Lol, I will admit that was a win. Congratulations. Gah, my 17-year-old-brain-who's-skipping can't take on all these multiple arguments! Hodapp I could manage, throw in another forumer and I would get by, Arn just kills me.
I still doubt Eliminate will cause the Plus network to be the juggernaut you all think it will be. It may help it to gain a much larger userbase, but how many are going to be active? Your average Joe will sign up, mess around with it once or twice and never touch it again.
Another thing to consider is it's hard to say how much bandwidth and CPU time hosting these games is even going to require. Make no mistake, Eliminate is going to be northing short of revolutionary on the iPhone, but it feels a lot like Quake 2 playing it. (Which I think is a great thing, but gives some clue as to what could be going on behind the scenes.) What kind of resources did hosting a Quake 2 server require? A Pentium-class processor, and 16MB of RAM (or 1MB of RAM per client). With how many of these classic FPS games are open source now, it really wouldn't surprise me to eventually find out that ngmoco was leaning heavily on these ancient FPS netcode and game server technologies. Think about it, Quake 2 is a game designed to be played via 56k (or worse). 3G has very similar latency. They've also no doubt planned for this game to be an amazing success, so I'm sure their server infrastructure is designed to easily scale with demand. At the end of the day, Neil, Alan, and the rest of the ngmoco crew are seasoned veterans of the gaming industry and experts in the business of video games. They're not going to drop the ball on Eliminate, especially with how long the game has been in development.
Yeah! He's a VERY pessimistic guy. He would have told Neil from ngmoco to stay at his EA job like: "Are you crazy?!? Nobody will ever buy rolling fruits... People don't like paying for games! They don't like games at all! Nobody owns an iPhone... and nobody will ever know what an App is....Just stick with EA!"
Tap Tap Revenge 3 wasn't supposed to be as popular because of the $0.99 price tag. However, the Tapulous name has carried it to the #1 spot. If NGmoco has as much weight as you say it does (I doubt even 2/5 of the iDevice gamers know who NGmoco is or know three of their games) such a good looking product should EASILY (understatement) sell at $0.99. I mean, such a GOOD LOOKING, and BEAUTIFUL product made by, *GASP!* NGmoco! Why not make it $0.99? That's all I'm asking. $0.99 gives me a little reasurance that they won't radically change something then everyone will be saying 'they gave it to you for free, they can change it!' and that insurance will actually want to make me buy energy packs even more because I know there's no chance of it going out of business.
I've missed you guys on this topic...most people just way tooo pessimistic when it comes to something being free.. they feel attacked as if they don't have the right to vote by not buying or something
Those guys are brilliant and have invested so many resources... they will have some plan B's before they are throwing away the last 9 months of development. Thanks for your contributions... if it were not for your and arn... I would have left this topic here already... most people don't want to recognize that this is actually a very important project for the future of ngmoco and iPhone gaming...
I was talking about Neil Young the ngmoco CEO: http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/levelup/archive/2008/06/18/scoop-longtime-electronic-arts-creator-neil-young-leaves-company.aspx
I'm not pessimistic you twat, I'm just wondering why NGmoco wouldn't go on the safe side and charge at least $0.99. Everyone would still buy it, and it would add a little reasurance in case unforseen problems occur in the future. And expandin, you're the one that got me on this spree. You are THE BIGGEST NGmoco fanboy I have seen.
I think you're missing the part that top free apps generate > 100,000 downloads a day vs 10-15,000 for top paid apps. If their business model scales, then more is better. arn
I still don't understand how NGmoco can give us lag free gameplay with >100,000 downloads per day. They're going to need servers like Halo and COD do, maybe bigger.
I think it's a good thing since this is the first time a game of this calibur is being released free of charge. But, since this game is mainly online deathmatch, I'm kinda worried about how the servers will be able to handle the magnitude of the players who will all be on at the same time..since this will no doubt hit number 1 on the free apps section in no time.
That's another thing. Halo isn't free of charge, Flight Plane isn't free of charge... Weren't we all complaining about how people demand that games are free or cheap? This is just another stepping stone for them! Why buy games from indie devs when these big companies sell theirs for free!
Their decision was made easier by Apple announcing that free games can include in app purchases. I think this is a great and very intelligent move by ngmoco, personally. In the app store free games get tons of downloads even compared to $0.99 games. This move does a whole hell of a lot for ngmoco. 1. Free = automatic downloads by a lot of iDevice gamers, no thinking about if you want to spend money for the download. 2. Increases Plus+ user accounts. 3. DLC will give ongoing revenue stream. 4. You can play anytime for free. If you suck your energy will deplete but you can still play, you just won't earn credits for upgrades until 90 minutes pass. I don't see anything wrong with this move.
So what Call me a fanboy. I'm proud of loving their games. I guess you will never understand why the difference in 99c can mean 10x more downloads and that in return might generate 99c x every month x 10. Basically way more hype and money.
Actually there's absolutely nothing wrong. They will bank even more. But most monkeys won't get because it takes some brainpower to see that.
