Okay, here's my opinion on the whole 'quality needs to be addressed before subscriptions, for fear of scaring off potential customers,' apparent dilemma.
Right now the current PC Graal market, in my opinion, is compromised of older players. At least those in their upper teens. As you get older you can begin to pick apart and pay attention to quality much more than you would when you were younger and more immature. People can fall back on nostalgic memories of Graal all they want, but the truth is it was just as bad, if not worse, back then as it is now. Pre-P2P was pretty bad in terms of quality(not that I'm saying post-P2P was all that great, but G2k1 wasn't exactly bad
). Scripts were ALWAYS broken, the "quests" sucked ass, the levels were horrible. This stuff didn't matter to most of the players, myself included. Why? I dunno. It just didn't matter, and I think that has a lot to do with how young I was. However as I got older, and more involved in development(which most of the small current playerbase has done in one way or the other), my standards started to grow. I started to want MORE. And more importantly, I started to see the potential of Graal when some servers/projects gave me a hint of it, like Oasis.
The problem is that people think that the iPhone market base and the PC market base is different, and I don't think it is. All potential PC players will not have higher standards for quality compared to the iPhone market base. It's about the
demographic Graal attracts, and mostly it seems to be the younger kids. I'm not basing this off numbers, but I feel the iPhone average age is much lower than the PC Graal playerbase. The iPhone app makes Graal easily accessible to the younger audience, and the gameplay itself apparently appeals to them. This has a lot to do with what I mentioned above. Younger players are more easily content. Is the PC market base suddenly devoid of the younger audiences? No it's not, but Graal on the PC is hardly accessible. The observer mode is horrible way to market a game and it's hard to even get a feel for the game when you have to sit and watch the screen for 5 minutes every few minutes. Then you have the subscriptions themselves, which are very expensive. Good luck, Timmy, getting your mommy to buy you a $50 subscription.
However, getting rid of subscriptions resolves those issues. Observer mode would be gone for good,
finally, and potential players will easily be able to drop in and see what the game is like. The demographic that will most likely be attracted would be of a younger audiences... I know, sucks for us, but that's exactly what happened to the iPhone servers. They would most likely not be scared off by the quality of the servers. Look at the iPhone Classic server. It looks HORRIBLE in my eyes. The cliffing, the tile errors, the mash-up of graphics and style. But the players there don't have a problem with it.
In lue of that, the sudden influx of players, in my opinion, would no doubt be a huge inspiration for the Classic servers to get **** done. Especially since they apparently don't have very high expectations. You can release a hat once a week and you know what, I think they'd be happy.
It actually pains me to say this, because I would hate to see the overall standards of Graal drop even lower than they are now... but what can I say? I'm tired of what we have, and anyways, the main thing I'm trying to address is that getting rid of subscriptions and making the game more accessible
right now wouldn't hurt business as much as you think. It should be done as soon as possible.
01-31-2011, 04:02 AM
Linear Mode
