Why, why doesn't the developer simply lower the price?

[Lord Asshat]

I have no issue buying a $15 game. I have an issue buying a $15 multiplayer game that has 0 people playing. Multiplayer relies on a community. The Dev states that he didn't want to run sales due to it seeming unfair to people who bought it full price, but I'd say he utterly failed in that regard, as it I'm pretty sure no one is happy the game is completely dead. Why not lower the price to $5? No sale, just try to get people in, and rebuild the community. I'd buy it.

[[Industrial] A_HUMBLEBUMBLED]

Agreed. The real unfairness comes from the fact that such a great indie game dev also comes from such a terrible RP rep

He's litteraly crashed his game into the ground, not from the game being boring but because of terrible (and ironic) marketing tactics.

[vfa]

it's much more of a waste to have a useless game because there's noone on it than it would be for others to buy it cheaper.

[Lord Asshat]

Exactly. It's misguided to think that lowering the price would hurt the community. Look at EVE Online, they added a free option to their historically only subscription based game, and their community is not only fine with it, their happy to have more people in the game.
Edit: TF2 is a similar story, and the veterans only got a simple hat as thanks. It still improved the community.

[[Industrial] A_HUMBLEBUMBLED]

Originally posted by Brodacious:

Exactly. It's misguided to think that lowering the price would hurt the community. Look at EVE Online, they added a free option to their historically only subscription based game, and their community is not only fine with it, their happy to have more people in the game.
Edit: TF2 is a similar story, and the veterans only got a simple hat as thanks. It still improved the community.

The strangest part is those were giant communities before-hand that probably would've been fine without the price drop, regardless.

Meanwhile you have a back-end game that has great development that's been neglected until it's community is barely a few dissidents while their PR head claims that they're doing them a favor.

[Lord Asshat]

I mention them simply to show that communities don't 'GO CRAZY if a price drop occurs. Everyone knows prices drop, and I agree, the PR of this game is terrible. Truly sad, especially since there's apparently another developer developing a similar game that's free and open source. I really don't know what this dev is thinking.

[vfa]

mind saying what the similar game that's free is called/the name of the developer?

[Lord Asshat]

I was incorrect on a couple things: it's not open source, but currently it's in beta and free.
Terminal Heist.
Not sure of the legality of it, not unless someone in the original team is making it.

[RollyBoy]

I'm actually the developer of Terminal Heist. If you look you will see that the source code the Castle Doctrine is completely copyright free, anyone can do anything they want with it, Jason (the TCD developer) is an info Anarchist. I had what I thought were a bunch of good ideas to stop cheating in TCD and Jason implemented some of them, but then basically he said he had to move on to his next project. Even though legally, I could just take his source code and reboot it into my own game, I am such a fan of Jason's work I didn't want to do anything without his blessing. So I specifically asked him permission. We even ended up meeting in person at one point. Jason is very supportive and I think he is happy his code is out there still doing things. One of the reasons we are not open source is to try to slow down cheaters. It's not a perfect solution but ever little impediment helps. I'm going to create another post here about Terminal Heist, we've done some really cool things in my humble opinion (including iOS and Android support), come check us out you won't be betraying Jason (he even has a Terminal Heist account) : http://www.terminalheist.com

* oh and to be clear, I was not a member of the original team, I was just a player that loved the game that was sad to see it go, so I was trying to figure out how to keep this game alive.

[Lord Asshat]

Ah, well thank you for clearing things up. Out of curiousity, how did people actually cheat in that game? Did they get the ability to spawn things in?

It's nice to see someone still supporting the game though, even in a different form. Good luck to you.

[RollyBoy]

Primary ways were modifying the client so you could see the whole map when robbing. And using multiple accounts to dump items and bounties to each other. We're hoping that our removal of the random names will make it easier for people to detect account collusion. If the game proves popular enough for us to keep investing time we might implement a graph database fraud detection system. Graph databases are ideal for seeing non obvious relationships between things. So eventually the game could say I notice these three accounts seem to transfer money to each other alot and alert an admin for investigation. Again, we gotta get the userbase rolling though before spendin a lot.more time making new features. Thas why I'm pushing you guys to join up and take a look. We are gathering steam we had ten new players sign up in the last like 18 hours and that's with no marketing outside my obnoxious posts.

[Lord Asshat]

Lol, I'll probably take a look after work, sounds cool man.

[RollyBoy]

Cool. Thanks. I don't know if you've ever heard of http://Plex.tv. I founded that company/app. At the risk of sounding like I'm bragging I have some experience in building user bases, Plex has like 10M users and we sold a couple million copies of the iPhone and Android apps. I only mention this because I know people are worried about investing time in another game that might die. While I can't promise TH won't die, I think having the benefit of watching what happened with TCD's decline, is s help. I have huge respect for Jason Rohrer I think he is a genius. However, in my opinion, he is an artist first and a principaled one at that and a business man second. I totally respect that. I love this game, so it's not really about the money (which there is none of coming anytime soon from this project), but I get stoked when I work on something and a bunch of people use it - art and principals be damned. :)

[John McLuck]

This game is dead. Unless they lower the price to like 2-5 Euro this game will remain dead.

[Pimo]

Yeah, I will never buy another of Jason's games and I actually preach to others not to now..

I hate that guy with a passion.