And to more platforms, which I think is badly needed
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Here too, but the stopping the monthly losses is entirely in the hands of Turbulenz. SE accepted they won’t get their investment back, but the support of running to the game will be coming to an end at some point here… so the ball is now in their court. That’s why I’m asking now to see if James - now that Phil put this out there - can give us some info on their plans on their side now. Perhaps it is still up in the air for them, or they are planning something they can’t talk about. But if they do know 100% this is it on the public servers, it would be good to know.
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Hypothetically, could someone (a normal person) fund this game themselves? Or do you have to be a company or something to invest in a game to allow further development of said game?
Just wondering for personal curiosity at this point 
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I guess that could fall under silent partner, angel investor, or a private investor. it would all depend upon the parties involved and the existing contracts. There are probably agreements as to how revenue has to be split or used.
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Without knowing what anybody’s plans are for the future, I do have one more suggestion. This update is fairly significant. That coupled with plans to add Titans, dungeons, blueprints, & new character races… could be given a name like The New Boundless Metaverse and they could start a new crowdfunding campaign for it. They probably aren’t interested in doing that though.
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Just to be clear, because I don’t want to panic people, if there was no alternative but to stop funding the servers at a loss and they would be shut down, we would absolutely give notice on that. And ideally try to find a way that something could be saved for the players.
The reason I’m jumping in now isn’t because anything is necessarily imminent, but just because folks were raising the question (fairly) of whether SE could/should/would do anything, and it’s in that spirit that I’m adding to the dialogue.
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I appreciate everything you’ve done👍
We all do I’d reckon!
Best info and with it some comfort, I’ve had about boundless in a while.
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Thank you, much appreciated!! 
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Appreciate you sir!
I know you would do all you could in regards to helping any gaming community.
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If the topic of mass marketing comes back up for consideration on the SE side, and on the chance that the changes in server capacity (along with the addition of rented worlds and forthcoming offline worlds) in particular haven’t been accounted for, it could be worth discussing from this angle.
It was truly impossible to reach critical mass of players in the first month or two. If players were far from home and a connecting planet was full, they simply could not get home. I believe this was an equal, if not greater, cause of lost players in the beginning than the initial grind.
While it would still be possible for a planet to hit max, it now takes 40 more players to hit on perma worlds, and there far more space across the universe for us to spread out. After offline worlds are released, if a new player has a bad mmo experience initially, they at least have the single player experience to keep them in the game with potential to return to the mmo, rather than deleting it forever.
On the community side, maybe we could help with the new player experience by suggesting new hints and tips at the beginning. I don’t think it tells us anywhere that we can sanctum warp home for free, for instance…
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I’m curious. What would the minimum requirements be to get a fresh round of promotion/advertising? Hypothetically, speaking.
…Certain $ numbers need to be met somewhere, game is self-sustainable for X time, a significant update, local planets, x # of copies sold, renegotiation…
I see ads for DQB, FF, and PWS all the time - but I know those are large titles. I honestly thought I would love DQB II, but I couldn’t put Boundless down lol. PWS is fun. I can see that you guys are enjoying that one.
Curious if a new marketing push were to happen, would it be FB ads, steam ads, YT ads, Twitch…or something else? Info that can’t be divulged, I suppose.
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There were almost 80 players on the same Known World in one of my hunt videos, after they updated the capacity. I remember being so annoyed that I couldn’t reach my home base before that because the world was at capacity lol. Good times though.
I know there were players that quit after their beacons expired and they lost everything (it used to get looted or disappear). People need to know that changed. I still see reviews and comments elsewhere about it. People also still don’t know that there is crossplay, it’s an MMO, there is more than one world, they can rent their own private planet, etc.
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I think leveraging Twitch and some of the Top Streamers and paying them to play the game for a period of time can help some. I see it quite often and at times it really helps. The main problem with this idea is the fact that as great as Boundless is… at times it is just boring to watch, but to counter that so is Minecraft but there are a number of streams that are popular for MC with a lot of viewers so it’s probably worth a shot in my opinion. I know in one of the stats I saw there was at least one pretty large streamer playing it. I stream from time to time but I am by no means a large streamer by a long shot.
Broadly, we’d need to feel that it was a “good” investment, and that there was a strong chance it would ultimately recoup the overall investment we made.
Every game has a budget; the ads you see for other games come out of that individual game’s budget - and if a game does better than expected, more budget might be made available to support that. Incidentally, we haven’t paid for any advertising for PowerWash Simulator - that one has had a massive amount of visibility purely from people wanting to play it/stream it, etc.
I, too, was hooked by Boundless - and the sense that anything was possible. In fact, the depth of passion from the community was one of the factors in us deciding to invest in the first place. But, if I’m really honest (with myself, also) I’ve come to the conclusion that as it’s designed Boundless is a game that’s only ever going to appeal to a relative niche in comparison to other world-builders that have been mega-successful… but to those it does appeal to, it’s almost like a second life (no pun intended).
Now, if that “engagement” from the super-dedicated community of the game could be brought to the masses… well, that was the thinking. Not only would it be self-sustaining (bear in mind server costs increase with player numbers), it would be solidly profitable - and that could fund ongoing development for many years, not to mention additional platforms, etc etc.
But when 1.0 released, that engagement wasn’t there on the broader scale. In hindsight, the pricing was probably wrong - I’ll hold my hands up on that one. Maybe if it had been $20 we’d have reached a critical mass? But the reasoning was, this is a subscriptionless MMO - no monthly fee… but there are ongoing and not insignificant costs of running (and beyond that, developing) the game. So it felt reasonable, and justified. Pull the price down to $20 and with bigger player numbers, maybe it would even have been sustainable either? All we can do is look at what happens when the game is on sale at 50% off (ie $20) - and the answer there is… not a great deal.
So maybe it’s a complexity vs depth argument, where potential players are put off either by not knowing the extent of what’s possible in the game, feeling like ‘late-comers’ can’t compete on a level playing field with those from Early Access, not understanding game mechanics, the sheer number of recipes (most of which aren’t ever used) etc?
Maybe people didn’t like the visual style? Sometimes Boundless can be beautiful, but maybe we just didn’t pay enough attention to curating colour schemes that would be more conventionally appealing at the start? There was a desire to have biomes and resources mix in gradually more exotic ways as planet levels went higher - but maybe we should have paid more attention to the aesthetics?
Should there have been a system to ‘save’ expired beacons? Or how would that have worked with long-dormant settlements and a finite galaxy? Should there have been no rules about borders of sovereignty, should griefing have been possible, should PvP have been auto-on for higher level worlds? And so on, and so on.
If I’m honest I don’t know (if I had the power to make the decisions) what I’d have changed in hindsight. Probably a bit of everything from the above. But because Boundless is such a broad experience - the name itself gives that away - it’s hard to say for sure if there was even one thing that would have moved the needle and changed it all; or would have needed lots of things to have been different?
(I mean, in the nicest possible way, even the core community often doesn’t agree on what needs to be changed to find the silver bullet 
)
And that, in turn, then begs the question - even if we had fully-funded dev team for 6 months starting right now, would we even know/be able to make the changes that suddenly move that amazing engagement from the super-core to have a wider appeal?
That’s the situation we’d have to be in before SE would look at it and say - okay, let’s pour more money in, because this time we’re confident it will be different. We’re very far from that, sadly, so it’s pretty irrelevant whether we’d put money into search, social, influencers (you can’t buy ads on Steam, that’s purely driven by the algorithm or Valve choosing to support).
The conversation for right now is, can we even find a cost-covering position in the near future? Is there any chance of even small updates? I didn’t intend to come out and ask the community for the answers to those questions - let alone the broader questions above - but obviously it’s a conversation that you’ve been having in effect for some time anyway. So I’m trying to be transparent about what I can be.
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In the end, it all comes down to profit. I have been very open about how I feel the current development focus is not going to bring back players and probably not increase the influx of new players. We can speculate what would and could change that and I think all of us will have many different ideas and in the end there is no guaranteed ROI and I think that is the problem here.
For me as a developer and as a business owner it would be a hard sell for me if someone came to me and asked for an investment in Boundless. I mean the price point as @philelliott stated is a turn-off for a number of my friends, the mention of Online PVP and MMO is a pretty big turn off too… and there are many that view the game as P2W when we all know it isn’t.
I have no solutions that can guarantee any ROI. It’s a risk and as @philelliott I am sure can attest to a game that has not had the success expected is an even larger risk especially in the gaming industry. As a business owner I don’t know that I would risk it, but the gamer in me and seeing how passionate this community is makes me wonder what could be possible.
All that said, in the end a game just falls out of popularity over time… and the community numbers come down, but in many of the sandboxes I still play even though the numbers have dwindled some they are still quite large. I can use 7 Days 2 Die as an example as Shroud streams it about once a week and the sales of the game have increases due to a lot of his viewers on Twitch buying it.
It’s an example, but for whatever reason the core community in Boundless never blew up big but the craziest thing is … every friend that I have introduced to the game has had some things in common:
- Never heard of the game previously
- If they make it past a week they stick around
- The few that didn’t want it gifted to them stated PVP and P2W as a turn-off.
I wish we could find a solid solution here but sadly there is no guaranteed one, I think SE would have to determine the risk and whether it is worth it as sad as that is. Even then SE has their hands tied somewhat…
EDIT: I would love input from @james on any of this I am sure he has ideas too.
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I like your train of thought here. 
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First of all, thank you for your transparency!
I don’t think there is a silver bullet, the game needs a change in direction and priorites on many fronts.
But at it’s core it’s a very good and beautiful game with a huge potential. It just repels players by so many different unnecessary means. Some of them you already named. Ugly starter planets, ugly characters, steep learning curve, loosing everything when forgetting to fuel your beacon, free-for-all city organisation which plays right into the hand of griefers. The combination of auto-fuel from gleam club and unlimited plots for cash from the shop was also an extremely toxic combination, the game was way better in EA when this didn’t exist.
So yeah … the game requires the players to dig real deep to discover it’s beautiful core. (pun intended)
Sometimes I feel like a Final Fantasy XIV level reboot is needed to make the game appeal to more players. Not in terms of funding and time but in terms of radical change in direction and priorites.
Since the announcement of 249 I always had the hope that player run servers could figure out these much needed changes.
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I think some of your points are spot on, but ugly starter planets and ugly characters were never a turn off. If that was the case then Minecraft would have that same issue granted you can change seeds or use mods to change things.
I never heard anyone I have spoken to ever mention ugly planets… I have however heard a few friends say that the characters looked a bit awkward, but I think they were always meant to look different and awkward. You could allow a lot more to be customized though in the initial screens and maybe customize the characters.
I also feel a reboot might be needed and some initial systems like the “new player experience” needs quite a bit more hand holding and the beacons could save the buildings as blueprints along with the blocks might go a long way here… I don’t know the ideal way to curb grieving but there were many ideas I am sure might work.
I guess time will tell.
EDIT: Also I still feel like @majorvex said a sort of rebranding and new information about the things that have changed needs to be conveyed and the removal of the Online-PVP on Steam may help.
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Not rebranding necessarily. In the past, with large updates, they gave it a name like Boundless: Empires and Boundless : Farming. With the introduction of more ways to play (locale universes, etc), I was just saying they could name it Boundless : Metaverse and use that for a fresh marketing push.
I think Boundless needs to decide if it plans to keep going the complex-MMORPG-grindy style of game (which seems to cause issues with player retention), or if it wants to go the Minecraft/Tr/PK fun open world sandbox way. Minecraft started out as free and worked it’s way up to it’s current price. Other voxel sandboxes are mostly F2P with mtx for extra block packs, blueprints, skins, themes, etc. I think this is what most people expect these days. Is it worth 39.99? Absolutely yes. Will kids and families pay that? A lot won’t. Especially since there is no demo or demo planet.
Seems like a lot of effort goes into forcing things to be balanced, but they aren’t balanced. It can’t be balanced with a small player base where one whale could buy or sell in mass and disturb the entire thing. One player can mass craft stacks of end-game hammers for whomever. New players have to get through 500 steps before they can begin to forge a wood hammer. Why can’t new player forge a wood hammer with the simple ingredients that they can gather, like foliage and rocks? It won’t be great, but maybe they could make them faster or something. Forge RNG is horrible and needs to go.
There are people that have grinded the heck out of cubits and plots. They have more than they care to spend or build with. Some have huge plot % bonuses. There will always be players that do this. The game can’t stay beholden to them and make decisions solely on what they might or might not do. The only thing I would suggest is to not allow players to place more than X plots on T1 & T2 beginner Known Worlds, no more than XX plots on T3 & T4 worlds, and so on. The issue would then become, players have already plotted on the worlds.
Some players & streamers would probably like an open PvP world or two.
The supply of metals and gems shouldn’t be so restrictive and anemic. It’s exciting to find a nice cave or vein of 100+ valuable resources to mine. Not having to find them one block by one block, as your hammer dies. Why can’t miners or farmers have a 1 in something chance of getting oortstone drops or something fun like that? Maybe even a rare 3x3 forged hammer? Things need to loosen up a bit and be less restrictive. Less time-gating (I have to wait an hour irl to craft a clean hammer? Or 30 minutes for simple glass?). More fun & happy, easy-going game play.
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On a positive note, I have noticed dev Blake was online this week at the same time James was (I think). Maybe that means they were working on the update. 
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