Sitting here begging for sword and shields while the obviously favourite sibling getting this
Iāve reached out to @james via email asking how much the game would cost to buy. Could you imagine a community that stayed with the game until the end. Buy it and become a coop gaming company. Iām sure most of us are willing to throw some more money on this game.
Let Me Know How That Goes.
Honestly, Iāve had much the same thought. More or less.
Has there ever been a publicly run video game? And if so was it successful(for a time)?
Not quite the same, but URU shut down for a while, but the players were able to convince the devs to allow them to fund the servers. The servers have been funded by donations for many years now, and there is still an active community playing.
I believe there are officially adoped mods as well, but not confident on that one.
Glitch shut down, but a lot of the client-side code and all of itās resources were made public domain. There have been several attempts at recreating the server software, but even afterā¦ 5 years?.. nobody has made a fully functional project yet (one group is looking promising, though).
Iām sure James will not answer such a question for many reasons, a small one being that this would not be worth the time to come up with a number because there is no-way we can pay-up even if we all came together with what each of us would be ready to spend on Boundless. I would expect something close to one or two million dollaridoos, maybe twice that. I have NO IDEA, but I donāt think we could come close to whatever the price actually is.
You then have to remember that Square Enix pays for the servers every month, not James, and same, if the players were to take over the monthly cost, we would find ourselves with a a handful of planets versus the 50 + Sovereigns we have now to play on, because itās not about making a one-time purchase, DUH, we would have to take over the servers too. You really think people here would be up for THAT subscription, knowing that the money players spend on the game as it is donāt cover the money SE spends monthly? ^^
Bottom-line, maybe stop sending DMs to James asking questions like that, or making @ him in messages for no reasonā¦ That man is apparently already forced to deal with Boundlessā game-support queries on the forum on his own personal time outside of work-hours because his actual days are apparently spent on BG3ā¦ All the people doing it all the time are only flooding his forum-inbox with @ mentions, which is the least helpful thing you can do to him.
[EDIT] To the person who flagged this post, next-time, find a valid reason to do so.
Amen to that bro well said
Yeah well, someone clearly donāt agree with you my good @HOST, and that person thought my post should be flagged because they thought it was either off-topic, inappropriate, spam or something else (like āit hurt mwyeh feelings!ā), which is EXACTLY what I was targetting yesterday when I wrote the following :
And the people who cowardly flag posts from the safety of anonymity must think theyāre part of the non-toxic part of the forum.
Flagging is great, it shows which post I should really read
I wish there was some way to collect data on just how many people have been driven off by forum shenanigans, either after playing the game or before even deciding to buy it. I certainly know some folks over the years who had legitimate grievances or just unpopular opinions who left because they felt like they were being squeezed out by this place.
All this talk of how great the community is, but weāll never know at what cost in players and $$$ it was won.
Well, in the topic of the thread Iām not talking about any extreme plan at all.
They can just try and contract someone in to tie things up/off with the world server code that they could release the rest of the stuff to the live servers.
Tens of thousands. No need to overload things with multi-million dollar public IP takeovers and whatnot that would obviously be impossible.
With a streamlined skill system for deeper character development and a big change to combat systems in place it might inspire some activity.
Plus itās hard to imagine the difference in number of portals that would still be open right now if you could shove in a stack of compact oort.
Yea Goblin makes great points there but it is in response to outright buying and owning the game. I feel like the only reason not to release the update is lack of technical support for the inevitable plethora of issues.
If it were possible to crowdfund the server costs alone andā¦ idk, crowd source support for the release or whatever the hell they could do to make sure itās playable, the grassroots thing could pick back up. Forget the whole dilemma about downloading/uploading worlds for local and release the solid stuff so we can keep playing and feel better about spreading the game to new players without fear of the game dying right after they spend $40.
Square Enix should just make it free to bring in new players who are far more likely to buy cubits (which go to SE I think) to keep public servers afloat, while established players who are spending more on sovereigns (keeping James afloat) are more likely to continue (and return to) playing with an increased playerbaseā¦
But I guess SE would rather bring in the occasional $40 every week or two until they decide to stop paying for the servers
Further on the cubits thing, think about the amount of cosmetics there are, and at what points they were all released. Body paints came out at a time when a good chunk of active players had so many cubits they got them for free.
Square Enix makes the game free and has Steam and PS shop show that itās now free. Thousands of people see it. 5000 download it, 2000 play within a few days. 1800 of them want body paint and 3 head wears, none of them have enough cubits from early levels because they need plots. 1800 people spend $40 on 2400 cubits, enough for 3 cosmetics.
The gameās biggest problem isnāt that people donāt like it, itās that people havenāt heard of it. Make it free. Make it known. Itāll make more money in the long run.
make the game free, I totally agree with that. this game is a goldmine if you think about it
like @DutchOfSorissi said the players will buy cubits & gleam club
donāt forget more sovereigns.
also if they let players create content like blocks and such I mean come on?
you got yourself a game that deserves the title āāboundlessāā and makes fame for its name!
Iāve always said the gameās entry-price was ridiculously high and should AT LEAST be cut in half permanently, knowing there was an in-game store behind it too. But that was a few years ago, now every 60$ game also has an in-game storeā¦ ^^ā
Last time I said āthe game should be Free 2 Play with more effort put in the in-game storeā, I got thoroughly punted out (by someone I do respect and who left us, sadly).
I think you have good ideas, and I support them. Plus youāre a hell of a builder.
Maybe donations, thenā¦ because I donāt see how crowdfunding the monthly cost of the servers could work, long-term. It would certainly be inconsistent. And I think A LOT of players are happy to play the game at 40ā¬, but they would NOT want to spend another penny for it if they can avoid it, so you could never count on them. Theyād be there to say they LOVE the game, though.
Iād love to say āletās help with the marketing of the game to bring in more peopleā, but I think it would be a terrible idea right now, with the devs working on BG3 and virtually absent from the forum, to bring new players so they can see for themselves that thereās been no worthwhile update in almost a year.
All the negative posts I usually make tend to say that : the only thing I can think of that we should be doing is hybernate (or calmly build and share screenshots) and wait for the devs to come back (if they ever actually come back) to unleash all we can as a community to help bring in more players, because at this current point in time, I highly doubt thereās anything we can do.
The worst case scenario would be that the devs never come back and that SE decides to reenact the ending of āOf Mice and Menā on the servers.
Thanks mate.
I think the Devs will come back, though ā¦ and I was under the impression that the game is fine for sustinance until they do and bring along the next updates.
I mean, as long as it does hang around, then however it advances it will make the game more appealing.
I would also say, though, that in terms of populations it has always had a nice level of that. I wouldnāt like, for example, the planets to start getting super jam packed. However I do fully believe that itās a scalable thing, when there are more players than is desired per square Oortian metre, then Iād imagine new sovreigns will be made.
I just think they should have released it in parts