Introversion

Hello,
I watched the Bank Heist Gameplay video and I thought that it's absolutely amazing. The game mixes 2 concepts I love most, Infrastructure and Tactics.
Then in the following conversation with my friend about it, we agreed that we'd absolutely LOVE to buy the game in it's current status.
I'm pretty sure there are many people out there who'll want to pay to play it (really, I can make a big list if needed).

I would be really glad to either pre-purchase the game right now for it's full price to test the development build or just pay something like 15 bucks to test it (and then buy the full game when it comes out).
What do you think folks?

Not happening but would be interesting.

The "pay for alpha" (15 or so) would be interesting because it's a bit of money for Introversion and would help them see what works and what doesn't on different configurations.

Damn jelco! Demos are pretty much pointless to me now too but only because GameFly exists. If it sucks I just send that bih back. I don't own any games for my 360 besides what I've downloaded. I get bored with a game after about a month. Unless it's from IV. ;)

I think an Alpha release would just distract the team from actually finishing the game. I'm eager to play it too but giving out a buggy compile would probably cause more harm than good.

kiberkiller wrote:we agreed that we'd absolutely LOVE to buy the game in it's current status.

You should probably try re-watching the video but this time looking carefully at what is actually happening rather than just listening to what Chris is saying is happening. You'll soon realise the game isn't as playable or functional as he makes out and that a lot of it is carefully scripted theatrics, as such, you and your friend would probably get more enjoyment from playing Sleep is Death together.

Montyphy wrote:Sleep is Death

No no no!

Why was I not informed of a new game by Jason Rohrer?

This was nearly a year ago?!

zach wrote:

Montyphy wrote:Sleep is Death

No no no!

Why was I not informed of a new game by Jason Rohrer?

This was nearly a year ago?!

I only know of it from posts by allen in the Games for 2009... And BEYOND! thread. I've never played it myself but I've been intrigued and tempted. Who knows, there could be a challenge in the near future involving creating/playing-out a story that includes a strange combination of characters, items, and/or plot points. Not sure how active the community is though.

It worked for Minecraft!

I'd pay for access to alpha builds of subversion. I also think it'd be a great opportunity to re-establish some dialogue between the Introversion staff and the community. Unfortunately it's unlikely to be as easy to make this remotely playable in alpha as with a game like Minecraft.

And besides Minecraft already being fun, you were pretty much pre-ordering it anyway when you bought it in Alpha.

This is like the business strategy that Frozen Synapse is going for... you pre order the product and get a view of the final product via the alpha/beta versions. (They dont ruin the story... just skirmish type games...)

I would pay a bit extra to play the alpha, and the rest of the versions, as well as get the full of course. Say normal price plus 5-10. Sad isn't it?

monkeyman23555 wrote:This is like the business strategy that Frozen Synapse is going for... you pre order the product and get a view of the final product via the alpha/beta versions. (They dont ruin the story... just skirmish type games...)

Exactly what I'm talking about. I own Frozen Synapse and even when it's was bugged, ugly and unfinished I had lots of fun with it.

Generally speaking, the point of an alpha or beta release is to get enough dedicated people playing the game to find problems on a wide range of hardware and software configurations. As a developer, you want people that are going to play the game and report errors consistently and clearly. Testers that simply want early access to the game are useless from the standpoint of a developer---in fact, they may be less than useless because they (a) don't report bugs and (b) get a poor impression of the game from a buggy release. In the past, IV have generally looked for people who have shown that they can spend the time testing and writing bug reports. They have gone outside of that group a little in order to test odd hardware configurations, but they still limit things to a relatively small group. In terms of getting games tested, it seems to work relatively well.

There are a couple of good reasons to sell alpha or beta access, but I don't think that any of them apply to IV at the moment. First, it can be a quick money making scheme to pay off bills in the short term. Granted, IV have had money management problems in the past, but they appear to be relatively solvent right now, and don't seem to need the cash injection. Second, releasing pre-production versions is a way of generating buzz---this works really well for the AAA studios, whose beta versions have probably already been tested pretty thoroughly in house, and I can see it working well for games that are not strongly story-oriented (i.e. the sandbox style games like Minecraft, or arcade games), but I'm not sure that applies to Subversion.

Basically (and of course it goes without saying that this is only my opinion), I don't see what the advantage is for IV. Why should they sell an alpha or beta version to the public? What's in it for them?

Oh, and this seems relevant.

xander

xander wrote:Oh, and this seems relevant.

If there's only one thing that can be learnt from that it will be, "Some of them will not, in fact, have a realistic idea about anything." Love it

Someone should half build a game, then let people fill in the rest. Or they should not fix any bugs, make the game open source and let the consumer fix the bugs themselves. I don't think that's a realistic idea about anything. Haha

Only if it counted as a sort of pre-order.