Stardock Magazine

December 2016

By Brad Wardell (@draginol)

Contents:

1. Editorial from Brad

2. WindowBlinds 10.5

3. Supporting Early Adopters

4. Escalation & Supreme Commander

## Editorial from Brad ##

With the American election over, we will be ending new updates to The Political Machine 2016.  One thing that was interesting was that according to the game stats, Donald Trump was favored to win in the actual game with Bernie Sanders a close second.  Given selection bias, it’s not meaningful as a predictor of the election.  But it was an interesting result nevertheless.

Here in Michigan, the weather is getting cold (unless you’re interviewing for a job, then it’s warm here all year around).  You’d think this would be the busy time for us but it’s actually the least busy time.  Anything that needs to have shipped has to have shipped by now.  This gives me the luxury of indulging of getting back into programming. You can see what I did here: https://www.stardock.net/article/480761/DEV_DIARY_AI_Walkthrough_of_184

Meanwhile, we’re still trying to find ways of getting more people to subscribe to our Twitch.tv channel.  Because I lack any sense of shame or dignity, I already asked my friends at Paradox and Firaxis what they do to get more viewers.  But if you have any suggestions, please let us know by commenting in this thread: https://forums.stardock.net/480874

I will try to write another one of these before the end of the year.  Let me know what topics you’d like me to write more about.

You can contact me directly on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/draginol

 

## WindowBlinds 10.5 ##

Object Desktop users got an unexpected surprise when WindowBlinds 10.5 was released a couple weeks ago.  The new version, amongst other things, can skin the Windows “modern” apps.  If you don’t have WindowBlinds, you can get it at www.windowblinds.net.

While historically making Windows look like a Mac or some other OS has been pretty popular, my personal preference is to make Windows look like Photoshop but so far I haven’t found a Photoshop skin so I use this:

Over the years, it’s gotten harder to skin Windows because many developers, especially Microsoft, violate their own UI rules by self-skinning themselves (looking at you Office!).  This has helped WindowBlinds in the corporate world because some companies want to make sure Windows itself conforms to the look and feel of Microsoft Office.  How is that for ironic?

 

## How do you support early adopters of games? ##

The PC game industry is in big trouble.  Most of them don’t know it yet but if they haven’t figured it out in 2016, it’ll hit them hard in 2017.

Early adopters of PC games are being abused.  Stardock is no better than any of the others on this as many of my arguments internally are on this issue.

Here is how it works:

You buy a game for fifty  bucks and then, a couple months later, it’s on a Steam sale for 25% off.  A year later it’s on sale for 75% off. 

The argument given to me is that it’s no different than people who go to the theater and pay $10 for a movie only to be able to watch it for $2.99 six months later with the entire family. My contention it is very different because unlike movie theaters, we have the ability to protect our most loyal fans and we have not.

For me, personally, it hit home with Ashes of the Singularity this past Spring.  It came out, it was $49.99.   As I write this, the list (non-sale) price of it is $24.99.  Why should anyone buy a game new?  The answer is, unless developers do something about this problem, they will find that gamers will treat them with the same loyalty as they’ve receiving – none.  And like I said, Stardock has been just as bad as the others.

So how did this happen in the first place?  The answer is that over the past two years, the market has completed its shift from retail to digital.  There was a cultural lag (and there still is) about the idea of a “new” game’s value versus an old game. But the reality is, a game is a game is a game.

Your new game can only charge 50 if it is fundamentally superior than the $10 old game.  This can be really tough for strategy game developers to deal with. But life ain’t fair.

The problem Stardock ran into with Ashes of the Singularity is that once we realized the market was shifting, we needed to find a way to reward our early adopters but didn’t know who they were.  We know who our founders are.  But what about those in early access? What about those who simply bought it at $49.99 in the first month? 

As an industry, we’re in unknown territory. We have to evolve or die. We have to show more appreciation to our customers and more specifically, more loyalty.  But words are cheap. Actions matter.

So here is what we’re doing:

We have begun rolling out the Stardock Launcher.  It just went out with Sins of a Solar Empire this week.  It’ll slowly get added to our other games soon.  The goal will be to tie a user’s Steam (or GOG) account so that, ideally, we can create more personalized offerings for our customers.

For example, let’s say you bought Ashes of the Singularity at 50 bucks.  We want to give you stuff to thank you for your loyalty.  When you launch your game, you’ll see the launcher which will, over time, provide special benefits for players, sometimes retroactively. Free DLC, many access to new games, maybe free software.

I wish I could say there was a set policy on this. But like everyone else will soon be, we’re all still just trying to find our way to demonstrate our loyalty to our early adopters.  It’s a problem that game developers must solve.

 

## Escalation & Supreme Commander ##

As some of you know, Stardock bid on publishing Supreme Commander 2.  We had just published Demigod and were in talks with Gas Powered Games to publish their next game.   It ultimately came down between Stardock and Square Enix.  Square offered more of an advance but with the caveat that Square would own it and it would be re-designed to be console friendly.  Stardock’s offer was less of an advance but it would be PC only and be an expansion upon Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance.

Some years later, Stardock and Oxide teams up to create a real-time strategy game of their own called Ashes of the Singularity.  Working on a brand-new, next-generation engine that would only work on PCs with 4 CPU cores and 2GB of memory, we anticipated the game topping out at around 50,000 units.  Thus, when we designed it, we wanted to make it appeal to the broadest possible market.

During the beta, we explicitly stated that Ashes would not have features like strategic zoom or upgradable buildings or a too many different kinds of units.  Our rationale, was that given the hardware requirements, we couldn’t design Ashes for just the hard-core RTS market.

Once the game was released and sold better than expected, we rolled up our sleeves and began looking at what we would do if we were going to make a “hard-core” version of Ashes of the Singularity.  This became Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation.

We did run into considerable fan backlash from Ashes fans who felt we had “baited and switched” since we released Escalation as a stand-alone expansion that includes everything that was in the base game as well.   This is one of the things that spurred us to create the launcher. We have to find a way to reward people more.   If you have suggestions, please let us know here: https://forums.stardock.net/480874

In the meantime, if you are looking for a brand-new, state of the art RTS check out Escalation.  If you have the base game, it’s priced as DLC for $20.

---

That’s all for now!