always inflates the economy. It makes no difference if it is or if it isn't combined with mass sell-offs of anything, this is clueless voodooman blaming one of the symptoms, much akin to medieval minds thinking that the coughing is what makes phthisic patients lose weight and there's no such thing as Koch's bacillus. The presence of meaningless crap that's money in name only is the problem, and the game designer trying to apply Western welfarism to "make the game better" (or moreover, just because he's culturally immersed in welfarism and can't quite think outside of Weber for lack of any exposure to actual culture, or even to first hand Weber crap for that matter) fails for the same reason the same nonsense fails when applied by politicians (who often seem children who aspired to design games but never got anywhere, much like our friend usagi). IRL they tend to blame "speculators" (look at Venezuela) for the IRL equivalent of "massive sell-offs". Nonsense & poppycock, they broke it, not the Chinese businessmen providing the very valuable and very respectable service of making it plain how stupid Mr. Designerman was.

Lastly, the idea that deleting players' cash is even something game management may contemplate, let alone implement is fucking scandalous.


Actually I'm told there's going to be a Design Document Highlights announcement later on, so commentary on this will have to wait for that.


It'd seem it's not because of time, tho. It'd seem it's because "we already have that, ty".


Yeah, perhaps that also counts for "largest", depending how you look at things. Good point.

That's untrue.

You only have to consider single-player RPGs to see why.  How much grinding did you do in the best single-player RPGs you've played?  If you've ever played pen-and-paper RPGs you won't have done any grinding either.

Grinding exists because players can consume original content faster than the developers can produce it - not because it HAS to exist.  It's a replacement for meaningful content - a cheap way to keep players feeling like they're doing something whilst they wait for the next update.  It's also widely used as a means to inflate play-through time - so 2 hours of interesting gameplay becomes 102 hours of play time (100 of which is mindless grinding).  It is NOT something that MUST exist just because something's tagged as an RPG.

I had a few round table discussions with the interesting points that came up. I must say some interesting things came to light.

First off something unrelated to S.MG:

You bring up this point in one of your "legacy" posts as well in relation to starting a "Bitcoin business". I let this swirl around for a good bit and after speaking with one of my buddies in the film industry about a project we are producing for Mr. Popescu, I recognized a pattern I hadn't recognized before. It goes back to your quote:


You always find those naturally intuitive in this field. That one uneducated fellow who happens to make a small fortune "running the streets". He starts with $20 dollars, turns it to $100. Soon that turns into $1000 dollars, and before you know it, a new kingpin is born.

However I started thinking about the failures in this field, every burnt out weed dealer who can barely manage to keep his operation running. They always seem to be running incredibly late, never giving an accurate time estimate. When they take out product on credit they always come up short. But these are symptoms of a deeper problem Mr. Popescu alludes to in his Trilema article titled aptly:  http://polimedia.us/trilema/2013/youre-the-guy-who-wasnt-good-enough-to-sling-dope/

You have the burnt out high school dropout, who can't deal drugs, calling himself a drug dealer. On top of this, not only do they believe they are a drug dealer, they wholeheartedly have faith in their abilities despite the contrary evidence to their obvious failures. They reek of undue arrogance. Subsequently like Kayne West, you "can't tell [them] nothing".

But more importantly, these are the type of people in any industry who will bring down the team. They wish to be the ones with fans without truly earning it. I recall an IRC chat log:

More importantly those who understand their limitations and strengths intuitively find a way to sling dope. They are the street urchin who one day pops up as the new kingpin. Many will claim Popescu fits the category of arrogance, but even he follows the old saying, "Know Thyself", in regards to his limitations:



Onto the good stuff:

So I did a little reading, a little round table discussing, and a lot of researching.

What I discover also answers:

Definitely. But the most likely reason grinding has become so deeply ingrained in the video game based RPG is due to the limitations of the classic consoles such as the NES. Anyone who has programmed on one of these understands these limitations are pretty extreme in comparison to modern day computers. The designers of Dragon Warrior, one of the first non-text based video game RPG's, is iconic for the slime monster kicking your ass at the start of the game. This immediately forces the player to grind. The designers intention was to create a feeling of "training" or forcing the player to train in response to strong creatures. In a DND campaign where one isn't limited by computational power, an elegant storyline of the party going to a dojo can exist, and levels are disbursed through a scenario where grinding needn't exist.

Saying grinding is "bad by design" is a little blanketing. In FFXI, a notorious game, grinding was the main feature of the game. A lot of people hated it, but just as many people loved it. Grinding came second to the storyline and "quests", making it a game of training, and subsequently discovery once strength was developed. Grinding wasn't mindless, but required skill, it required a party to work together in a harmony not seen in many other games. Each person played their role.

If a healer healed to fast while fighting a mob, he ran out of MP, the tank died, and mob went on to attack the rest of the party, and everyone died.
If the tank didn't maintain the aggression of the mob, the creature went after the healer (since healing aggravates mobs), who died, and subsequently everyone died.

The examples can go on and on and on. I wasn't trying to say grinding must exist for a game to be called an RPG, but merely it has become a part of "tradition" for a lack of a better word. Moreover there are ways to design grinding so it's done well. And when I say grinding I mean the act of killing mobs for no other reason than to gather drops or experience.

Rote and repetitive gameplay is the problem which is generally what grinding amounts to. In the case of Final Fantasy, your role (as whatever job you decided to be), changed depending on the structure of your party. This created a more dynamic feeling to the act of grinding and made it not tedious for the more experience player due to the rewarding nature, rather than it being a rote repetitive task. One quote that sums it up is: "Every battle is like a boss fight." When grinding in FFXI the slightest fuck-up resulted in cataclysmic failure.

Again I'm not saying grinding is necessary. That's definitely not the case, I'm just saying it shouldn't be written off as "bad design".

I think this circles back to the strength of the finite ability of bitcoin. Finite being the keyword. How the cash flows within a game from player to player is a different beast entirely, but games have been very successful in making usable resources finite within the game system.

Star Wars Galaxies, many years back (in the 2004 era), had a system where every "usable" item in the game (weapons, clothes, armor, everything really), was crafted by another player in game. As well, all the resources items were created from, were very limited. This created a very profound emergent effect on the gameplay. Like people digging for oil, various resources on planets would start to deplete over time as people mined them. This created an economy where a lot of people bartered with resources rather than the in game currency.

SWG is a terrible example, for a multitude of other reasons, but for the sake of example I used it. I would think that a system where everything is finite would completely change the mindset of players from trying to "rape the planet" via farming, to becoming efficient hunters as you spoke of earlier. Perhaps I'm simplifying the solution, but I'm trying to understand your mentality on this one.

As scandalous as it was, the China-farmers were breaking the ToA by selling Gil. The management took an active approach to the ever inflating economy by deleting accounts which were selling Gil "illegally", in term deleting their Gil. This in turn did work, very well in fact, deflating the prices in the auction houses by nearly 100%.

Was this a good solution? Probably not, it's like putting a band-aid on a wound that requires stitching. As you stated previous the China-farmer is exploiting something that is already broken. The designer is to blame, not the farmer.

It's called education; those without it often berate those with. You and Mr. Popescu are no different. You will attack someone for not having an education or not being a success; all the while not having an education and not being responsible for your own success as well.


Having actually played nearly every RPG game in existence, I can at least say something about what keeps me coming back to the genre. It's precisely the opposite of CSR racing. In CSR racing, you have a 10-15 second car race, and you spend about the same time upgrading your car between races if you're quick. And once the game is over, it's really over -- there is no "endgame", and you didn't really earn anything, because you have no skin in the game. Part of the appeal of a RPG is in fact farming and grinding. The journey -- not the destination. And in a MMORPG it's doing that together with (and at times against) others you meet online. This is something that you appear not to get. The problem is not the economy or the gold flow, which is just something you tune to the progression. The problem is that you want to make money from all this. You want to charge a subscription, or have a real money economy, or whatever. And that brings out the farmers. Because as soon as you make people pay for their success one way or another, they will find a way to pay someone else to have that success for them.

Kind of like how Mr. Popescu pays you to argue on his behalf. Or how he paid people to write MPEX (he didn't write it himself).

The same problem exists in a different form in games like Tomb Raider. People will go look up a walkthrough to the game instead of sitting there trying to figure it out themselves. Not all the time mind you -- just on the 5% of the game they don't enjoy. There is pretty much nothing you can do to prevent this from happening to your game. People will not play your game if they can not be entertained and get a sense of achievement from it, and nothing you can do to give a player a sense of achievement can be made non-transferable. In days gone past this means people would often not finish games. Nowadays, everyone finishes every game. If they can't finish it, they just open up a walkthough-FAQ for the game. You can see this in how games like Half-life have changed over the years. Half-life contained many jump and platform puzzles that Half-life 2 did not contain. It's not because the puzzles were too difficult. It's because some people found them tedious or boring. So the game was made easier, and as a result the story had to be a lot stronger and more involving. The puzzles had to be more cranial and less in-game-physical. But you do not have this luxury with a RPG, if that is really what you are attempting to design. Screwing with the genre will just make you turn out a shitty game. We know this now. Being honest I don't know what your plan is for your in-game-economy but I am pretty sure you will not be reinventing the genre any time soon ;-)


You're being an idiot again. Based on what you've said (i.e. "Farming always inflates the economy") can't we conclude you don't really understand progression or economy? In any RPG game there is a progression, not an economy. An 'economy' is just a means to control progression. It means that certain people who have reached a certain level no longer need to look for certain items or go to certain areas anymore.

Other means of controlling progression are level caps, item levels, skill points/skills which unlock at a certain level, time-based controls (such as the pulleys in Act III of Diablo III) and so forth. It's just a method of controlling how long players need to spend in a certain level before they can progress to the next area. Metering content. That is all. I find it so telling how you are discussing the gold and economy of a RPG in place of progression, when discussing problems like "Chinese farmers". You need to understand game design before you can start talking about a revenue model, or you get trainwrecks like trying to put me down by comparing me to a politician immersed in welfarism (another one of the "MPOE-PR talks game design" wtf moments, I suppose?)

I really can't wait to see what you guys are going to come up with. I'll be honest, I never once thought anything connected to MPEX would ever fail, and I was really surprised when MPOE bond had back to back double digit losses. But this is the first project associated with Mr. Popescu that I am sure will fail. It's the way you spurn advice. Let me clue you in. You're the cheezball who thinks they have a new concept for a social network. You know, the marketing genius or fresh MBA grad that thinks they're going to hire their way into running the next twitter. It's just not going to happen. It's your attitude -- not enough that you succeed but that others fail  sort of thing -- combined with trying to break into game design it makes you look and sound like a total douche. You guys are clearly in way over your head on this one. I cannot possibly imagine you guys coming up with any sort of MMORPG at all.

Probably. I might venture as far as to say that the principal value of WoW is exactly this grinding, that some people apparently like, and that the failure to implement same is the actual cause of the D3 collapse, in spite of all the numerous other defects countless web-commentators found.


Well in an RCE game in a sense this is somewhat obliquely present, in the sense that the player is (usually) attentive to efficiency, which means he primarily does whatever he's doing because it's productive rather than because "it's what the storyline hath ordained".


That's okay, ToA are about as scandalous.


Get a job already.


You say that as if it's a bad thing. I can't begin to contemplate what must be going on inside the skullous cavity of some dood imagining exchange executives write the code the exchange works on. Because Bitcoin, still?


Yeah, I can tell. And you're not the only one, either.

I guess this is because I don't understand PR or whatever.


Don't remind me of that issue where you and harnett provided the losses to go with MPOE's performance last year. There's a difference between a bulwark propping up a market on one end (something nobody else has done or could conceivably do apart from MPOE) and some idiot mismanaging funds to spectacular results (something pretty much anyone can do, just like you can).

No, you don't get it. You have to listen to what people tell you and stop being such a kid. The problem is you want to make money from your game in a "fuck the player as long as we get paid" way. You are putting the money first and it will ruin your game. I am not even close to the first person who has told you this, which is why I quoted thestringpuller. S.MG should probably hire him as a consultant. After what I read from him, I would do so myself if I was involved in game design. He is spot on about everything, although notably he missed with Richard Garriot, who was the producer of Lineage and Lineage II, City of Heroes, etc. as well as a designer and/or producer of a number of other recent games. The next WoW could very well come from him, I wouldn't have characterized him as someone with a small at-home following at all.


It's not a bad thing. It's that you seem to place a great deal of value on success and the ability to get things done, yet you reject advice which comes to you (albeit through others) from successful, accomplished game designers. It's this:


It's the irony of it all. And then you try to make it personal. I'm a child-politician engrossed in welfarism, so you don't have to take my advice. Or I don't have a job. Or whatever. You reek of failure and incompetence. If I was the only person telling you these things it would be different, but I'm not.

We'll see how far you get in game design, it will be interesting to watch. But right now you have nothing, no projections, no dates. Nothing but a lot of talk. The way this is going I'll finish kongzi.ca before you even have a zone editor.

To be fair, PR's game art contest has been attracting some really serious contenders. It should just be a matter of time before they assemble an entire team of top-shelf undiscovered talent.

I would like to see a great new game as much as anyone.

Maybe some people liked the grinding in WoW, but it was definitely manifested in a different way. There is no absolute dependency on a party. What occurs in WoW is the romantic solo-quest. When partying occurs it's just an extension of this mentality, as well skill really isn't truly necessary. If you watch someone in a WoW dungeon, they rapidly hit keys as if they are trying to refresh reddit when it's down. FFXI is far different due to the timing requirements. Press a button too quick and you fuck-up, press it too late and you fuck up. The entire action of fighting was designed to be fulfilling, holding true to the Final Fantasy franchise, and in turn the process of grinding became fulfilling. It's a sort of emergent gameplay built on a fundamentally sound concept.

In WoW this was highly diluted, for the sake of difficulty. FFXI turned a lot of would-be players off because they had trouble acclimating to the skill level. However many veteran players (which I definitely would not include myself in this category), would say this barrier to entry made the social aspect of the game more fulfilling because the game punishes incompetence.

WoW was always an endeavor to the end level, as the end content was the treat everyone wanted. Maybe in the beginning the journey was fulfilling, but after some time, this became increasingly more "rote" due to the allure of the endgame. This became so pervasive, Blizzard created several "events" and "bonuses" which gave the player double XP. Where in the original incarnation of WoW it would take a least a few months of heavy play time to get to max level. It is said a player can reach max level in the most current incarnation in a matter of weeks.

usagi adequately stated "the journey not the destination". WoW focuses on the destination, FFXI the journey. WoW became more accessible, and subsequently extremely profitable.

I ultimately think you're game will have similar principles to FFXI, focusing on skill rather than rote mundane tasks. Ultimately that's more fulfilling to the player.

You're focused on the effects of farming, the inflationary nature of resources being infinite. This is a definitely and interesting point. As you state in the quote below, when there is only enough money to buy one "Super Awesome Sword of Chaos" in the entire game, it creates an entirely different mindset. If this sword only can have on instance of itself within the entire game as a limitation, this definitely creates a different mindset from the traditional "lets get money by killing shit". I guess you and MP were baffled and annoyed that monsters dropped gold coins in the traditional RPG. I don't blame you.

As stated above with FFXI this isn't constrained to merely an RCE game. This is particularly clear in Dark Souls which is a game in-which the fundamental level of play is dependent on how skilled the player is with his or her character. You see the same signs, the player is more attentive to his items, his movements, his actions, and his growth. Completing tasks/quests within the game bring a certain "fuck yea" level of satisfaction, unlike a simple quest in WoW.

Perhaps it's purely the difficulty, but that seems to be simplifying it too much.

Adding something such as permadeath for the hardcore player usually instantly raises the player's awareness. But that doesn't create any more depth to the existing experience.

Depth is ultimately achieved through the content. Everything within the game attributes to the player experience. This attention to the level of detail is why the GTA franchise has become so successful.

I hope you're not saying I'm saying that, because I'm not.

Just because an individual doesn't have the capacity to perform a task themselves, doesn't mean this person can't procure the necessary resources. This is moot. Perhaps S.MG goes up in flames, but if this is the case, it will be a Hindenburg-like explosion that will be witnessed for miles, and not a puff of smoke. I believe in fundamentals in game design. I play devil's advocate here because I hate when designers use a lot of smoke and mirrors to mask bad design.


They do listen, and in particular Mr. Popescu is willing to listen to reason. Perhaps the reason S.MG is hyperfocused on the business plan is because whatever the designer is doing will not be seen by us unless approved by Mr. Popescu. The designer (if they have one yet), is locked in a box, far way from the public. MPOE-PR even stated that as one of the benefits of being a developer in contract with S.MG.

I'm flattered at people thinking I should be a game design consultant, but I'm just pointing out the fundamentals. Anyone significantly more experienced than I, and is a designer by trade will point out similar things.

Well WoW is an old game now, so declining subscription rates are not as meaningful as they may have been earlier -- but I was under the impression that WoW has been hemorrhaging players for quite some time. They made a very dramatic shift from focusing on the early and middle progression of the game to the late game, and destroyed new player's experience of the early game entirely. It began with flying mounts, which removed the need to explore the land on quests. It's like a trope, walking form one place to another repeatedly. In Ultima it was, Lord British tells you to find Mariah in the Lycaeum, (or in Moonglow in one version), then when you find her you have to go back to Lord British, who then sends you after someone else. Back and forth. It was an impetus to explore and just dick around in the game and have fun in your role. Something which I have only really seen expressed well recently in Fallout 3 -- a game I enjoyed much more than WoW and which I feel has a greater replay value.


No, MPOE-PR likes to make quips at me for some reason, that was in response to her.


Well like I said, I'm interested to see what they will put out.

Kids listen to what people tell them. Because they do not have a choice in the matter. Because they don't have a job.

"People" does not denote and cannot be stretched to denote random forum cumrags/lolcows such as yourself.

Let me recap some chief points to perhaps more palatably flavor the spent grease captive between your ears:




Actually the relation between you and art closely approximates the relation between usagi and finance. Come to think of it, that coincidence begs the question whether you're also gender ambiguous and nationality confused. Do you know what year it is?


IANAE, but isn't the entire point of WoW raiding, and is it pretty much impossible to play if you're in a shitty guild that can't raid worth a crap?


Dude this is shocking news to me, I've seen so many dorks dork all over each other on the basis of absent of insufficient wowskills?!


I am authorized to anticipatorily state that moreover the game won't have an end. A game design announcement still is scheduled, probably will clarify a lot of points. Likely sometime in July.


Not to mention it creates cooperative behavior of a kind never seen before in mmorpgs: sword RENTING.

Think about it: if you were to identify a town in your own head not by some arbitrary name the developers alloted it, but by the fact that it's that one town which owns that one sword which does X exceptionally well....


I am sadly not authorized to comment on this point, but if I were you'd be wowed right now. Sucks to be me.


For "some reason"? Ask sir Reginald Greyhawk what the reason might be. He might ask for pay first however.

Just call me Pat.

Your false assumption is that you are a capable judge of what's art and what's not, which is an amusing situation in that it actually begs the question. But hey, phrases change meaning all the time, so for all intensive purposes, you spoke correctly.


Would work in the library eBook rental sense. If you go to Terrible Boner Town and rent the chalice of terrible boners, the Terrible Bonians would want some sort of assurance they'd get their chalice back, instead of just getting stuck with permanent priapism every time someone "rents" a chalice.


(!!!)

This brings us back to the usefulness of in-game banks, or at least safes. If ol' Reggie Greyhawk was holding his full wallet when he got killed, he'd be awful sad. You'd make a killing on deposit/withdrawal fees alone.


Well, I don't have any gold on me, but I've got this chalice, see...

Thats why I don't play MMORPGs.

Also when I play a game I don't wanna deal with internet people. If I wanted to deal with internet people I'd go troll a message board or something.

There is already a well-funded group developing proprietary gateway software to integrate a BTC economy into several major game platforms. If you are still at the stage of raising capital you have probably already missed the boat. It should have been obvious for at least a year that BTC is ideally suited to replace in-game currencies, especially if you want to migrate assets between platforms. The only sticking point has been the resistance to abandoning control of the value of current proprietary game currencies for a self-regulating one. But that resistance is beginning to crumble as the benefits begin to make themselves apparent. They are doing quite a bit behind the scenes on this, and whether they are successful will be for the future to determine. Please take this with a grain of salt, I can offer no proof, so just consider it a random rumor, and just another datapoint.

I am under NDA to really say anything else, so don't ask.

Until this "well-funded group" actually releases something it is still a wide open field.

S.MG is past the stage of raising capital, or didn't you notice that the IPO is already done?

Heh. You don't come here telling me that, sparky. I go to your thread telling you that.

Lurk moar.


It was (http://polimedia.us/trilema/2012/the-reasons-why-bitcoin-securities-cant-be-regulated-by-the-sec/).

Lurk moar.


Don't worry, I really don't give a shit. Your relative cluelessness tells me all I need to know about this "well-funded group".

Being first in the field doesn't matter as much as doing things right.

Being first to publish and getting it at least half-right does.

Proof of work is the most important factor of all  ;)

Well at least he's established proof of talk, right? That also counts.

How much marketshare do you have? 2%? 5%? 10%?

What market?

Right now they have 0%, which will continue until they release something.

So am I reading this correctly?

$800,000 has been invested in a company that has no business, assets or firm plans, other than a 'desire' to get involved in Bitcoin games........

You are reading this wrongly. 8,799.0657479 BTC were invested in MP's game venture. It's not "a" company, and dollars aren't involved. Furthermore, the corp does have assets: 8,799.0657479 BTC, in cash, and it does have plans, as discussed in the OP.

Apparently "you are reading this wrongly" was not actually accurate. Should have said "every single thing you think is wrong".

To help piss you off further: 38k BTC (https://twitter.com/Mircea_Popescu/status/347798434494947328) were invested in S.MPOE too.

Now, you were saying?


Indeed. Of the 10bn dollar video game market (significantly larger than the movie market, for that matter), 0%. Of the 0 BTC video game market, an unspecified % (as the result of dividing zero by zero is undefined).

If it doesn't get delayed for a year or two like BFL  ;)

Whats worrying is that you actually seem to believe this.


Why would that piss me off?

Because bitcoin, or something!

The mistaken assumption is that people resent the fact that MPOE has stacks of BTC. In fact, nobody cares.

Are you fresh off the SA boat?

South Australia is a loooong way from Canada.

LOL. PR just got trolled hard, or somebody stupid just walked into a good drubbing. Sometimes it is hard to tell about sarcasm on the internet?


I would say there is some sort of potential market for bitcoin games, so the divisor here is non-zero. So it is more accurate to say you have 0% of the market, which puts you in top place next to all the other people thinking about making bitcoin games. The difference is you visibly have funding, which is one step ahead of anybody else.

Dun be a goon.


What exactly do you have in mind, the Dragon Tale thing? It's kinda dead/abandoned from what I've seen last.

No, I mean there is nothing currently available, but there are people who would use such a thing if it existed. It is a 'potential market'.

So if there is nothing there then the divisor is 0. The market is what the market is, not what the market could be.

I guess that depends on if you are looking at past figures or future projections.

Details (http://polimedia.us/trilema/2013/statements-regarding-the-mmorpg-under-development-i-v/) posted today re the S.MG MMORPG's real cash economy, chosen game engine and software, development environment, splash screen and game artwork submission opportunities, etc.

Great news, loving the progress. MP also promised me secret zones and weps!

There's a rules etc release scheduled for sometime next month. More details on this sort of stuff then.

Things be comin' right along.

The willingness of people to invest their more or less hard earned money in vastly inflated wild ideas on Bitcoin stock exchanges continually blows my mind.

Stick around, you're in the right place.

It does remind me of the dotcom era ca. 1998.  Pets.com, Boo.com, great investments! ::)

Okay, for your own benefit do a ten similarities list.

You don't even have to pay me for offering you the opportunity to learn shit.

Anything thestringpuller has posted is pure gold, I've boomarked this page (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=66082;sa=showPosts)... thanks!!

I don't have much to add to this thread because basically he has already said everything I would have and even more... and much much better than I would.

Just pointing this out:
Not exactly.

They started messing up when they decided to help unskilled players to compete in the endgame. Doing so actually degraded very much the endgame scene, which (as has already been said in this thread) was the main feature of WoW: skilled players got frustrated that the endgame was getting ruined and quit. Now, if skilled players quit, it doesn't matter how much you give free loot to unskilled players: if they have nobody to mentor them, they will fail. And they will complain. Hence, Blizzard dumbed down even more the endgame, making everything even worse...

It's just that, everything else is at most a corollary.

I disagree here.

Even if investors care only about profits and not happy users, unhappy users will not bring profits in the long term, and likely not even in the short term (though that may happen).

If your game is horrible it won't sell, no matter if it has a good business model (actually, having a bad game is a bad business model itself). Furthermore you'll alienate players for your future games.

If instead your game is great but it doesn't have a sound business model, it may be a financial failure, but at least will give you a head start for your next one (assuming you manage to try to make one).

So, both of these failures bring you no money, but while one gives you an advantage for an eventual next try, the other gives you a penalty!

You're not disagreeing with me at all.

If making a bad game or having unsatisfied/unhappy customers makes less profit then a profit-driven company won't do that.  But the reason they won't do it is because it hurts profit - not because of an overriding desire for good games or happy customers.

There's no denying the two things are linked - and that producing horrid games is bad on every score.  Where the distinction matters is on more marginal decisions - where there's a choice between making customers more happy or making more profit.  Most of the time the two are in general alignment - but by no means always.  You could probably make customers happier by halving all prices - but unless that increases overall profit (i.e. increase in volume outweighs loss of margin) a company shouldn't do so (a simplification of course).

Your second example relies on the company having sufficient capital to make a second game after financial failure on the first.  If they do - and it it's planned - then it's generally known as a loss-leader and it a perfectly sound profit-driven decision to make.  If a company unintentionally makes a loss then that's normally going to be bad management however you cut it.

Why must things be so absolute and extreme?

Players can both enjoy a game AND have complaints about it. I'd bet that you could even find a correlation with complaints to "success" ratio.

A game both be imperfect or merely above average and be a success as well.

A game be released, yet not be ready for final judgment. This is a work in progress, and likely will be released as one as well.

This is pretty much why noob friendly may never mean noob entitle-y.


If MPEx is anything to go by the key to domination goes through finding all the idiots and stepping on all their toes while making a vocal point of it, pointing and laughing and peeing in their mochaccino.


Since the Internet it's rare that anything actually ever gets "finished" anyway. Actually, in the case of artwork this had been happening for centuries. Masters repainted their work over decades.

But it needs to be far enough along in development that all the essential functionality is there. If you release a buggy unusable piece of garbage then it will turn off potential players, even if you make huge improvements later.

There goes their plan to release a buggy unusable piece of garbage! You are such a party pooper!

As a preface: this is mainly directed at MPOE-PR.

I wanted to wait for two things before I made another post on this topic: 1) the release of MP's game design dossier, and 2) the release of GTA V's gameplay video.

As a quick anecdote, a few years ago before I owned a 360, I was playing GTA IV at a friend's place. He stated something that has stuck with me ever since, "Every action in this game is so satisfying." At that moment I realized the depth and subtlety of the design of that game. Something so profound I couldn't even begin to fathom the man hours that went into even the simplest of actions.

In the GTA IV artbook that comes with the special edition there is a short commentary from the art director, Aaron Garbut. He does a quick postmortem of the evolution of GTA, but goes on to state the following:


This is the exact opposite of what I gathered when I read MP's statement. "Do not form an expectation and you won't be disappointed" and "nothing will work at first". This is garbage, I'm sorry to use such a blanket statement, but what's the point of promoting a flagship product, then releasing a buggy alpha?

Personally I feel as though I'm being served a glorious turd all dressed up in fancy clothes, and being told it's an innovative next generation action figure, or that it will one day grow into that innovative action figure. Maybe this isn't exactly the case, but the evidence presented isn't very convincing.

The issue I brought up to begin with:


This has been reiterated:

ThickAsThieves philosophically disagrees with me saying, "Just wait and see, you'll be surprised" or as he posted in the forum:

SimCity tried this, players realized they were being served a turd, and Maxis is losing fans, as I stated in a previous post.

GTAV's first gameplay video came out, and the final judgement can already be made this game will be nothing short of extraordinary.

How do you make a game fun? You listen. And you clearly don't want to listen to your would be fans:



Game designers very much do care what FanFic says, because FanFic is a fan. It's probably a disservice to the designers to shield them from Internet people, as they will never be able to hear legitimate criticism. You'll probably state, "Internet people don't count as real critics" for one reason or another, but that dismissive nature further digs this hole, that I have no idea why is being dug.

When I had a discussion with ThickAsThieves about my concerns on IRC with MP present (I don't keep logs so I'm quoting/paraphrasing by memory), it seemed as though development would be open to players, as stated in the dossier announcement on Trilema. But what became clearly evident is the allure of the game will be provided by emergent gameplay, particularly based on interactions between players. Your example of "sword renting", would be an example of this emergent behavior. The main problem is this depends on veteran players, and a well maintained community. I brought up the example of Eve, and The Battle of Asakai which involved more than some 3000 players. There is an entire player based history (much like the history of the Bitcoin community), as to why this Battle occurred.

Eve turned 10 in May, thus it's taken years to develop the intricate emergence that allows for a player driven war to occur.

A few days later we went on to discuss Elite after I jokingly brought up Roomba Simulator 2013 as being the next Game of the Year (which may surprisingly get a few thousand downloads due to it's ridiculous nature). Soon after I see this post:
http://trilema.com/2013/have-you-played-elite-back-in-the-80s/

Relating to Eve, and subsequently a post relating to the scams in Eve created from it's emergent gameplay. Eve of course is a reimplementation of Elite, and the original developers of Eve state Elite was the inspiration for developing Eve.

Perhaps the untitled S.MG flagship title will be able to attract a player base capable of creating such an emergent experience, but without following fundamentals, this dream will never become a reality.

But if a battle of Asakai were to occur in in S.MG's lets hope it goes a bit better than in Eve, as this player who was there stated:

A game needs to be fun, period. Don't lose sight of that, and perhaps S.MG will be able to make something of itself. But that is a difficult endeavor. With public acknowledgement of a lack of artists (they are in constant recruitment from what I can tell), a mysterious if not absent designer, and a PR rep telling me "it's gonna be fun don't you worry", while arguing:


I'm hard pressed to have faith S.MG has competence in this field. S.MPOE is successful, MPEX is successful. But the endeavor that MP is undertaking as his flagship for S.MG dwarfs the former two monuments in scope and burden. To think otherwise is delusional.

To conclude this, my biggest concern comes from the public relations department of S.MG dismissing the "aesthetics" of game design as a whole. Maybe that wasn't the initial intent, and perhaps there is a true appreciation for them, but I don't see any belief or adherence to them thus far.

Again maybe the statement:

was just to say "it's just a game" and a game is just some abstraction. Maybe you don't give a fuck about gaming. Or perhaps you think the argument is moot.

But Rockstar publicly released this in relation to the postmortem of GTAIV, the point I've been trying to get across:


While you public released:

Now don't take this the wrong way, but if this is the mindset S.MG is taking in their approach to making games, (that is what S.MG does right?), Farmville the MMO will arise from this clusterfuck, and the ~9000 BTC raised will have been for naught. I hope to God, this isn't the case, but the evidence isn't very convincing.

It's difficult to believe there's any reality to this project. To build a proper game requires huge teams of professionally experienced people, this isn't the early days of 64KB computers anymore and wire-frame graphics.

Some people will clearly in invest in anything that involves Bitcoins without any serious thoughts.

Excellent points raised.

I agree you need to have a functional product to release, but there will always be room for improvement after you do release the initial game.


I think thestringpuller must have the highest text volume per post of anybody at this form, by a wide margin.

Probably the highest signal to noise ratio as well. I don't give a fuck about MMORPGs, but I find myself following this thread and reading every word.

His posts are so high quality that a successful blog could easily made from them.
As I said, just in case I bookmarked a link (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=66082;sa=showPosts) to his posts.

If thestringpuller ever went into game design I would invest in it due to the quality of his posts which to me signify's someone who knows what they are talking about.

As always excellent observation

I think there's some confusion at work here, in that you seem to be thinking of someone on a proprietary platform with captive customers (Crapple, Craposoft, Craptendo, SEGA etc). This is not the case here, S.MG is not going that way. Alpha and pre-alpha releases are not supposed to be feature complete, are not intended for the consumption of the window lemming and in general I don't think the first client will even be usable by people who can't CLI or compile. So let's not run too much ahead.


Basically because fuck you, that's why. If you've not guessed it so far, MP's stance is very much "either you're doing something or you're shutting the fuck up". Reconsider how this thread went (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=234398.100), it's not happenstance that it went that way. People who wish to contribute their "commentary" will be mocked mercilessly, not for any reason other than because they're not actually human, they're what's wrong with the race.

So, to sum up: tell me not what you would like to see S.MG do, with this game or any other. Tell me what you're capable of doing for it and I'll tell you why it's either not wanted, not useful, or remarkably fucking stupid and useless.

Attitude adjustment time.


It's on the other hand not hard to believe you'd march in here and opine without a clue as to what exactly you're opining about. Here's a hint: the total available sum of engineer man-hours that this entire community can deploy, including the self-styled "devteam" and anyone else in any way involved with Bitcoin is perhaps, on a good day, if all hands on dock within a tenth of what MP handles. You're not required or even asked to believe or not believe anything, but for your own benefit do more research, do less opining.

It's perfectly true that people invest into Bitcoin stuff just because they're idiots. That's, of course, everyone else. The sooner you learn to make that distinction (not as a point of ideology but as a point of fact, which is what it is) the sooner you might actually be said to have a clue as to wtf is going on in BTC.


If memory serves the only part where you've added anything but noise is the part where you were going to do some work on heraldics a few weeks ago. Am I seeing anything within any sort of timeframe or are you just here to run the mouth?


This eerily goes with ex-trader's post above. I think, honestly, that you all should go make your game glbse and spare me. Apparently more hands-on humiliation needs to be applied to you lot before you're ready to be actual productive members of society, so by all means, let's.

Disappointed that they're not "craptive" customers. Rapidly went downhill after "Craposoft".




We both know the answer to that, but I did get one of our artists to ink a quick boar. Thanks for the reminder!

https://i.imgur.com/MOVSIpr.png

It would not be a MMORPG something simple with Ren'py to start out see what is popular, if it reviews well then develop something that fleshes out that story-line building up on an established fan-base before launching an IPO. Unlike others I would prefer to test something out before going full out.
If several cheap practice games are made using that design it helps determine and attract your user base focus your development and receive commentary that may help improve your game.
Even if it starts out simple as they say Rome was not built in a day.

An example of this is Sim Girls created by Sim Man although I prefer team projects like Katawa Shoujo  ;)
http://www.blackspears.com/reward-points-program.html
http://www.katawa-shoujo.com/

First aside if MPOE-PR made a visual novel I would lean towards a Katawa Shoujo story-line from your team it would be interesting to see what your test run would look like.

Second aside games designs do succeed through crowdfunding your key advantage is that it is in bitcoin if you choose to provide capital for game designers to design games.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/disastercake/soul-saga-a-j-rpg-inspired-by-playstation-classics?ref=discover_rec

Actually that's not bad at all. I especially like that they have their cocks (as very few English speaking laughable prudes know these days, pretty much all heraldic animals had a cock, even the bird-like ones). You prolly should work something out with MP over on irc (https://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=bitcoin-assets).

There is a problem with your heraldry spec:


This would place the shield off-center, sitting to the left. Should the shield area be wider, or the blue area?

Also, can these areas overlap if the designs work together. For example, if ornaments curve in kind with the tail of a beast, or a beast's paw rests against a protruding ornament on the edge of a shield? Or will these aspects be interchangeable, thus disallowing such schemes?

I'm not sure what the problem you see is, but MP said there's going to be a mask made to help people visually understand so let's wait for that.

Heraldic cocks are actually an interesting topic. Certainly, 500 years ago the cock was viewed in a very different light; more than a few young women must have looked upon such heraldics with dread. I'm sure dissertations have been written on this subject.



Yup. (1024-330)/2=347. Shield will be 17px left of center, following the numbers given. The boars are centered around where the shield should be, but they're not equidistant from the image border.


I'll let the artist know; I'm sure she'll be pleased. What sort of hours does MP keep?

Over a decade ago I started learning DirectX 8, (my how time flies), the original Xbox had just been released, and flash games started becoming popular on the internet. A perfect storm was brewing for aspiring game developers; a climate not seen for nearly a decade was developing around us. http://www.gamedev.net (http://www.gamedev.net) started hosting incredible articles, and any and all knowledge to create a video game was finally surfacing on the world wide web, instead of being locked away in expensive books. Thus began the era of the indie developer.

In 2006 EA started to become one of the worst companies to work for, and soon defectors started to arise. Of these defectors Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel founded a company 2D Boy on their limited savings, approximately $10,000. Starbucks was their office. Kyle drew pretty pictures, and Ron programmed.

In 2008 they released World of Goo, a critically acclaimed independent game. A few months after the release I emailed them while working on my first game with a good friend of mine. Here is a response from Ron, the programmer:

A simple greeting, and "you got dis here/go for it" encouragement:

There is something profound about the support available in the indie community. Everyone is willing to help each other reach a mutual goal.

You've come into our house, not the other way around. So what can S.MG contribute to this community they are attempting to disrupt?

Um sure? You're going the route of stepping on everyone's heels with stilettos in a foreign community (the gamedev community), and expect to acquisition worthwhile talent. This won't play out well.

I've met with many in the community in an attempt to direct them to MP in relation to working with S.MG, posted their concerns, and have been met with dismal results. This being the case, S.MG has a big hill to climb.

This hill is made even steeper:


Hopefully someone with game industry experience hurries in and performs a Mary Poppins-like miracle for you, in the same way Rockstar saved Team Bondi from themselves. But Rockstar could only do so much, and only saved their flagship title, unfortunately they couldn't save the studio.

In a recent Trilema article it seems even Mr. Popescu has a hint of concern:

I really wish you all the luck and hope everything works out.


If you're really serious about this statement here are two games the lead designer for my current project made in recent years:
http://www.cosmicadventuresquad.com/projects/planetration/ (http://www.cosmicadventuresquad.com/projects/planetration/)
http://www.cosmicadventuresquad.com/projects/leave-me-alone/ (http://www.cosmicadventuresquad.com/projects/leave-me-alone/)

The latter is already pretty successful with 100,000 plays, and is currently sponsored. The former is still in development. Give them a play, leave a comment, etc. (Perhaps he'll create a btc tip jar address). If they gain popularity they'll add features, and push for publication, but for now they're out there waiting for people to play them.

In the future we'll be releasing some more games on multiple platforms. Hopefully my posts have piqued some interest in their development.

I leave you all with the Jabberwocky:
https://i.imgur.com/6l5QU03.jpg

Hey, that's nice. Did you draw that?

So, I tried to play the linked games, but they don't seem to work? They don't seem to be responding to the keyboard?

EDIT: So, I tried it using Firefox instead of Safari and this time it worked.

If you're really serious about this statement here are two games the lead designer for my current project made in recent years:
http://www.cosmicadventuresquad.com/projects/planetration/
http://www.cosmicadventuresquad.com/projects/leave-me-alone/

The latter is already pretty successful with 100,000 plays, and is currently sponsored. The former is still in development. Give them a play, leave a comment, etc. (Perhaps he'll create a btc tip jar address). If they gain popularity they'll add features, and push for publication, but for now they're out there waiting for people to play them.

In the future we'll be releasing some more games on multiple platforms. Hopefully my posts have piqued some interest in their development.


[/quote]

Thanks for replying
I gave the two games a try and they are quite fun although I did notice that I couldn't drill through my own holes and got stuck untll I realized I could reverse and then the second part of the game was a fun change of pace as I was not expecting that surprising change with a nice soundtrack and the sonic pick up ring noise its a fun game :)

Do wish I could retreat faster after making a really detailed perfectly made path to get every single item before the core exploded ^_^
Made me go HURRY UP!!! First time I did that and OH CRAP ha-ha almost want a retreat the drill faster upgrade

The second game darn stalkers kind of like Slenderman only I see that they chase me and don't lurk in the bloody distance till I cover them with a tree in or turn away

If it was on Kongregate a few months ago I would send have sent you something in the tip jar although it was removed and that was disappointing as it promoted indie development.
http://www.kongregate.com/forums/1-kongregate/topics/307728-ending-the-tipping-program

I enjoyed the games and left a comment on both games give me a bit address and I'll send a tip too ^_^
I do enjoy indie development and find these games enjoyable simple but fun
Freedom

I leave you all with the Jabberwocky:
https://i.imgur.com/6l5QU03.jpg

They work it just isn't start that is start :)

WASD or Up arrow down arrow left right for Leave Me Alone walk the wrong way to see the High Scores Walk the Right way to start the game
That name was convenient
Hover Over the Red Planet in Planetration then Click on it
Two commands one for the turret using the mouse and WASD UP/DOWN/LEFT/RIGHT cursors for drill Backspace to reverse if your path conflicts  ;)
Had a moment where I was like that as well

Browser Used Google chrome

Here's the mask: http://trilema.com/2013/statements-regarding-the-mmorpg-under-development-i-v/#comment-93959


Overlap is okay, to a reasonable degree, but yes they are interchangeable. So the reasonable degree can't be that "the curve is in kind with the tail of one beast". Has to be more general than that.

Where do I play

will it have free rolls ways to earn bitcoins free

If it weren't for you goons this forum would read like camwhoretalk.

I've only just spotted this thread so sorry for being late to the party. I've run a game studio for nearly 20 years. I've worked on all sorts of good and crap stuff in that time, mostly in the background so you wouldn't know of us. Lots of licensed work, that sort of thing.

On the indie side I've worked on Alien Hominid (came before Castle Crashers, check it out), Cletus Clay (unfinished, long story! Be awesome when done!) Derrick the Deathfin and Eufloria (Apple's iPad Game of 2012 runner-up, multiple award winner, 500K+ sales). Look them up if you want - they're all interesting in their own ways. 2 of the 3 released ones have sold extremely well. I'm currently working on a Eufloria spin off. I've worked on most platforms and know plenty of people in the industry.

I also set up the Bitcoin Bundle, with the kind support of Ron & Kyle (World of Goo) amongst others.

So that's my background - hence I think I'm qualified to talk about game investments (you may disagree).

I'll say this up front - I'm not an MMO expert and I won't pretend to be, but I do have some knowledge of the area and friends whose very business it is.

• Any game is extremely high risk. Most are never finished, most that are will flop.
• An MMO is extremely difficult to pull off, let alone without serious experience. You have to be hugely talented and be making something that stands out from the crowd with new visuals or game dynamics. Even cloning is not going to work (and is more difficult to do well than people imagine)
• If you are going to do a successful MMO, it's going to cost a lot of money and take a very long time.
• I did see that TAT's fund implied money will be made in various ways but I know this industry very well - details please.

In general, as an experienced game developer who has seen & experienced pretty much everything, good and bad, I wouldn't touch this as an investment. The attitude feels wrong, approach is wrong from what I can see, and the experience isn't there.

That's just my opinion and it doesn't mean I wish them the guys ill will or that they won't succeed. In fact I hope they do succeed and if they ever wanted advice they can always ask, but as an investment I can't recommend it .

If people do want to invest Bitcoin in games, I can come up with a vastly better way to do it. If I could raise thousands of Bitcoins, I'd allocate it to 2 or 3 really good, unique projects which are well beyond the paperwork stage. And it'd still be high risk, just rather less of one.

I would love to do such a thing so if someone wants to talk to me about it, PM me please.

I can't speak for S.MG at all, but isn't it possible for what you suggest to also be a part of their plan?

If I'm an investor in games, I need to know if I'm investing in:

An MMO
An outsourcing business
A f2p iOS/Android developer (original content, cloneville?)
An investment fund for games (what types?)
A particular game (platform, multi-platform, IP ownership)

I need to know the particulars about dividends.
I need to know all relevant experience.
I need to know development strategy, costs, schedule, and key staff.

All of these are completely different, require different skill sets, different levels and kinds of experience, and their own unique business plan.

I've seen mention of middleware but not a lot more. MMOs are ludicrously high risk and very difficult to do. I know people who have actually done it without much experience so I know it is possible, but they went into it extremely knowledgable, well advised, really knew their design stuff, and it's still been (and is) incredibly difficult and expensive (Path of Exile, developer in New Zealand).

The only one I'd even consider investing in if someone didn't have game industry experience is an outsourcing business, but they'd still need a partner who knew the business or they'd need a really good plan and have all the industry stats and figures at their finger tips.

I know this is the wild west but it's still a business and one which is asking for a considerable amount of money. Since this is an area I know well, and I know how high the failure rate is, this pitch is missing... well... almost everything. In the nicest possible way. And I don't want the first big Bitcoin games investment to be like that. Any investment in a game developer is high risk money in the first place, but it should at least be an investment into the right business.

So, back to your question. If it is part of their plan then that should be clear to investors. Moreover, they need make clear the particulars - of which there are many.

EDIT: As a spokesperson, MPOE-PR is doing a spectacularly poor job. You're asking for that much money and you don't think you should need more than a name and the word 'Game'? That's ridiculous. As is saying that there is no particular area planned to concentrate in - you *have* to know, you don't just pull it out of a hat and say 'well the f2p model is going pretty well so we may do that'. The more I re-read this thread, the worse I realise this is.

S.MG should state what their -full- plan is and how they intend to work it within the game sector. Far too much money involved to be allowed to wing it.

Investors - most investors in games lose money. That's not because they are investing in the wrong people necessarily, it's a viciously competitive market place where right place, right time, and talent all need to come together. Investing when you don't even really know what you're investing in multiplies that risk a hundred fold unless that person has a great track record in that precise area.

And if it's mostly to be invested in the MMO linked to in this thread, run away. Run away now. I just don't even know what to say - it's way, way off the mark.

Haha!

Nah, I've no interest in getting into an argument about this.

I've made my point as a non-investor from the game industry. People will make up their own minds from here and MPOE-PR can run this how he wants. He doesn't need to spend time defending his proposition from me as I'm not investing, and I've seen how those type of threads pan out.

If you are considering investing, i believe I've pointed enough out so you know the right questions and risks.

A pity, it could've been quite fun!

Don't worry, I would never have touched anything related to mpoe/mpex even before both you and thestringpuller "clearly pointed out" what was dead wrong with his "plan" and his attitude ;)

I hope the gaming industry will stop luring businessmen such as him, because they really hurt the industry as a whole :/

Hmm, well I have edited my post somewhat as I was deeply unimpressed with the blog post about the MMO, and the attitude towards people submitting artwork.

One can never know whether something will be a success, but you do learn to work out the odds.

I sometimes invest "leftover BTC" after reinvesting divs in some of these companies with an unclear earning model. The amount of money is too little to care about but if only one of them strikes it rich I might hold something of value in the future. The TAT passthrough is cheap enough on Havelock.

Send it to me and you can have a copy of Eufloria ;)

Yes, I do the same sometimes.

Much better now! : D
(was very good even before the edit, of course)

I didn't imagine you were. Basically you're just here in the hopes of being taken seriously/at your word on the grounds of just so. It won't happen. See here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=124441.0).


Dude. Shut the fuck up about "the industry". On this Internet everyone knows you're a dog, you have no business with "the industry".


If/Once you get over yourself you'll probably find your way to the assets chan (https://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=bitcoin-assets), where you can join the actual movers and shakers laughing at at all the clueless noobs thinking that.

And the above responses demonstrate everything you should need to know.

I really hope people take the time to evaluate this investment properly. It's absolutely ludicrous to have this person fronting it IMHO, let alone my issues with the investment itself given what little is known about it and the MMO information released thus far.

MPOE, if people want to trust you then that's their right. However, your constant misdirection and insults to people in this thread are not doing you or the fund any good whatsoever.

You are not in a position to evaluate what does what. This is because you are stupid, too stupid even to realize exactly how stupid you are. Shut up and lurk more. Supposedly very mild tutoring in the subject matter is sufficient to help improve your lacking metacognitive abilities, even if it won't do much for your actual skill and ability. At the point you finally realize just how utterly stupid you are, you may be in a position to (humbly!) ask questions. That comes much, much before being in a position to make statements.

Yeah, err, whatever. Erm, are you on medication?! Kind of half serious.

I'm both amazed and terrified by the fact that people not only still read him, but give him their money too!
However, there is plenty of people who falls for totally obvious scams too, so I shouldn't be surprised if they fall for him (at least he's one single small step above the scammers).

So basically you're a little butthurt that your oh-so-expert bullshit went nowhere, and so time to pretend like reality doesn't exist and didn't just piss all over you. Well done, but the problem is in your head. The solution you imagine you've found won't help it any.

The same goes for the rest of you idiots doddering around here.


Read up about how GLBSE died. Then you'll be just as terrified, but for much better cause.

+1,000,000

They've been warned though and time will pass at which point they can evaluate their judgement.....

I thought the response was great. It addressed the concerns raised in a direct and concise manner.

I had some interest in learning about MG because I'm a gamer, investor, etc.. but after reading this entire thread it's clear to me that this is no investment. There's no experience to speak of, no real plan that I can see and MP comes across as the biggest douche on the internet. Get over yourself dude, you might learn a thing or two.

It's mind blowing MG has been able to raise any sort of funds. The community really needs to be a lot more diligent.

They did not only raise a bunch of money (roughly equivalent to 1 million USD), but the share price has roughly doubled since the IPO. So I guess the people with money disagree with you.

People are often stupid.
Look at how many throw their money at obvious scams.
Look at how many don't even try to get the money back after they have been scammed.

Has it actually raised 1 million dollars? Really?

Oh dear.

I guess it actually raised 9000 btc, no actual dollars. You can look at the history over on mpex.co

I did look. I just, well, wow.

Mpoe, don't let them down.

MPOE-PR, leaving aside the blindingly obvious, what do you think of this: http://www.tsukino.ca/netwhack/

It's something I put together in my spare time on and off the first few years I was teaching English in Japan. It seems to me that Mircea is interested (somewhat) in those old-school type of games. Notice the interface. Anyway, with a bit of serious love it could rival Nethack. If you understand what I am talking about, and have ever played a monetized MUD (i.e. Medievia) you will know there is a market here.

The question I pose to you is, will you turn down an easy market? If you would like, maybe we can work together and S.MG can publish my game. If you want to talk terms may I suggest a 70%-30% split in favor of S.MG contingent upon a list of features being added to the game at your discretion; I am also more than willing to work for shares in the company as any participant in a startup should be. Let me know!

Woah there. If you want a deal for a game that's not the way to do it!

Publisher: you don't need one. You may want a funder.

Terms: 70:30 in their favour? That had better be a lot of funding.

And lots of other stuff...

Not only are you wrong, but you're also clueless.


People random clueless noobs just like yourself were saying the same thing a year ago. They were making the same wrong choices based on the same broken thought process a year ago. They are no longer with us, for those reasons.

Do yourself a favor and follow the same advice I've given to all the other random clueless noobs outspoken idiots in this thread. Keep quiet until you have a clue and use the time to do your reading.


No. Not "people". Not some vague imaginary thing way over there.

You. You are stupid. You fail to distinguish scams from actual deals.


I think that's very bold.


So you came here with your delusions of self importance, got thoroughly humiliated and somehow just can't let go. Too thick to pick up on your own failure or what exactly is the matter?

You want me to download Java..

LOL at the quote from Nefario. Althought, I don't think he counts as a random clueless noob, he is more like the leader of all clueless noobs.

Actually I would prefer if Netwhack was an example of why you should already have it installed in the first place.

Hey, no one is asking you to put it in your browser :)

I am no fan of java and you have to be crazy to start any web project in it these days, but there are successful games that still run in Java profitably.

If you are thinking about Minecraft then yes, it's definitely profitable and written in Java, but if it wasn't it would have so much better performances...

If you know what you are doing and do your homework, you also know you don't want to work for him.
Unless, of course, he pays you upfront and gives you carte blanche.

This. Although flash and mobile stuff shouldn't take years.

And not to have Mpoe-pr anywhere near pr. You can imagine how that will turn out with journos, gaming forums, reddit, et al! Popcorn time.

The company concept may yet be ok - not that I have evidence of that - but the pr will kill it even if it is.

I don't see that at all. Sure, it's something of a meme to hate Java, but there's really nothing else that is as useful. Nothing else really compares to what you can do in Java. Most of the complaints about Java are 10 years old. Which says a lot for Java. I mean, I just love it when people say that Java is slow or that it doesn't have closures, it's almost as if they are the fish that didn't make the jump and they're being left behind, in the past. You can actually see the clouds forming in people's brains as they stop thinking when you tell them Java is as fast as C for many implementations, and has had closures for years.

Cognitive dissonance. You should see people's faces when I argue that Visual Studio is a really good IDE.

Nethack predates Java by about as much as your mental age.


This is pretty much spot on.


This is pretty much nonsense. The only way to establish that someone KNEW what they were doing with games is in the retrospective. Same as movies and everything else in the line.


Dream on. You've got a ways to go to carry the man's coffee yet.

I'm interested in learning the subtleties in the distinction between Mircea's known position that a person's capability is measured by the successes they have demonstrated, and how that seemingly conflicts with your statement.

Yes, things change and past success does not guarantee future success, but it helps to be experienced, no?

Or do you feel that the true measure in demonstrating success is tied to agility/adaptability in a string of successes?

I do think the more entrenched you become in a school of thought, the more likely you are to have those with more perspective eat your lunch, but where is the line here?

Well, I have no idea where the line is. MP makes the calls as to the future, apparently history goes into it but I'm pretty sure it's not the whole story. Perhaps the confusion comes from your mixing professional stuff (such as for instance being a banker) with creative stuff. Willy nilly creative stuff is a hit and miss affair, there's no escaping that.

Otherwise it certainly helps to be experienced. It's just the experienced are never the dorks declaring that on some lolforum. Compare noob MP (http://trilema.com/2013/noob-mp-or-how-it-all-began/) with the string of noobs on parade here, hi I'm X doing Y vs anon nobody doing nothing. Not a very hard call to make in the end.

And yet there it is -- my fully functional roguelike, in all it's glory. Disturbing, isn't it?

That's a vaguely more sensible post.

Creative stuff is professional though. The creative element in a game varies from quite a bit to very small indeed.

The vast majority of people in the game dev world are engineers or artists. The artwork is creative in a way obviously, but it's usually little different to working on The Simpsons or whatever. It takes talent and effort but you're a cog in a machine, and there is no shortage of good artists.

In both of the above cases you're looking for experience every single time. Within the indie world, many people are surprisingly experienced and amazingly talented. Often there is a mix, and often there has been a lot of tutoring going on. In almost every case, advice is given by other indies to help out on a lot of areas that you simply can't know about without having experience.

I also wouldn't describe creative stuff as willy nilly. That indicates you don't understand the nature of creativity or how it applies to game development.

In your second paragraph you say 'the experienced are never the dorks declaring that on some lolforum'. Actually you're very wrong. I, and many other game developers, well known and otherwise, are on a number of forums.

Being obnoxious when you don't know who people are, let alone when some of us are not anonymous, is very poor business sense. That is how people will see you, gamers, and professional developers.

I may have been on the fence over the fund if it wasn't for your attitude, but if anyone asked me now whether to work for MP I'd say no way and point them here. It makes the fund wreak of lack of professionalism. Don't you see that?

Yeah, funny, isn't it? And yet, there it is: Netwhack.

 ;D

My, look at all that egg on your face! BTW, serious love = less than 3 months. It's just that I don't get paid to develop nethack clones. If there was any money on the line whatsoever I would put out a game better than nethack in about that time plus a few.

Fun fact of the day: Nethack's item and monster data is compatible with Netwhack. This is because Netwhack was initially written in C++, and was initially a port of Nethack to C++. Most of the data you see in-game is original though, as I didn't want to offend anyone on the devteam... yet  :D

A. Stop interjecting yourself in the discussions of adults as if you were one. You aren't one.
B. Learn to spell.
C. Look up what words mean, read up on what's being discussed. S.MG is not a "fund".

oic, you're talking about technical aspects.

That's not what people mean when they talk about things rivaling other things. It's about cultural impact. In the context of gamer culture the things that rival nethack/rogue are ADVENT, Space Invaders, Elite, スーパーマリオブラザーズ or id Software's 1992 Castle Wolfenstein remake. Your copy with a few bits slapped on is not one of these.

Exactly.

I love you. You're amazing!

Oh, I completely agree. I have no intention of challenging Nethack's cultural impact. But that is not what I said. It's quite clear that Netwhack is just a toy game I made to see if I could do it; I presented it as something I did in my spare time, I was quite clear about that. The point was, "that's something I did in my spare time, what have you done?"

I brought it up as my way of showing why I am in this discussion. To show that what I say is the perspective of someone who is a competent programmer and who has studied and practiced the art of game design from many angles. If you want to talk practice and experience it's fair to say there are many others here (thestringpuller, ff) who are far more experienced and involved in the industry than I am. But it is also fair to say that I am as far above someone like greyhawk as tsp and ff are from me.

But, it's really not that important. As I have said before, I would really like S.MG to succeed, because I want to play a new game. It's really that simple for me. I've long since given up trying to figure out why they choose the hard way forward. It will be an interesting social experiment; if they succeed, how they do it, and if they fail, how they will handle it. I'm not even interested in which scenario is more likely. I guess you could say my point is, I wrote netwhack ten years ago, and today, S.MG has nothing. And try as they might to surpass what little toy game I have written, so far I see nothing on the table except a lot of insults hurled at people who know better and who have accomplished far more.

Don't kid yourself.  ;) Just because I left the gaming industry some 15 years ago for better paying and more relaxing pastures doesn't mean I don't know anything about it anymore. The more things change, the more they stay the same, especially in this industry.

Oh, I see, it makes sense.

Problem is that he thinks he need no previous experience to do that, and this path always lead to spectacular failures.

I understand, but for the sake of the Industry, I want him to fail: such an arrogant and ignorant person can be quite harmful, and we would stay much better if people like him wouldn't try to meddle in things they don't understand.
"We" is both people in game development, and, to a lesser extent, players themselves.

There's a difference between kidding yourself and not knowing something. Once you are told, you have the opportunity to learn. I'm happy to say I learned something today. Thanks, greyhawk.

Who is being arrogant now? We can't have anybody shake the boat of our precious "industry"!

Until the game is released we can only vent  ;)

Oh, come on, have you read his posts?

At the rate you're going you'll be this month's avatar of bitcointalk idiocy.

3/10, have some coffee and breakfast and try again

How appropriate, you fight like a cow!

In that case, here's another thing to learn:

http://www.sec.gov/News/PressRelease/Detail/PressRelease/1370539730583

Hope your secret underground base is secret and stuff.

Good, Pirate is about to be hanged or made to walk the plank. As was custom 200 years ago. :D

Of course the present day pirate Jon Corzine who ran away with millions of MF Global deposits will still escape scott free.

Memo to prospective pirates today: get politically connected. :P

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Me: "That guy's fucked."
Pascale: "Good, he SHOULD be fucked."

Heavy lels indeed

They found Trendon now that is newsworthy

That doesn't make sense. But for what it's worth, I know you tried. Good work, greyhawk!

Went through 10 pages and still don't get what do you mean by "game".
Are you talking about developing gambling games like Satoshi Dice to have people put BTCs in and get part of their investment (hopefully) back?
Or you are talking about general computer games like World of Warcraft?

BTW, what just happened on BTCT, feeling like on a roller coaster, anyone can fill me in?

Did you read the linked trilema posts? The main game being developed currently is a MMORPG with a real cash economy.

The BTCT TAT.MINIGAME is just a pass-through, and the number of shares is not very large, so it is easy to spike the price upward (or downward) without really affecting the overall evaluation of S.MG.

Thank you! Crystal clear now ;)

Well if you want info, you read the discussions on Trilema (http://trilema.com/category/smg/) rather than going through ten pages of this nonsense.

...Lol oops, beaten to it.

To update the forum, an early alpha (http://trilema.com/2013/its-called-eulora/) was in fact released, last month. It's sort-of functional.

The server is going up and down a lot as per the needs of the devteam so there's no guarantee you may see it at any given time. Nevertheless trying is free.

Picking up so many cheap shares on Havelock right now!

August update: there's some shiny new stuff going on in-game, including a .1337btc prize if you manage to win Eulora's very first easter egg hunt. Also the client source is up for anyone who wants to compile their own, there's an open coding task up for grabs, and so on.

Details here (http://trilema.com/2013/eulora-august-update/).

Wasn't sure what to think of this, so haven't really touched it.  I see this is starting to make some progress.  Going to see what it's about.

I tried to download and use the software on a Lubuntu system. Version 0.0.1 just gave me a bunch of random characters and errors that it could not find the right files. Then I noticed there is a version 0.0.2, I downloaded that, but I kept getting errors when I tried to extract the downloaded files.

Alright, from when I ran version 1:

Edit:
For version 2 I got it to extract now, but when I run it I see this:

Random characters seems a pretty accurate description. :)
Exactly what OS are you on?
The current versions are only available for linux64 builds. And you need to start it with the included bash (launch.sh). Hopefully other builds will be available in the near future, or you can download source from github and build your own. (note: If you do that you will still need art and data files from the download and for now local copies of Cal3d and Crystalspace).

Oh, I didn't realize it was just for linux64. I am running a Lubuntu 32 bit system in a virtual box on a mac.

That's much better. I've forwarded it to the dev ppl.

So far the best idea is that either the download didn't complete or for some reason the unzipping corrupted the files. Have you checked the md5 sums as shown on the downloads (http://minigame.bz/eulora/binaries/) page? Do they match?

Is your OS 32 bit? Cause the precompiled binaries are for 64 bit atm.

Edit: I guess I'm late again.

Try changing your time zone.  ;)

I've got a 64-bit linux machine, I'll give it a try later today.

A treasure trove of game mechanics and concepts is up over at Trilema (http://trilema.com/2013/eulora-game-mechanics-etc/). Details on anticipated development milestones, too.

Eulora in china is named 罗拉颂 by me .

http://btc8.com/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=7&page=1&extra=#pid8

Further details released re crafting (http://trilema.com/2013/eulora-crafting/).


Ahh that's pretty cool!

I bought shares on BTCT. It's a cool game! ;D

Any update？

Not yet.

Heraldics are coming along nicely. I'm told this is based on some sort of prehistoric cave bear:

http://imgur.com/NIybwbh.jpg

Any update?

wait

There's going to be a further release sometime this month, they've just about got crafting prototyped.

It will be a alpha version or a final version?

Certainly not a final version, no.

Status update (http://trilema.com/2013/eulora-october-update/) just posted with notes on development, upcoming plans and artwork.

New alpha version out today. Check out the important extensions, assorted notes, and binary bundle here (http://trilema.com/2013/smg-eulora-v003/).

Is it possible to transfer the shares from bitfunder to havelock?

See here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=258847.msg3499763#msg3499763 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=258847.msg3499763#msg3499763)

any update?

Nothing big since the Nov report.

Mid February comment on the new update  ;)
http://trilema.com/2014/smg-eulora-v004/

good.

What do you think about huntercoin?

Eulora wiki has been created, feel free to contribute.

http://www.eulorum.org/ (http://www.eulorum.org/)

Kind of forgot about this but how will this thread update in the future

I am amazed that this runescape knockoff is valued at 10,000 btc.

Do they even have a planned source of revenue?

I assume it has to do with gambling/fleecing like every other listing on mpex.

Well Mircea is still sort of dead so any updates to Bitcointalk needs a PR
Which is not MP since its still sort of banned lol

Updates are on the trilema website, http://trilema.com/category/smg/ (http://trilema.com/category/smg/). I don't think they plan on putting any more updates on this forum. You can always join the #bitcoin-assets channel on IRC freenode.net if you want more information.

8744 btc in cash with no business plan? What is this money being spent on? How did they raise so much to begin with?

Sounds exactly like neobee 2.0.

Pancake you are honestly the most flippy floppy person Ive seen on this forum. One second you are trashing all the scams on this forum(and normally for good reason I might add), but the next second your praising nearly identical scams from another forum. How does that work?

I totally forgot that for the investomomers of mpex a financial report = legit business.

Speaking of which I would love to offer you the chance to invest in my lemonade stand. 100 shares at 1000btc a peice. You would probably be pleased to know we do daily financial reports.

A step up from that boss NeoBee investment of yours, I'm sure :)

Don't you understand? All neobee was missing was financial reports.

Sorry, wat?  All I remember was you trying to unload your one hundred shares :)

http://goldsilver.com/re/common/images/images/Untitled1.png

That is assuming the financial reports are accurate.

I suppose that the guy running this operation could be the most trustworthy person in existence but that doesn't change the fact that this halfassed knockoff of runescape has literally no chance of raising even a few percent of their total value in revenue.

I'd be surprised if they earned an entire bitcoin.

Also AM has plenty of money for reinvestment. NRE for gen3 was paid for with part of said money.


Was anyone informed? 1-2 trades a month seem to hint no. .

Ah thanks for this and haven't been on the assets channel for a bit but do know its where TAT MP Lightbox once upon a time and a few other oldies lurk so should go hang out there sometime.

Also 8744 In Cash still well at least we know the Bitcoins are held and not all risked at market value ...
Still Neobee was a weird one march statement looks great has a nice google doc go into april 2 weeks later Dead
Financial situation in upheaval
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1khGADbJeu0efCNZ13lnz8BucG7PfS5Cl9lBZ1sncY-4/preview?sle=true

But since this is S Minigame should not go to far off topic back to waiting on it.

As an aside well we did have this conversation way back with thestringpuller it can work just need to see its design first.
That currency system they want to test out was interesting.

Also Re: Seventh Continent

Eulora now in Beta. Version 0.1.0 released

http://trilema.com/2015/minigame-smg-april-may-2015-combined-statement/ (http://trilema.com/2015/minigame-smg-april-may-2015-combined-statement/)

S.MG realised no operating revenue this period, but IS expected to realise operating revenue next period.

This coming Sunday, June the 7th, in between 19:00 and 23:00 GMT the first game event will take place. It will consist of me handing out enchanted magic bags to all comers, engraved with the recipient's name. The enchantment allows these bags to produce 1`337 game coins each dayii. As the game coin is anchored to one satoshi per, you probably want to hang on to these ancient relics.

Looks like rare items are coming out.