The amount of players playing this game have fallen in the last years. If we release this game on Steam Greenlight, many more people will join. Maybe fix some of the bugs and make the graphics a bit more detailed and then we can release it on Steam. Pay or Free to play is your choice. I love this game, but the lack of players makes me sad. Please consider this !
It's already released. PR won't help. We get new players, but they flock to Scout or can't learn the game fast enough to have fun. This game is simply too unintuitive.
Actually, you're all kind of wrong. Simple Sample is right about Greenlight, but wrong about the reasons for it. We've had this in the pipeline for a little while, but we haven't really mentioned anything public about it. There are plans to go to Greenlight. EDIT: I did write a whole load of shit here that I was just informed I really shouldn't have written, given some of it really shouldn't be public. Rest assured, there are a fuck tonne of reasons for going to Greenlight for Empires. However, as Spartacus said, we're not retaining new players. Things aren't intuitive enough. The plan with the game going forward is to really try and focus on fixing that, so we stand the best chance come Greenlight. We'll have an edge that absolutely no other Greenlighter's have. We're already on Steam. We have an official group which we can abuse for votes, and we can make it super easy for people to download because it's on Steam. But this stuff is a bit off yet. We need a decent length of time to reach the level required, and I honestly don't know if we'll ever get there. But Greenlight is our current long term objective. It's essentially the last shot for Empires, and we're all fairly aware of that. We've just released this really well received patch, got a tonne of PR, some even unexpected (pcgamer.com), but playercount hasn't really changed. The writing is on the wall. We have to do something big, or it's game over.
No panic, good things will stay. I think, we have to play the game... and concentrate our activities (look at http://forums.empiresmod.com/showthread.php?t=17283 ).
Most important is to get new players into the game by making them finish some kind of basic training (i.e. Tutorial which includes all functions of infantry and some basics for commander like dropping buildings and research navigation) so they don't ragequit after joining a server and asking how to join the game.
So you need to go through green light if you want to take our moneyz or what? What would be the point of green lighting?
Actually, it'd still be free. I've been told I can't really say, but at the very least, we'd get to a more prominent section on the Steam store. I'm not saying we're going to Greenlight. I'm just saying we'd like to.
It is ok, if Empires costs some money... but before I will buy the game, it should be fully developed.
If we do Greenlight, we may want to charge for Empires. That sounds crazy, but if you could set certain sale amounts, then it would bring in a shload of players. You know about Steamgifts, right? Players set up giveaways on the website, a few hundred people join the giveaway, one person is picked after a few days, the giver sends to the give-ee the steam key. But the giver gets something called "contribution points" for giving. If he gives Far Cry 3 ($60 regular on Steam), he gets 60 contrib points. Now when another giver sets his giveaway to only allow accounts with $50+ contrib, he can join that giveaway. Typically, Steamgifts regulars will give expensive games like Skyrim for very high contrib values so only other regulars can join the giveaway. So people try to exploit the system to increase their contrib values. If I can get the $7 THQ Amazon Bundle and give all the games away, I can get like $100+ contribution because the games typically go for a lot on Steam. Other games that go 90% off get gobbled up and spammed on Steamgifts because a giver can get 10 contrb dollars for each actual dollar. So if Empires was Greenlit and the price was set at like $10, but we ran 95% off constantly, it would become a Steamgifts darling for people that exploit the contribution system. Hundreds of copies would be purchased and immediately given away. And the players that received the copies would be less likely to quit Empires because they can put a dollar value on their gift. And it never fuckings stops. There's a game called "Fortix" that is famous for doing exactly this. People still buy it just to give it away. So you get a small amount of dev cash to keep the servers up and hundreds of new players. Win-fucking-win.
I brought up something similar to this, but apparently you can't charge for Empires because it uses the source engine, unless you pay some fees to Valve.
