Greedy Uber Entertainment?

Ew, I know what you mean. It gets me down some days too

Seeing games like that actually make me depressed.

A few years ago I was angry about some random games were you had to preorder to play beta. At that time many people I knew thought that to be a stupid scheme of the publishers.

Last Year PA come up on KS and I instantaneously backed to get at least alpha-access and upgraded even further later on without feeling even bad about it.
KS changes so much, suddenly it feels good to pay tons of money to get stuff like alpha-access.

... well player UBER

I'd be very surprised to see PA not making any profit. The KS should have payed for a substantial amount of the development-costs and the game has lots of publicity thanks to the whole KS-concept.

But wait - wasn't the big publisher actually a source of stress in the past? And going indie a way to circumvent that stress? Or is it a different kind of stress?

The stress of having 44,000+ "individual publishers"? (some of whom are quite noisy)
The stress of doing this kind of genre defining game with the whole internet-world looking at you?
The stress of showing off incomplete game assets to ignorant gamers rather than ignorant suits?
The stress of what happens if this fails and they have to shelve all their plans for PA before they even see the light of day?
The stress of...
You get the idea...

No safety net anymore, eh Uber?

This. There are different forms of stress, and I think we all prefer this, but there are still stresses associated with NOT having a publisher which provides it's own safety net.

- No massive QA team
- No marketing and PR team (I'm effectively our PR and marketing team, which if you know my background as design, engineering, and general misanthrope is kinda scary)
- No resources that large companies bring.. not just money, but access to hardware, software site licenses, and a host of other things you take for granted until they're gone.

There is no perfect world when it comes to dev. It's always a series of carefully calculated risks to pull this stuff off.

And this is why I wanted this thread to stay open. I think there's a lot of misconceptions about the ease and cost of game development out there. First is that we are still a business, even if our main passion is making and playing games.

And it's why I'm continually blown away at how well this community communicates and discusses topics with us. So again, thanks. Even to the people who question our motives, at least you're on here talking. Well, except for this threads OP. Sad he hasn't come back, because it does feel like it was just an attempt to cause a stir, rather than have a real discussion.

I've been really amazed by this game's community. I've only been on a couple of gaming forums, but already most of them were pretty annoying.
-MWO forums are full of junk
-I merely glanced at the starcraft 2 forums, and realized that even that was a bad idea
-Supcom forums were pretty nice, Supcom2 forums were pretty ok, but there were lots of people there that just couldn't handle good discussion. The Steam forums were way worse. I think rcix and I became the unofficial 'no, it's not FA, but thanks for posting the same thing that all those other guys did' people over there. Still managed to have some good conversation despite it.

PAs forums? I actually really enjoy my time here. The posters, even if they have problems, stay very professional. It's refreshing. Not to mention all the dev posts.

Actually, I think other forums could take a hint. Quantity of dev posts seems to correlate with how nice the community is

Agreed, it's nice to have the devs swoop in and set everyone straight before it all devolves into a factless flame war. There a still a few threads that end up like that when not even Uber know the answers yet, but it's only a few and most people are still relatively respectful in them .

This makes me love Uber even more. <3 <3

This is more-over an internal management process explanation.

People will do things in, what they believe, is there best interest and, as a result, will buy goods and services based on what their perceived worth is. The people who have purchased alpha, has set the value of alpha access higher than the actual cost set. Therefore to them, the value derived from participating in the alpha is greater than what they would have done with their earnings had they not participated in the alpha. This is the basis of opportunity cost, and to each individual it is different.

Now a business can access their supply, or, in this case, ability to provide the alpha service, and find that the costs associated with providing one more unit, in this case is an individual, with access to alpha would be exponentially higher, exceeding its bearable cost per unit. This is an internal management decision, which is based on what they feel is a profitable activity for them to undertake. Since you can reasonably estimate the quantity demand at a given price, the business will adjust their price model to include as many individuals as it can before exceeding its bearable cost per unit.

In addition, the internal management must also decide what size should the sample size be since a large enough and random enough sample size of a population will indicate the nature of the global population, within a reasonable tolerance. Therefore, it isn’t necessary to test each individual of the global population. Now, if the sample size that would indicate the nature of the global population is less than the number of units allowable to have access to alpha before exceeding its bearable cost per unit than the business will use as many individuals allowable before exceeding its bearable cost per unit. Whereas, if the opposite was true than the business will need to balance its perceived value of a sample size to indicate the nature of the global population with its desired profit margin. From this they will set their price in order to maximize their interests.

If the price was set too low, too many individuals would participate which would increase their cost beyond its bearable cost per unit. Depending on the rising costs it may not only decrease their desired profit margin, indicating that other projects should have been undertaken, but could potentially create losses for the business. Where the cost of providing the service was higher than the amount charged.

In addition, the concepts within economies of scale in terms of diminishing costs, in this case, is not possible to achieve due to the relative size of the organization for a multitude of reasons, which I will not get into.

Since we do not know Uber’s internal management decisions on these matters it is safe to say that only Uber truly knows whether they are taking advantage of their customers. Personally, I don’t think so, not just from the above quote from Garat but due to the fact that their price model is in-line with the gaming industry. Where I am, new video games are $60.00 retail; therefore, we are getting a discount (If purchased for $40.00) because you are aware of its early existence. If you pre-order it at the average new video game price ($60.00) you will get into the beta. Which I must say, is more than most companies offer these days. The only real premium is for the Alpha, which is $30.00, which I do not believe is too much to ask for.

I hope this helps.

You have a few thousand backers thirsty to make the alpha crash and abuse any kind of exploit you might introduce. The tricky part is just to make sure that they all know how to report bugs and understand that the alpha/beta is by no means a finished product.

When I think back to FA and QA I think of the patch 3603, that was never really released to GPGnet apparently because THQ didn't feel like doing QA for it. At least that's the official explanation I've read somewhere.
Also, looking at how many bugs and exploits in FA only came to light thanks to the playerbase I'd say that players are pretty good at finding bugs. The question is more how hard it will be to handle all the feedback you'll get.

I think you're expectations are way too high! ;p

Mike

Why?

We (44,000+ backers and pre-orderers) are not trained QA testers... by a long way.

We may stumble on bugs and problems... but we're not trained in how to report those bugs and the protocol that comes with crash reports.

"Alpha" is just another word for "Early Access" to most people.

Because most don't even know what a Real Alpha or Beta is, they've been spoiled by the new trend of using beta as new demos. Not to mention a general lack of knowledge of how game development actually works/happens.

Honestly I think we'll be lucky to get more than a few hundred people that turn out to be proper 'testers' that are actually looking for bugs and not just stumbling upon them while playing and can properly articulate what happened and what might have caused it.

I will say thought that things are slowly getting better, 5 years ago something like this was basically a dream.

But I don't think we're quite there yet.

Mike

I would assume that the fraction of people that more or less know how to report bugs and understand what "alpha" means within the people that payed 90$+ to get alpha access is rather high compared to the general "gamer"-population. Especially since my general feeling is that the TA/FA/PA community also has a relatively large fraction of people with a technical background compared to other games.
I guess we can just hope for the best.
What's definitely important is that the first thing shown after launching the alpha is a big information-dialog that tells people that they should report bugs in a certain way if they want to see them fixed.

Yeah, I accounted for that by saying a few hundred. ;p It's also worth clarifying I'm talking about consistent 'testers' the ones around for the greater majority of the testing period and not just messing around with a new version for a few hour sand waiting for the next one to pop out. Like I said the industry is moving forward, the info is out there nowadays, it's up to the gamers to educate themselves now, and I tihnk that's gonna be a bumpy road.

Mike

How many Alpha testers will use the Bug-Report system?

How many of those Alpha Testers will come to the forums on a regular basis?

How many of those Alpha Testers that do come to the forums on a regular basis will treat it like a Job? (which it is)

How many of those Alpha Testers that do come to the forums on a regular basis and treat it like a Job, also have a full grasp of succinct problem reporting even after being "told" how to do it?

keep cutting something into smaller and smaller slices... and you end up with something wafer-thin...
Just don't put too much faith in the internet Cola_Colin... you might be disappointed with the results.

We will know the answer to these questions in 6 weeks or so. I have never seen something that really compares, so I obviously don't know the answer to these questions. Nobody does.
So hopefully everybody hopes the best and UBER prepares for the worst

Don't worry I can deal with disappointment here and there.

Well, i've done some bug reporting in the past, so i hope that experience comes in handy for this, but as Cola said it'll be very different since it's such an early alpha.

I'm prepared. I'm trained in the dark art of QA, and have lots of time to devote to it. Completely agree that I'll probably be in the vast minority, but it's in my best interests to make sure the alpha phase squashes as many bugs as possible. I'll be trying everything and anything to generate lots of (hopefully useful) bug feedback for the folks at Uber.