Xercodo
Xovoni Astronautical Manufacturing and Engineering
3475
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Posted - 2014.04.09 21:07:00 -
[1] - Quote
Doireen Kaundur wrote:DaReaper wrote:As already stated, the ship painting/skins are a pilot program. You do know what the definition of 'pilot program' is right?
Its business speak for alpha test.
Essentually, they looked at used ships and decided to pick a few and see if players are even remotely interested in skins. If they have a few ships and crappy skins but player buy and use them and the crappy mechanic, then the guy in charge can take the numbers to the big wigs at CCP and go 'look, we wanted to hit a goal of xxx sold, we hit yyy! The players want this, even in this design, so can we have money to actually make it work? And based on our projections this will give ccp XXX profit.." Then the big wigs go "do it" or "no no money, wait longer" or "no scrap the entire idea"
This is why you did not see a new mechanic and it fully turned on. If no one used it, you would of seen people having a **** storm about wasted dev time. This was the fastest and easiest way to implement and prolly took a hew hours to do it, as oppose to weeks or months, all the while if it failed, then joe blow player can't go 'wait you wasted 6 months on this crap? you could used that 6 months to fix xxx! what the hell are you think ccp'
Understand? If you want more skins buy or use the ones we have now. Show them there is demand. People ask for this, but how many people, 100? 1000? that's not a lot when you have 500k or so accounts. But if that is shown to be 100k accounts buying the skins... then there is justification in doing a full blow feature. I respectfully disagree. You dont see if a new 3 course meal will be a hit by just serving the appetizer. I hate all the new skins, but would still want to paint my ship.
That's because food is a terrible analogy for your point because no one in the food industry does that anyway. It's however VERY common in technology industries in both hardware and software. It's just that most of the time this process of trying out ****** versions tends to happen at the internal level before you see it as a product or it's tested by a special user group, but even those sorts of things are becoming less common, especially for something new.
But here's something that you also need to understand. The technology world is founded on and its back is made out of innovation. Even if A isn't new, and nor is B, putting them together to make C is. Or maybe they're making A and B from scratch. The point is, because technology is based on making something new it's hard for business men to gauge it. How do you get the market value of a product over a 3 year period if it's never been done before?
Because of this the tech business world has a concept called "MVP", Minimum Viable Product. A lot of tech is expensive to do, especially in manpower where engineers command six figures of salary....and you need to hire multiple engineers...
Instead you scrape together what you can in small investments make a pretty ****** MVP (but one that still make use of your primary feature or technology), and start selling it. You then take this revenue and feed to back into development and use it as justification for larger investment to expand, get better customer service, improve design, adding features, etc.
This is why we're seeing more games showing up as paid early access on steam and why betas involving money are more prevalent. Budding development companies need some revenue to show the investors "see, we made money, now fund us so we can hire more people and make more money". Or in some cases, like with Rust and certain KickStarter projects you get all the money you need from that MVP right off the bat and you throw it all into development.
In CCP's case they already have an established market so what they do is they roll out test versions of features, collect data for a few months to a year, and then iterate. This way they don't break anything too significant nor do they change game mechanics too drastically in the long run. An example of this is the removal of the hacking loot spew mechanic this summer (which will have had a lifetime of one year) and the second pass we had one T1 frigates and cruisers with 1.3 very recently (also a year since initial overhaul).
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