OUYA Moving Away from Required Free-to-Try

[arcticdog]

THIS. This is now so important.

Ok, so they're going back on their policy and that's really sad. I can understand it from a developer's point of view however I feel it's important to remember that we are the consumers, we are the ones buying the games. If you disagree with the changes, make it known through your actions. Buy from or donate to the little guys who uphold the policies on which the Ouya was built. I know there are so many developers who will carry on creating demos for their games which is great, as demos are a bit of a lost art nowadays - they really do have their place and I wish more developers would utilize them - we should support them through this, over the developers who refuse to. By all means let's stamp our feet and make some noise to show the guys at Ouya we're not particularly pleased with this decision, but please, do not forget or turn your back on the little guys. The Ouya was built on their dreams, let's not crush them now over a decision they had no say in.

Not entirely accurate. During the first office hours hangout hosted by Bawb, James, Kellee, and Co., Bawb brought up they were looking into this and wanted feedback. I asked Bawb directly via twitter if we could provide feedback even though we weren't present for the actual session, and he said of course.

So while it wasn't a mass email to all 30,000+ developers, a small fraction of which are actually taking the platform seriously, they did NOT spring this on developers that take it seriously enough to attend or at least review their office hours hangout. And assuming Bawb was telling the truth (no reason to believe otherwise), there was opportunity to express opinions prior to this announcement.

Ok, one of those at a time -

Consumers Vs. Developers.
The issue is (and probably will remain) that gamers who have never made a game, don't understand how difficult it is, and how difficult some of the choices are to make during the development process. This means that what the consumer thinks is best for them may not be achievable or realistic for the developer. Demos (for example) take time to build, and if a developer already has a game in place this may be difficult to achieve (I think, I have very limited experience in the field). So without some kind of dev diary/blogging system or a set of indepth videos it is impossible to convey the level of skill, time and effort (also money!) a highly polished gaming experience takes to create.

No. You are pretty much spot on. I'm sure there are some "lazy" developers out there that don't want to bother with coding a demo, but its difficulty is highly subjective to the game. It's not fair to make a blanket statement about a developer's motivations or competency based on a demo. In fact, a badly conceived demo itself can give an inaccurate feeling about a game, either positive or negative.

Here's my own personal account... If your game level based, it seems logical that you can just cut off at a certain level. My game is level based, but it has "training" worked into the narrative. So the beginning of the game is a little cut scene heavy, and may leave the gamer with the impression that the entire game is like that even at the most logical stop point. Do I pad extra levels in to somehow remove that impression? Do I end up making the demo too long as a consequence? Will gamers see through the attempt and decide it's too fluffy and I'm being deceptive? With that, now I'm faced with having to design some of the game's story and early levels around the desire to make a demo. From a business perspective, I personally think it will help customers make a confident and happy decision which will hopefully reflect favorably upon my brand, perhaps at the cost of artistic integrity. But I can definitely see how some developers might feel this violates their artistic "vision" of the game's flow in some way. If I didn't have to worry about it, odds are the game would release faster because there would be one less "mode" to test in the game.

And I haven't even fully decided if I'm going to target OUYA yet, so it's a problem not unique to this platform, which is why many app stores don't make it a requirement.

One thing I have a really strong opinion on is.. The behavior here is a little over-reactive if developer support is desired at all. Not saying consumers should worship the ground developers walk on, but can you imagine how any developer that's been approached by the orchestrated efforts presented in other places on this forum might feel if they decide to give OUYA a look and come here to see what it's all about? The loudest and rudest are going to stick out the most visibly. It could very well ruin chances of a developer supporting the platform at all, whether they intend to make a demo or not, simply because of way they're being viewed/treated here. It's shouldn't be an "us vs. them" scenario, and continuing to cultivate such an atmosphere is highly toxic to the platform and this community. It's clear that developers have options as to where to peddle their wares. And whether consumers of OUYA believe it or not, they're really NOT in a position of power here. That's not said to troll or make anyone feel bad. But it's an unfortunate reputation that this community has earned outside of this forum by having low adoption, famously not buying games (or at least thats how the press spun it), and constantly complaining how something isn't "open" enough based on their own expectations more than reality.

You can be assured you will see more "journalism" next week picking apart how the reaction has been here and spinning it into another troubling aspect of the whole micro-console ideals and OUYA specifically.

And speaking of those orchestrated efforts, it's more likely than not that at least some of those developers who've been approached by anyone here, and were given a "No. We're not developing for OUYA" response gave that response because of the demo policy. Being closed minded about this particular thing is a little hypocritical. It comes off as "Please come to our platform.. but only on our terms." Does that scream "open"? No. Not really. The choice really is.. you can have it without the demo, or not have it at all. If a game is good enough to pursue in a twitter-a-thon or email campaign, is a demo really needed? The message sent by those efforts really says "no" as well. So again.. hypocritical. Unless the message is.. "come to our platform so we can try a portion of your game for free". And if that's the case, no developer will bother, and not sure I can blame them.

Developers Vs. Developers
Not being a developer and having limited experience on this forum I probably shouldn't comment here, however I'd love to see developers banding together, and a change of policy now is not going to ease any tensions in this camp.

To be quite honest with you, I prefer a demo. If something's cheap enough, I won't lose sleep over losing a few bucks on a bad game. But that bad game will damage that developer's brand in my eyes if they didn't give me an opportunity to judge their effort without paying. But I don't feel entitled to that. So when Bawb mentioned it during that hangout, I personally didn't provide an opinion one way or the other, especially if it meant more games. Premium games become free to play all the time on Google Play.

But as a developer and consumer, I'd like to see the platform succeed. If that's accomplished by allowing some developers into the party by loosening the demo requirement, I don't know how that hurts the cause. Honestly, I think it hurts the developer more since there is a sector of the audience here that clearly wants demos. But I think it's the developer's burden to shoulder that disappointment and hopefully that gets reflected where it hurts most. Not by hurled insults, but by how well their game performs in the market.

I know some have said this is some sort of "broken promise", but I don't see it that way. Businesses evolve and have to make hard decisions sometimes to keep the doors open and ensure users can enjoy the product long term. They delivered what they said they'd deliver, and the games were free to try until they discovered that was closing the door on a lot of opportunity, so it's hard to say they have had any ill intent here. I highly doubt there was any devious plan to eventually disappoint everyone. I actually believe that's the case of all their decisions, even one's I've vocally berated myself. What business does that willfully?

It was a sacred cow, and a lot of people are paranoid about the impact. But the reality is.. free-to-play IS where the current growth is. When Apple first opened the app store, all you could get was premium "pay before you play" apps. In about a year after enabling "Free to Play" APIs in iOS, the free to play apps eclipsed the premium by a large amount. Yes. Apple's customers. Famous for buying anything and everything were suddenly getting more free apps than paid apps. Why would developers pursue it if Apple's customers buy everything? I expect that trend to continue on OUYA, who has (like it or not) a reputation of having customers who don't want to pay for anything (and some of the reaction in this thread doesn't help that)

The reality is.. we'll see some games here with an up front price. But the notion that nobody will offer demos because there's no incentive anymore has no real solid ground. How much developers will embrace it will be 100% decided by sales. Nobody here lives in a vacuum, and they've demonstrated they will voice their opinion. The first developer that releases an awful game for an unfair up front price will not have many victims and enough 1 star ratings to bury them deep in the o-ranking.

Even the so-called research that says including a demo damages sales reeks of bias. There are no games on XBox Live arcade that don't have a demo, so that research must have been referring to retail or on-demand games. But they failed to mention that these games are also available to rent through various outlets, giving customers an inexpensive means of "demoing" games that don't have an official demo.

Everyone Vs. The Ouya
This is the one that saddens me most. It's so easy to hate something you've never really tried, or that has made a few mistakes in it's time. It's important to remember here is that the guys who are 'Ouya' are a young company still. They have a lot to learn, and it would be great if this forum could be a place where we instead of kicking and screaming over some of the issues and kinks and honest mistakes that they make, could instead give them feedback to grow from. This thread clearly highlights something we as a community are not happy about, so now we need to move forward and put some suggestions in place - what do we want to see if this IS implemented? Is there a better way than this to solve the 'big developer issue'?

Of course, not all of the responsibility on that last one lies with us, we could now use some strong Ouya representative voices to come forward with some statements that we can post feedback on directly, and communicate with regularly on solving this issue.


Hopefully we can liaise with some Ouya staff on this, have a look into how the submission guidelines can be used to help stop awful ports and get really good quality titles in - some direct communication with them and some response to our feedback would be excellent!

A bit of an essay - I went a bit crazy

Essay... heh. Amateur.

I've suggested OUYA attack this from a different angle. Such as providing tools to automate demo-making for common situations.

Also, instead of pushing a restrictive policy, perhaps reward developers who actually go through the effort of making a demo even if it's for a brief period of time..
Something like.. a better than 30% cut of the game sales if a demo is released on launch date.
An automatic bump in the O-Ranking just for having a demo

I'd guess the better royalty cut would turn heads pretty sharply and cause even the most stubborn developer to reconsider not making a demo.
Positive re-enforcement almost ALWAYS gets better rewards than negative. The fact is.. it doesn't matter if you're coaxing developers, or raising kids and arctic dogs.


Someone else (I think Darth2D) mentioned segregating the games into separate areas. This is how Google Play does it, so it's a real life case study that seems to work for them.

What about Dani_SF's Bloom: Memories and Grantmoore3d's two projects? I hate the term more than I hate sugar free candy, but if there ever was a set of triple "A" games then it's the stuff from them.

Dani actually did provide a demo to her backers. I've played it. It has a lot of potential to be a great game. Not really because of it's mechanics though. Nothing wrong with them since it's highly influenced by the 2D Zelda games. But you're right. The production values of the art and music will definitely sell the game without anyone ever touching a controller.

Which brings up an interesting point. If Dani chose to bring this to OUYA, but couldn't figure out how to make a demo for it... would you want that to be what determines if it appears on the OUYA at all?

[RiotingSpectre]

Dani actually did provide a demo to her backers. I've played it. It has a lot of potential to be a great game. Not really because of it's mechanics though. Nothing wrong with them since it's highly influenced by the 2D Zelda games. But you're right. The production values of the art and music will definitely sell the game without anyone ever touching a controller.

Which brings up an interesting point. If Dani chose to bring this to OUYA, but couldn't figure out how to make a demo for it... would you want that to be what determines if it appears on the OUYA at all?

I'm not completely against the idea of a game without a demo since most of the games I've bought in my life have been from high-stakes purchases. If I want a new game and am looking at something with a gleam in my eye then I do my research first via YouTube for game-play footage, Google for customer reviews, and what's recommended by the employees at the establishments I shop at. I don't like doing all this so that I can secure a safe purchase since it's a drag amongst other things, but there's no denying that the playground has changed and I think things accommodating to this change would be nice. The formula and the industry as a whole has been going through a shift since the introduction and accessibility of mobile gaming with things having demos or LITE versions being a prominent thing. How to explain this better, how to explain this better....

I suppose it comes down to being spoiled in a sense because of what we're now used to these days and due to the fact that we can have as many free tries on a demo on quite a large sum of games today; we're used to being in our comfort zone on things with our purchases. Once someone takes us out of the zone via older practices and other things is when the complaining starts happening. I support the efforts of every developer as long as it fits within what I consider to be passable by today's standards and those standards are fairness from a consumer standpoint and revered from other developers looking at your project. The former is proper execution when you release the game such as adequate pricing, whether it's pay-to-win, subscription model based, and all those other things. I can't speak much of the latter and am an archaic piece of work with what I do know about that side so I'll just play the "Don't be a bullshit-face" card and call it a day on that.

The argument that it's impossible for a game to have any sort of demo is very questionable if not outright immediately dismissible simply because the follow-up to it always is, is that "I don't want to do more work". There are countless types of demos such as one level which could be used for most games, timed which could be used for a lot of those arcade inspired games, minimum credits per day which worked for Canabalt, and early access amongst other things. There are options for everything and while you can say that I don't know what I'm talking about because I'm not a developer. Well my two responses to that are "My two eyes also let me see bullshit by the way." and "I've yet to have a single instance where someone made a respectable argument against my notion(s).". I'm fine with games that have no demo while also being fine with a demo being said to be more work, but when you spout nonsense like it's literally impossible then that's when I start to get irritated.

Continuing on, I don't foresee a tremendous amount of people putting their games on the platform without a demo since your argument along with my own have concluded that it would be like a rich white boy walking into a very ghetto neighborhood. For instance, if someone were to put a game on Discover without a demo which is a store comprised of nothing but games with demos at the moment then it would be like this.



Let's just say that Richie Rich would be an unidentifiable smear on the pavement behind Mrs. Sticklesin's house.

I think the people who will choose not to purchase anything that is without a demo are going about the retaliation all wrong. You're keeping the platform no doubt anyways and since OUYA Incorporate earns money off game sales more than they do consoles, they need that money more than ever. The reason why we saw this change in the first place is because the reality of their financial situation had forced them to give up on one of their biggest strong points and If you refuse to buy a large some of titles(even if they're still the minority in Discover) then you're going to contribute to a more negative future of OUYA Incorporate. One where we might not even be able to side-load, have this forum because it's a liability, and all sorts of other things. You can have an honor code like what me and Steven are doing, but don't be a fool.

Furthermore, I would take Bloom: Memories with no more required demos in the entire Discover store anymore over a Discover store without Bloom: Memories and required demos. There's no doubting the fact that we're starving for fun content to play and more content to experience. As much as I don't like the change of policies, I too can't deny the urgency of the situation we face. I believe in Dani along with most of the other developers on here and will support them with the ones who will spout excuses, game the system, and are doing things poorly such as for cash grabs won't get a dime from me. Even without that strong policy this console is still for gamers, by gamers to me and no fucking shithead is going to take that away from me.

Lastly, it's not to say that I'm happy the way things have gone. I'm seriously not pleased at all. I however(like many of you) must take into consideration that we can have an OUYA with no required demos or no OUYA at all in the future into the equation. I will continue to support the platform in my own way and I will continue what most consider to be the top contribute of this forum. Just make note that when there is legitimate in any way, shape, or form is where you'll find me sticking up for what's right.