Colony Ship Early Access Release Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Infinitron]

Hard truth: Colony Ship will fail commercially and will be Iron Tower's last game. Vault Dweller missed his window by not getting it out in 2022.

I'd love to be wrong.

 

[Jaedar]

Hard truth: Colony Ship will fail commercially and will be Iron Tower's last game. Vault Dweller missed his window by not getting it out in 2022.

I'd love to be wrong.

You're probably right (I think VD has even said there's like 50% chance this will be ITS last game, although either way they'll have enough money for some post launch support), but I don't see why releasing in 22 would have been better?

Being crunched between soyberpunk dlc, spacerim, bg3 and rogue trader is not optimal, but there's always going to be AAA releases.

I still think it will be my rpgoty.

 

[Infinitron]

I think you answered your own question there.

 

[Vault Dweller]

It is what it is. We couldn't release in 2022, so that's a moot point.

 

[Efe]

Good luck on release
That said, I don't see much advertisement for the game. Are you doing anything for visibility?

 

[Alienman]

Hire Larian's PR team, but then you might have add some stuff to the game... if you know what I mean.

 

[Alter Sack]

It is what it is. We couldn't release in 2022, so that's a moot point.

So why not release the game in early 2024 after polishing it some more?

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

Except for BG3, I don't think there's much overlap between fans of AoD and triple AAA crap. Not to mention BG3 is probably introducing a lot of people to turned based CRPGs.

As for myself, I pre-ordered CS ages ago and I couldn't care less about BG or Tardian. I assume there are others.

 

[Vault Dweller]

Good luck on release
That said, I don't see much advertisement for the game. Are you doing anything for visibility?

Not much we can do. The gaming media is still ignoring us, zero interest there. A PR agency (on a budget) can do two things: send a bunch of keys to the influencers and try to reach the gaming media (which we've already done when we launched on EA; sending more keys would be pointless, trying to reach the gaming media even more pointless). Thus all we can do is pray to Steam to smile upon us and grant us lowly peasants a bit of visibility.

So why not release the game in early 2024 after polishing it some more?

I don't think it would change anything.

Yes, Cyberpunk and Starfield are massive releases but I don't think that people playing Starfield on release would have bought Colony Ship on release. Different audiences. BG3 is closer to our audience, but I'm guessing that it's not for everyone and those who didn't like the game might be more willing to support our humble effort. Rogue Trader? Possibly, but we need 1% of their sales numbers to survive and make it to the next round, so it's not like we're fighting for the same customers.

 

[just]

yeah i agree
is there any big animal you can fuck on that ship?
drop it in the trailer
has to be male on male btw, so dont fuck it up

 

[Alienman]

The only thing left as I see it... is a BIG scandal.

 

[TheDarkUrge]

Don't worry when the game releases I'll make some shill threads in the steam forum pages for starfield and bg3 and save the game

I dont know what the punishments from steam would be if a dev was caught doing it themselves, but astroturfing seems the best way to market these days.

 

[thesecret1]

BG3 was a bore fest, Starfield looked too retarded to even bother pirating, Cybershit is a GTA clone and has exactly zero audience overlap, Broken Roads is a poor attempt at a joke, rogue trader is by Owlcat and there's, therefore, no reason to think it'll be anywhere above mediocre. Idk what you people are on about, the only deluge going on this year is a deluge of SHIT, with Colony Ship and a couple indie RPGs the only beacons of hope.

 

[Jaedar]

The only thing left as I see it... is a BIG scandal.

Is is an indie game charging 40 euro. Surely that is a scandal in itself.

 

[Lord_Potato]

Cybershit is a GTA clone and has exactly zero audience overlap,

I beg your pardon.

Playing CP2077 right now, with Space Wreck and Colony Ship already purchased and waiting for their full releases as my next games to be played.

There is an audience overlap.

 

[Hellraiser]

Is is an indie game charging 40 euro. Surely that is a scandal in itself.

Meh, still nothing compared to what Matrix Games is doing with pricing since forever.

Games also are a weird market where niche products are expected to be priced solely based on the budget the developer blew (mostly) on art assets, rather than according to basic laws of supply and demand. I remember someone making the same point in another thread about how absurd this is. Low-demand niche products that takes years of R&D to make are never cheap anywhere else.

Also for fucks sake, 40 euro is not that much after the last few years of inflation. And you could have bought it at half the price just after it went into EA.

 

[Alienman]

Games also are a weird market where niche products are expected to be priced solely based on the budget the developer blew (mostly) on art assets, rather than according to basic laws of supply and demand

If that were true, digital-only games should cost 1 euro.

 

[Shaki]

Hard truth: Colony Ship will fail commercially and will be Iron Tower's last game. Vault Dweller missed his window by not getting it out in 2022.

I'd love to be wrong.

You trippin nigga, after the influx of normies thanks to BG3, now is the best time to release a turn based RPG, a lot of people might buy it who normally wouldn't even look at that type of game. If they released in 2022, literally a year before mainstream finally discovered the genre, THAT would be the biggest possible fail. Releasing close to big games, only negatively affect other big games, since they want to get full mainstream attention, but Colony Ship was never going to get that anyway, niche that was going to buy it, will buy it regardless of when it releases, and the only possible chance to get a crumb of attention from normies and journos, is hitting the post BG3 depression phase when they're desperately looking for a similar game to scratch the itch, which is NOW.

 

[lukaszek]

You trippin nigga, after the influx of normies thanks to BG3, now is the best time to release a turn based RPG

you just need to up the tentacles

 

[Shaki]

You trippin nigga, after the influx of normies thanks to BG3, now is the best time to release a turn based RPG

you just need to up the tentacles

I mean, if after BG3's success, Vince didn't already add a few graphic sex scenes with robots and mutants, then he's trolling. He's literally one mutant fucking trailer away, from earning enough money to fully finance 10 next games he wants to make.

 

[Hellraiser]

Games also are a weird market where niche products are expected to be priced solely based on the budget the developer blew (mostly) on art assets, rather than according to basic laws of supply and demand

If that were true, digital-only games should cost 1 euro.

You got me here, definitely a poor attempt on my side at explaining my point as indeed supply is infinite and one could think that it would indeed result in the 1 euro scenario, but that's under a very very basic (if not naive) understanding of the price-demand-supply relationship.

The price, supply and demand relationship is not a linear function, and in the particular case of easily "reproducible" (unit-wise) goods like games (technically there might be a variable per unit cost in the form of steam key fees) I would simplify the case to one of constant supply rather then infinite supply for modeling purposes and finding the market price equilibrium point. This is because again supply is non-factor and we don't really face any material differences from a cost perspective due to variable cost (per unit cost) being almost non-existent in a software development business, so it does not make sense to evaluate if we should produce 100 units or 50 units. Our concern is only how many units at what price the customers will buy to find the optimum. So not really supply and demand, just demand (and price).

Therefore what we get is a simplified function of just the price-demand relationship, and as a (hypothetical) business we need to decide a pricing where the revenue is optimal based on the price-demand function.

 

[Lord_Potato]

I mean even if they don't plan on including it in the game proper, making a trailer devoted to fucking large robots/mutants mocking BG3 and releasing it to youtube could bring a lot of publicity and attention

 

[JarlFrank]

Games also are a weird market where niche products are expected to be priced solely based on the budget the developer blew (mostly) on art assets, rather than according to basic laws of supply and demand

If that were true, digital-only games should cost 1 euro.

You got me here, definitely a poor attempt on my side at explaining my point as indeed supply is infinite and one could think that it would indeed result in the 1 euro scenario, but that's under a very very basic (if not naive) understanding of the price-demand-supply relationship.

The price, supply and demand relationship is not a linear function, and in the particular case of easily "reproducible" (unit-wise) goods like games (technically there might be a variable per unit cost in the form of steam key fees) I would simplify the case to one of constant supply rather then infinite supply for modeling purposes and finding the market price equilibrium point. This is because again supply is non-factor and we don't really face any material differences from a cost perspective due to variable cost (per unit cost) being almost non-existent in a software development business, so it does not make sense to evaluate if we should produce 100 units or 50 units. Our concern is only how many units at what price the customers will buy to find the optimum.

Therefore what we get is a simplified function of just the price-demand relationship, and as a (hypothetical) business we need to decide a pricing where the revenue is optimal based on the price-demand function.

There is supply and demand for games.

A certain genre has X amount of good games in it, that's the supply.
People want to play Y amount of games, that's the demand.

If I want to play a good RPG but nobody is making good RPGs, that means demand is higher than supply.

Therefore, serving an underserved niche means you're creating much-needed supply for an existing demand.

 

[Jaedar]

Is is an indie game charging 40 euro. Surely that is a scandal in itself.

Meh, still nothing compared to what Matrix Games is doing with pricing since forever.

Games also are a weird market where niche products are expected to be priced solely based on the budget the developer blew (mostly) on art assets, rather than according to basic laws of supply and demand. I remember someone making the same point in another thread about how absurd this is. Low-demand niche products that takes years of R&D to make are never cheap anywhere else.

Also for fucks sake, 40 euro is not that much after the last few years of inflation. And you could have bought it at half the price just after it went into EA.

I don't disagree. While the patreon model has its flaws, one really good thing about it is that it lets niche products get funded (although admittedly it is mostly/entirely porn so far) by basically letting people pay as much as they want.
But 40 euro is probably going to be a hard sell. I would likely think it was worth it, but I bought it way back in earliest access and paid at most 20 so it's easy to say.

 

[Hellraiser]

But 40 euro is probably going to be a hard sell. I would likely think it was worth it, but I bought it way back in earliest access and paid at most 20 so it's easy to say.

Pricing is always a gamble, I like to believe that the audience for this kind of game can afford 40 euro because they're old, Fallout is almost 26 years old, so anyone who wants more of that kind of thing should have a job by now. Furthermore the games Colony Ship is inspired by are a pleb filter, so the target audience is likely to have better paying jobs than the average joe playing COD or some NEET zoomer playing gatcha shit. Alternatively the target group for Colony Ship might be forever alone spergs with nothing better to spend money on, due to lack of wimmin, children, substances addictions (except junk food) or desires to leave the room where their PC is located.

I brought up Matrix Games for a reason, they basically assume the above and keep making niche hardcore titles priced way steeper than typical for indies, as they know there are enough customers to buy at those prices and this seems to work for them for at least 10 years if not longer.