No Online Coop = No Purchase

[Processor]

Local coop is cool and all but this is Steam. Did you forget this was Steam? I guarantee more people on here play online coop games more than they ever play local coop games. Bad move not including online coop with a game on Steam. Such a shame.

[Puff]

+ 1

[MindЯewind]

Yes please make online play. Otherwise this game looks really awesome! Goodjob

[Barkley]

Hi,

I completely understand your point of view but I don't think you've thought about mine (nor that you should to be honest). Developing an online game is *a lot* of work. To justify that much work the game should sell very well, which is unfortunately not the case.

On the other hand, with the current install ratio adding co-op online would only help those people that already have a friend to play with, that is, very few people.

We're a very small indie developer, we need to make sure we take the right decisions in terms of where to spend our time. Otherwise we may end up out of work very soon.

My apologies,

[Processor]

Originally posted by Barkley:

Hi,

I completely understand your point of view but I don't think you've thought about mine (nor that you should to be honest). Developing an online game is *a lot* of work. To justify that much work the game should sell very well, which is unfortunately not the case.

On the other hand, with the current install ratio adding co-op online would only help those people that already have a friend to play with, that is, very few people.

We're a very small indie developer, we need to make sure we take the right decisions in terms of where to spend our time. Otherwise we may end up out of work very soon.

My apologies,

That's unfortunate but entirely understandable. Thanks for the response. It's basically a double edge sword.

[Barkley]

Thanks for your understanding!

[DarkAlkaiser]

Yeah, thought about this a few times, some games are so perfect for online, but they don't sell well, sometimes because of the lack of online, and never get it. I'm sure it's hard to consider which option is the right to go with.

[Sir Sniffel]

I would suggest to remove the Koop-Category from your Steam Page, because I just bought the game to play it with others and feel pretty mislead since I realized, that you can only play together on the same console.

[Grez]

FWIW, I much prefer "couch co-op" games. I was really bummed when the latest Halo went online co-op only...I actually played Halo 1-4 and Reach (and ODST, too) in split-screen co-op. SO much more fun to get together in person, kill a few beers and yell at the screen.

I am also planning to start a monthly couch co-op night with a few of my buddies where I hook my gaming PC up to my big screen, plug in a bunch of Xbox360 controllers, and choose 3-5 local co-op games from my stupid long list of them to try that night.

So from my perspective, the local co-op is excellent. I just got this game, so I haven't had a chance to try it out yet, but I can tell you that the local co-op was one of the reasons that I bought it, so thank you for that.

[Barkley]

Thanks Grez! It requires a bit of time to support couch co-op in games but I like to play with mates and (hopefully soon) with my son too. I think it's a worthwhile investment. Online co-op is so much harder. It's doable but it brings its own share of issues and judging when is it going to be worth it is hard.

I understand some people decides not to buy the game because it doesn't support online. I'm fine with that. I just hope they understand implementing online is not just pressing a button and it all works. It's qutie a lot of work and we (indies) have to be very careful with how we spend our resources, lest we end up out of business.

Best regards,

[Grez]

Hey, I totally understand. But, I think that most people don't...they've never written code, and, at most, have cobbled together some kind of game in a game-maker kind of app, or have designed a level for something in a design tool, and really don't have any idea what it takes to code a custom game (or any app, for that matter) from the ground-up. They've been spoiled by having a mature industry that can crank out AAA games at high speed, and so they always have bleeding-edge tech in front of them, and this unduly influences their expectations. It's kind of like how smart phones have become a commodity item, and people have zero appreciation for the fact that they have more power than the super computers that NASA had to put a man on the moon or launch the space shuttle, and they're carrying it around in their freaking POCKET (and complain about the expense of it). [insert eye roll here]

You have my empathy...I used to be a professional dev, and now I'm a program manager (so basically I think things up, ensure proper alignment with customer wants/needs and the market, and do designs/specs). I started coding games when I was a little kid, back when doing that meant ZERO tools, and games were ASCII or CGA things, and drawing a line on the screen meant a line of code. I experienced the very early days of shareware/freeware/donationware as a concept firsthand. I made custom sound packs for DOOM I & II with DOS-based tools. I wrote the first publicly-available mapcycle manager for Half Life 1. But at the time I was doing this, the audience was still mostly pretty technically savvy, because you had to have a certain skill level to even find this stuff in the early days of public internet, and also to apply/use any of these tools. That's not true any more. So yeah, I get it...but my experience is not very common. Most people are just consumers who usually started gaming with the ease of a console unit, and if they became more serious, then they evolved into PC gamers, so their expectations are set unfairly high when it comes to indie games, especially from a single developer.