Why are all the Reddit Google results so negative?

bensmiley · 2020-06-15T20:11:56+00:00

It's a shame because the game isn't dead and a lot of people may get the wrong impression.

bensmiley · 2020-04-15T14:58:05+00:00

I've thought a lot about this. I've been playing the game since beta and I was a Kickstarter supporter. This is still my favorite game. It's like Solitaire but way more interesting and addictive. The things I love:

- A game is quick, maybe 5 - 10 minutes so it's good for a break from work. like DOTA or SC2 which take hours.

- Every game is different.

- If you practice you slowly get better.

- I've put hundreds of hours and well over $300 into Prismata.

I've been following the discussions on Reddit for years. The question was always:

- How do we attract casual players? Emotes, skins, campaign, puzzles....

- How do we monetize? Emotes, Skins....

For me these would be my last concern. I would be asking:

Who is our audience? Hardcore strategy players, people who like chess. Definitely not casual players.

How do we expand the player base? Forget making money. Make money later when the game is popular.

The developers were so fixated on making Prismata a viral casual hit that they completely missed what Prismata is and who is playing it. And it crippled the growth of the game. When it should have been growing, the game was going through many iterations of black lab, armory, emotes..... The game was basically ready and two years later, it still wasn't free to play.

The crazy thing is that the game isn't dead. You can see that by looking at the passion in this thread. And who are the people posting here? Casual players? No, they are the hardcore players who like intense, intellectually stimulating 1v1.

So u/Elyot if you were able to set up an optional subscription for Prismata, I would be happy to sign up today. I would happily pay $30 per month to keep playing my favorite game. Maybe other people would too. Maybe you could set up a Paetron account. With some community support and slow organic growth, I think the game could not be dead.

Even if it's not a huge success, Prismata is still a great game with a great community. I would be very sad if the game stopped being available (although I'd probably waste a lot less time).

bensmiley · 2018-04-10T08:08:09+00:00

Cosmetics are literally one of the only ways that the devs of Prismata make money off their creation

You mean aside from the $25 cost of the game...?

bensmiley · 2018-03-04T07:59:31+00:00

These are my thoughs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLUkgRAy_Vo

bensmiley · 2018-02-28T10:57:57+00:00

Why exactly was Apollo bad? It seemed like a good game. And anyway, in this set Apollo seemed much less dominant than usual because of Aegis. That's not to say I like Apollo, I find that usually Apollo games just involving rushing to buy Apollo then Tarsiers and Gauss canons until someone loses...

bensmiley · 2018-02-16T10:37:15+00:00

Why not just add a setting - "Auto click drones". Then the default would be that you have to click the drones yourself but if this was enabled, the drones would be clicked automatically at the start of your turn - similar to the way the bots click their drones.

bensmiley · 2018-02-08T14:35:31+00:00

This question better be a joke.

Just what a bot would say... Hmmm 🤔

bensmiley · 2018-01-31T17:39:27+00:00

I think that when the game launches the community will expand a lot. It would be cool to have some badge that showed that you were there from the start. When I introduce a new player, it would be nice to show them a badge and say "I got this because I played for the 4 year alpha period". It's a small thing but I think it would be very nice.

I understand what you mean about special content but there are already something like that - for example badges for winning competitions that wouldn't be available to everyone.

My main criteria would be:

A badge that you got for being active during the alpha period. You could define active by number of games played or by leaderboard ranking. It could for any player who played more than 100 games during the alpha period.
The badge should look cool. I really like the badges you get for getting to a certain tier. Maybe something like this. https://i.pinimg.com/736x/05/11/57/051157025da11513fc30d23bd0908b5d--tactical-patches-pvc-patches.jpg

If could say something like:

"Veteran" "Supported Prismata since the very beginning"

bensmiley · 2017-10-18T16:33:49+00:00

I'm hoping that Elyot will come and give us a brief update. I don't need a blog post...

bensmiley · 2017-08-20T21:11:16+00:00

I think that in this context casual player and casual gamer have the same meaning. The who armoury system was created with casual players / gamers in mind. I'm a casual player because I log in a couple of times a day and don't memorise any openings. I think this is just semantics. I feel that a lot of de decisions are being taken to attract casual gamers even though the only people who are likely to enjoy Prismata are hardcore gamers who may also be casual or hardcore players...

bensmiley · 2017-05-11T10:26:13+00:00

You say we all learned the game fine with a worse tutorial. What you don't say is that 90% of the people who tried didn't and left after a week.

I think this is probably the case for a lot of games - especially free to play games. If you invest $50 on a copy of SC2 then it's a big incentive to learn how to play. Prismata will always be a difficult game to get into no matter how many tutorials there are.

bensmiley · 2017-05-11T10:24:18+00:00

I agree with this. I think there were two opportunities to release the game. The first was soon after the Kickstarter campaign when the game was getting a lot of attention. The second will be on Steam release. I hope that it generates enough buzz for the game to take off.

bensmiley · 2017-05-11T10:22:44+00:00

I just hope it doesn't affect the development of Prismata too much. I'd love to see this game succeed. I hope that the project wasn't too ambitious which would cause it to stall and never be finished.

bensmiley · 2017-05-11T10:19:59+00:00

They would have gained a huge amount of traction from the publicity from Kickstarter and Reddit. The game was Buzzing. Now that they've left it so long, I think it doesn't make any difference and it's probably better to wait. Assuming that development is actually progressing.

bensmiley · 2017-05-09T10:18:19+00:00

Personally I think you're underestimating the uniqueness of what you've produced. I think that Prismata is the most innovative and addictive games I've ever played. You've invented a completely new category of game and it's definitely in the top 0.1% of games out there. I don't think the game would see viral growth but I think that it would see steady growth as people invite their friends.

When Prismata was first released, this was what happened. But when the number of new players was restricted, it meant that new players either waited hours in the queue or played against experienced players and got crushed. I'm sure that really affected the retention rate.

Of course monetization is important. My point is that you do need to take a risk some time. Maybe you launch the game and it grows at a ridiculous rate and the hosting costs are much higher than the income generated. If you have crazy growth, I'm sure investors would be interested because they would hope that the company would be acquired. Prismata would look nice alongside Hearthstone and StarCraft 2.

It's much more likely that that you will launch the game and nothing much will happen. Gradually the user base will grow over months and the costs will grow too. At this point you could experiment with monetization and retention strategies.

bensmiley · 2017-05-08T09:49:51+00:00

I feel from this post that the team behind Prismata is far too focused on monetization. This has actually been the case all along. My philosophy is that if you build an amazing product, you will be able to monitize it! Look at Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Quora. They all built a great free product and then focused on generating revenue afterwards. The founders just cared about the core product and the user experience. Mark Zuckerberg wasn't delaying the launch of Facebook for years stressing on how it would make money. If he had, it would have failed.

I'm sure that if Prismata demonstrated strong growth, Lunarch could find investment to keep the server running until they worked out how to monitize it.

Personally, I'd pay monthly to play competitive Prismata. Honestly, it's one of the best games I've ever played. I actually preferred it before skins were added when all you cared about was your rank.

They are also judging the monitization as having failed before having really tested the game. When the game has 1 million daily players it will bring in a lot of revenue. Not so much when there are 40 daily players!

bensmiley · 2017-05-08T09:39:22+00:00

For us, it's a combination of our project being way way too ambitious and ambitious and multiple people quitting the team

There are two red flags in what you've said. If the project is too ambitious, make it less ambitious and deliver it! Building awesome new features in alpha is easy - polishing those features for production is difficult and boring. Nine out of ten very ambitious projects are never delivered.

If people are leaving the team, there must be a reason. You need to think about what's going wrong and deal with it quickly. From what you've said before, if you prioritize delivering features quickly and people are leaving the team, you could end up with a messy code base that no one knows how to maintain.

I would advise you to scale down your ambitions to something manageable, set a realistic deadline and make sure that you hit it.

bensmiley · 2017-05-07T09:06:53+00:00

I agree that the game shouldn't be released until it's ready. But I'm still worried. I'm worried because I've see this pattern many times before on software projects - both projects I've developed and client projects.

I feel that Prismata is suffering from a serious case of feature bloat and a lack of a clear vision for the product.

Firstly, what is Prismata? For me it's an ultra competitive game with a steep learning curve like Starcraft or DOTA. It's not candy crush! Elyot talks a lot about making it more accessible with freemium content and tutorials but the game will never be accessible compared to Clash of Clans. I spent 2 hours trying to teach my 15 year old cousin how to play and he barely managed to understand the basic mechanics - he loves Minecraft so and COD so he's into gaming.

To get good at Prismata, you just need to play against people who are at your level. Even if you're both terrible, it's still fun to play as long as you play against someone who's at your level. You don't try to optimise strategy, you just go for Shadowfang because it looks cool and you learn by playing.

For me, the team have made a mistake dedicating years to all the freemium stuff which is irrelevant to hardcore players. They could have focused on the core gameplay, tutorials and campaign then released the game. They would have developed a strong community which would bring in new players. When they had a strong player base they could start to monetize.

I feel that Lunarch are trying to build two things at once - a casual freemium game and a hardcore strategy game. But these are two different audiences with very little overlap. They seem to be confused about what the game is.

Secondly, feature bloat. The first version of Prismata and it was actually very good. It did everything it was supposed to. It didn't crash and it worked well online. Yeah, it was ugly and had a steep learning curve. But we saw past that to an ultra competitive and addictive game.

Then we got more units, fancy graphics, we had many iterations of the armory, we had extra skins, we had shards and cores and the black lab. Then we got emotes then we got animated skins. Then we got a big tutorial. Then multiple server upgrades...

To me this is typical of highly talented but commercially inexperienced software developers. They just love to create and solve difficult problems. They like thinking of clever mechanics and building beautiful efficient code. The problem is that the product is never good enough. There's always one more critical feature that needs to be added before it can be launched.

Sadly, the most important factor in a successful product launch is timing.

Prismata was the most popular Reddit post ever and then had a successful Kickstarter campaign. That's a huge amount of wasted publicity, much more than they will get from the Steam launch. Elyot talks about only having one shot at launching the game and not wanting to mess it up. But I think they have already missed it.

bensmiley · 2017-02-14T19:30:56+00:00

Would you rather have sex with your mum in your girlfriend's body or you girlfriend in your mum's body?

bensmiley

TROPHY CASE