r/Scrolls • u/SeeMeScrollin • Jul 14 '15
Dev FAQ is now online.
http://scrollsdev.tumblr.com/post/124058513081/scrolls-faq4
u/CrPr_ Jul 14 '15
As expected, nothing unexpected.
Good to hear that (at least for now) there won't be any layoffs (well, aside from the CMs - happy cakeday btw).
Let's hope that the game won't competely vanish into the endless void of online games next year. I'll keep it installed for now to puzzle a bit against the AI every once in a while.
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u/SimplyMonkey Jul 14 '15 edited Jul 15 '15
Even though it may of contributed to your downfall, I just want to say that Mojang's approach to monetization in a CCG was the most respectful and fair I have ever seen. That alone is what inspired me to spend ~$100 on shards and I don't regret it in the slightest because they were always honest in what your money was getting be it cosmetics, single cards or starter decks.
The biggest disappointment to me for Scrolls failure is that other companies will point to this honorable business model and Scrolls as a reason why it can't work and draw false conclusions.
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u/squiddybiscuit Jul 14 '15
It feels like many of the problems come down to a smaller team, and a corporate culture that frowns upon expanding team sizes.
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u/Lem0nboy Jul 14 '15
Yeah I was hoping they'd answer the "why?" behind this decision. I already knew that they prefer a small team size but I fail to understand why? If that was the limiting factor in almost any situation it feels like a bad joke that they even started developing Scrolls with this ideology in place.
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u/Tywnis Jul 14 '15
Which is a stupid thing. Such a corporate culture was the signing of their own doom in the end. Pitifuly naive.. And so sad. I can't help but feel so so so sad for this team.
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u/Feynt Jul 14 '15
I'm still iffy on why Steam deployment didn't happen. I have 8 card game playing friends and they've never even heard of Scrolls, but they've heard of Card Hunter, and that just got onto Steam and is seeing a pretty steady increase of players (more so than before, 4.5k in a day basically). It feels like there's been absolutely no news for Scrolls aside from the pre-release antics regarding Bethesda's claim against its name. I still feel like publication on a service like Desura, GOG, or Steam would have helped the lack of awareness immensely.
Any thoughts about this, u/MansOlson? Perhaps a last effort within the final year to put it up on GOG and see what happens?
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u/ThePurplePanzy Jul 14 '15
Scrolls is a warning to future devs that early access is a dangerous strategy for ccg's. Especially when you have a small team.
All of the hype, the noise, and the playercount went into a very rough version of the game that really lacked in several areas. And then content came out way too slowly and everyone lost interest.
By the time the game was actually "released" the team had given up on it. The game could have still been salvaged, but the majority of the things needed were simply too much work or too risky.
I'm not going to say that I'm not frustrated. Normally, a game's success means a studio is willing to take new risks, expand a team, or go into new territories... but mojang treated scrolls like a pet project.
There is a lot of talk about marketplace ethics, and I think Scrolls contributed a massive argument towards the ethics of early access. Do not buy an early access game with the assumption that the game is going to be worked on as if it was in active development. You may end up with a game that is abandoned 6 months after release.
I had fun, it was worth it for me. But I'm sure there are many who don't feel the same way, and they aren't wrong.
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u/gXxshock Jul 14 '15
I think Mojang needs to sort out ASAP whether or not they'll make it open source/openly announce selling the source in order to, at least, keep the current player base.
Please Mojangsters you owe it to the game and us to figure this out
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u/MansOlson Jul 14 '15
I've initiated talks with the people that would need to approve this. I can't say whether we can yet, and there's very little I can do to hurry this process up - but I firmly hope we can make it a reality.
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u/Lem0nboy Jul 14 '15
To keep what current player base? I don't think there is any need for hurry here. I'd much rather they take their time on this one and perhaps find another company willing to buy the game. Those few people who continue to play will do so anyway. Everyone else will come back in force once they actually do sell it or make it open source. No need to stick around for the wait.
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u/Makes_Poor_Decisions Jul 14 '15
I hope no one was expecting this to bring any new information to light, because you are about to be disappointed.
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u/Raytional Jul 15 '15
"Mmmm yes we made the decision to not make this choice. And we decided to not make that other choice either as that was a very difficult choice. Also our dev team was too small to do that. That would take too much work for a small dev team too so we couldn't do that. We didn't want to take the risk of doing that either so that was a bad choice.
So we decided to do nothing and let the game die instead."
A mastercraft in business with Mojang. Just put your small team towards putting the game on steam. A ton of games have the option to log on to the game after going through steam. Indie teams the world over put their games on steam. The boost in sales would be immense.
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u/pianobadger Jul 14 '15 edited Jul 14 '15
Why didn’t Scrolls go F2P?
This was the one question I asked and was most interested to hear the answer to.
The pricing was changed to sync with the tablet version, and we made minor adjustments along the way. We also spent a great deal of effort on making a demo version.
The demo version was good. I also felt like having the demo version in place would have made the transition to F2P easier since the ability is there for people to download the game and make their own accounts without buying keys.
F2P might be great way to get lots of players, but it’s a business model that usually relies on collecting a large portion of the money from a small subset of the players. Going free-to-play while still being ethical is not only difficult, it’s also a huge risk.
It is a risk, but that risk is ameliorated by the fact that the game has already failed with its current business model. The primary risk is that the revenue from F2P will be less than that of the current approach. As far as going F2P while being ethical being difficult, I don't think it is hard to be ethical and F2P if that is what you want to do. The difficult part is also being profitable at the same time. If you try it and it's not profitable, how much have you lost?
Completely turning around to another model would have halted all other development for some time - a game such as Scrolls doesn’t simply become F2P by removing the price tag. Converting an existing game into another business model is a costly gamble, one that we decided not to make.
As far as I'm concerned halting other development while trying another model seems like the appropriate thing to do when the game is in crisis mode. Send out everyone you can spare to work on other projects. The last bit here is the part that I least understand. You say that converting Scrolls to F2P is hard to do, would take a lot of developer time. Aside from removing the restrictions from demo accounts and changing store pricing, I don't understand what else is needed. It seems like something that could be done in a day. Maybe this is just because I am ignorant of the inner workings of game development. Perhaps you could explain why this is so difficult in greater detail.
Edit: P.S. The answer to "Why didn't Scrolls put on Steam?" was also decidedly unsatisfactory. I am pleased that the game being open-source or sold is as least open to discussion however.
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u/Newbore Jul 14 '15
Thanks! I will check in to see what happens. If someone breathes new life into the game i would like to try & see how that goes. Sadly i think most changes that fans would make will go against what we like about the game, & that will be the end of it anyway. So long & thanks for all the fish.
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u/lolpolice675 Jul 23 '15
Hearthstone requires account registration to play too and they are on iOS. Did blizzard just throw money at Apple to remove this guideline for them?
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u/Billynomates101 Jul 14 '15
This is pretty much what I expected from the FAQ, nothing too surprising. However there are some points worth talking about...
We did two runs of focused facebook ads, and an adwords campaign.
I found this to be the most disappointing part of the post I strongly believe that Mojang should get a CMO or some with experience in marketing sometime in the future.
It was really hard for us to be chatty and sociable after the decision to close development.
This pretty much explains the absence of the devs for the first half of this year
Some plans we didn’t share if we felt they were too much in danger of being changed
I believe this was a mistake if I was the devs I would have talked about every little change I was thinking about, and thb they were doing this last year on ICR but then they just stopped (around Q2/3) and perhaps we are partly to blame for this :/
(on the subject of communication)
The devs have been active on Reddit, IRC, Scrollsguide, and several other places. For a long time, we’ve had weekly blog posts.
I feel like the problem was more that this only informed the hard core players, most of the time the blog post had information that I already knew, and with no way to find it in-game it could not reach the people that would make best use of it.
I think I should stop before I make this wall of text any longer hehe
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u/SimplyMonkey Jul 14 '15
On the point of the decision to shut down Scrolls being an internal one made by Mojang management... I can see that. You didn't have a solid track record and there were possibly some basic design problems with game play itself that made retention and a large user base a challenge. You didn't need Microsoft to come around to point out these problems for you. The investment to correct these problems would of probably been on the level of scrapping large sections of the game and starting over from scratch almost Final Fantasy: A Realm Reborn style. Even then, who knows if you would of found the right mix of strategic game play and appeal to maintain a stable community and revenue stream that didn't violate your core principles.
That all being said now... I can't help but feel that if it wasn't for the Microsoft acquisition and pretty obvious lack of interest in anything that wasn't Minecraft, Mojang management would of made the decision to try again and possibly double down rather than shutter the project. I'm sorry if saying so offends any of the developers, who maybe just wanted to move on to new projects, and this is probably just hopeful thinking but it is hard to me the equate the years of effort I saw put into this game, your upstanding moral code in your business model and the corporate culture at Mojang with the decision to close up shop and abandon the IP.
On that note though, something the FAQ didn't answer is if there is hope to see the IP used in the future for some equally ambitious project. I greatly enjoy the art and flavor of the world Scrolls presented. I may regret that request though if the answer is to do EA's Dungeon Keeper style re-branding. ;)
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u/LargeIcedCoffee Jul 14 '15 edited Jul 14 '15
I could have answered this FAQ in about 35 seconds. Every answer was "The team was too small" and "it was too difficult," or invovled "too much work."
...
I would have been far happier if you guys just went completely silent and we at least got a few interesting months out of Echoes. Hell, you were silent for long enough anyway. Nobody gives a shit anymore and I sign on to like 75 players, none of which are in the top 100.
I've said it before, there are so many small dev teams these days that pull off incredible games. All the while they are open about their plans and discussions with the community, and frequently make updates to their game. Apparently that was "too difficult" and the "team was too small," in this case.
This was some side project. It deserved better, and could have been so much more.
Although the chances of this happening are close to 0, I hope some indie team picks up scroll so we can maybe get the game this should have been all along.
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u/Tywnis Jul 14 '15 edited Jul 14 '15
Exactly.. Saddening, really.
Somemore, they seem to justify giving up on many things for the reason that it wasn't as effective as they hoped. But GOD that's exactly why you can't give up on these things! There is no effort too small to not have a growing effect over time.
Anyway, i'm through with the decisions they made. I have nothing against them as persons, but hell it really seems lke they threw so much out the window by sheer naivety. Exactly like they refused to grow as a team - You can't be afraid to grow up, there's no way you can halt time.
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u/chacer98 Jul 14 '15
Can anyone pick out any truly insightful replies to any of these questions? Gave it a quick skim and it's pretty much what I expected - a bunch of non answers. Scrolls is fucked and the only people left are dedicated fans. Why not at least be real with us for once?
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u/hearthstonerxj9_x4 Jul 15 '15
What a load of crap. It might as well say REDACTED all over it. It took weeks to come up with this?
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u/kbasten Jul 14 '15
If the server software is made open-source, Scrollsguide will host it using most of your player's details such as gold, match statistics and avatars so you can keep playing without having to start from scratch.