The problem is that due to Humble Bundle and some steam sales, Boundless has WAY MORE accounts that own Boundless than you think. And the return rate of players who have written the game off is EXTREMELY LOW no matter the game.
All speculation but what if James goal was to get a game developed to get into a major game studio. From that perspective, he nailed it.
As for going open source…game is over ten years old. Why not? I am sure there are talented folks on the forums that can really add some fresh life into the game.
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The only thing I have to say in terms of making it opensource:
Even then you can still likely wait another 2 - 3 years before you get any significant updates. The game is written in a proprietary engine, we’d first have to spend months if not years figuring out how the engine works before we can even think about adding things.
If you think about it James made a game… Sold it and made money. I’d call that a success. It launched him and some of his team into a much larger project and company…also a personal success.
Financially and popularity wise it was never successful.
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That’s defiantly not true, but i can see why you may think it, the return rate of the angry few who cant get a chip off their shoulder is low, but I’m sure most the players who got the bundle have not even played boundless yet, would only take one of their friends mentioning it for them to pick it up and maybe eventually pay for a planet or some cubits if they grow to love it.
He defiantly nailed that, in my opinion the whole of James’s team probably agreed they didn’t want to work on Boundless from the silly issues they were having to address on the forums allot, and how they seemed to be biting their tongues through lots of it, so it makes complete sense to sell it off. MMO’s however small will always take a fair bit of management - another reason I cant see opensource working, cant see how a country would be able to run with out some sort of government either, but perhaps in 50-100 years AI will solve that. (could be less I guess).
I see, sorry, i was thinking of players and Monumental in teams of personal success, often frame things in the wrong way, for James and the team I think they got exactly what they needed and wanted.
You can say this with full conviction, but steam publishes marketing stats and is very open that if your game doesn’t at first have good reception, getting it to ever succeed is EXTREMELY hard later. Stories like no man’s sky are extremely rare.
This really depends on the base of the game, most games are pretty ■■■■, and at best average, I know I’m biased with my conviction, but I really think boundless has the potential to become a beautiful collective art piece, something that can rarely be said for a game. The reason it is true that a bad initial reception is because most people are making games simply as a business, rather than a business and passion project (passionate about the idea for the game, not making games as a whole), I said the same about No Mans Sky, but would not say the same for countless games I have come across on steam. Even if you are passionate about making a game, it takes allot of thought to be able to build a game that you are truly passionate about, and usually a ton of failure’s if it is making games that has the drive for your passion. If you start of making games because you want to make games, you also need someone on the team with a passion for artistic vision, which is a whole different ball game (connectionist rather than Boolean logic), and few people are lucky enough to have the time to build up both skillsets enough to not make a huge number of errors with either logic style before they build on their weaknesses to make a “successful” game. I feel that James managed to nail both the connectionist and Boolean logic of the game, but him and the team preferred the work to the messy human side of the game, so they have passed the buck. I would bet on the game being a “success” in my eyes with only a handful of updates. What I class as a success for a game is having enough income coming in to keep updating the game for the foreseeable future (with an MMO anyway).
So to sum up this entire thread and 4 plus or minus years. The game was sold to a developer who never really cared about the game itself and we have no idea truly why they bought the game from James to begin with. Let’s just enjoy this game for what it is. A broken masterpiece, soon to be shelved but never forgotten.
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Seems to work fine for me, so I can’t say its broken.
Someone that knew Monty suggested he buy the game to keep it alive that’s all I know about the purchase. There were promises made, none of which were kept. So… I just play the game, a very working masterpiece, which could be shelved any minute or in 15 years.
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Game is pretty complete. Could have bunch of other stuff added, but it is complete as is.
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Totally agree with you. Why, just recently Cubic Odyssey released on May 14th and it has been quite popular. And it was put on by a small development team. And the Dev team seem to be on top of things. Game has been out for over 18 hours and they’ve already released 3 separate patches.
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While it does have more people than Boundless, 3k people is not popular.
To be fair, stories like Hello Games’ are extremely rare. They over-promised, far under-delivered, then spent years finishing the game until it was more than originally promised. The general pattern is over-promise, under-deliver, make excuses for why you under-delivered, walk away. It was truly shocking that No Man’s Sky ended up getting finished, much less continues to be updated. The ratio of stories like No Man’s Sky’s might improve if other companies tried doing something novel, like finishing the games they released half cooked.
If only Sean Murray, from Hello Games, would play and fall in love with Boundless and buy it.
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I deserved that. What I should have said is that it’s in the same niche market as Boundless, Trove, Creativerse and all that. The genre itself has a much smaller audience. This definitely doesn’t mean it is a bad game or isn’t popular within that niche audience.
Co-op though … they need more open universe games, but they are usually a lot more difficult, and the maintenance costs can be crazy.
I think part of the “problem” with the development of Boundless was the amount of time they had to put in to counteract the “Prestige Wars” and people’s jackassery. Although, part of that problem IMO is the “Become Viceroy” Objective/Achievement. If time hadn’t needed to be “wasted” in coming up with solutions, there are other things that it could have been used for instead and we would have what ever that was. I think this is the main reason things were “under delivered”. Having Covid rear its nasty little head didn’t help either.
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Blaming players for lack of development is a poor excuse.
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