Game News Age of Decadence June Update

[hiver]

Call me naive, but I think if you have a good good, and you're on Steam, it will sell an appropriate amount. I don't think you have anything to worry about on those counts Mr Weller.

The one stumbling block I can see is less motivated gamers not realizing how good the game is. The new character system will improve that a lot I think. I would say you still need some way to communicate that you really need to play multiple paths to get the whole picture. Playing through Teron as a merchant, assassin and thief blew my mind as I got different puzzle pieces that put together a whole story. However, right after finishing the first playthrough (as a thief), I was actually thinking the story was kind of barebones. You have to do 3 different paths to get the experience that many other games give you in 1. If you can communicate this to new players, it should help a lot.

Exactly.

And then there is selling your game - and selling your game.
As in "whoring out" and - "selling your game".

One very, very important thing that everyone seems to forget when they talk about selling is that Iron Towers, or other such only bigger studios making games like these, dont need to hit some specific sales figures on release.
They dont even need to sell that much at all.

They dont need a hit and thousands of copies sold in days.
Thats irrelevant.

What they need is to make a strong entry, present work of quality and let it speak for itself - while they provide support for it - to speak for itself.
And keep doing it, so they stabilize the flow of sales over longer time - and then keep them going.
Instead of having to take a chunk off the market in a sudden hit, before everyone gets bored and disgusted, before new, flashy but insubstantial experience wears out, - like mass market publisher parasites need to do, they actually need to work on increasing the flow of sales over long time.

Its a different model.

Point being: there is no need to go for the advices and logic of "bwaaah sell out or go doowwnn!".

 

[hiver]

He doesn't need a million people to buy the game though. There is definitely still "hard core" gamers out there. Look at the run away success of Minecraft, even Dwarf Fortress has a sizable community and that game seemingly tries to make itself hard to play. I think AoD can find a niche where 20-50 thousand people buy it.

To elucidate on my previous post, I don't think the difficulty will be the stumbling block with people interested in a turn based "classic" style RPG, but rather how different the experience is. Gamers are used to being able to grasp the situation of the world in a single playthrough, while you need multiple in AoD.

The stumbling block is more a matter of challenge. Age of Decadence is a pretty hard game that requires true understanding of its mechanics and smart character leveling. It is also totally possible to screw things up, possibly to the point of needing to restart the game. Seasoned RPG fans have to re-learn a lot to be able to enjoy Age of Decadence fully; even something like "successful skill check doesn't always lead to a positive outcome" will repel a lot of people.

All Easily sidestepped if "AoD for beginners" was compiled and released on Steam (for example) - felipepepe could maybe make a funny tube movie-trailer of it.

With proper, nicely filled with game art, pieces of story or tidbits of lore, game manual on a side, for aficionados - of course.