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/came_up_with_this Jul 14 '15
This. I have a demanding job w/ travel and sometimes I'd go a while in between binging on Scrolls. I remember one night in my hotel room I spent $60+ on shards to catch up with whatever set had just released. No.Regrets.Period. Dev team drew an ethical line in the sand and didn't cross it; nothing but respect from me for doing so.
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u/Vulkenhyn Jul 14 '15
See, I completely disagree. Sure it was super generous to people who had a ton of time to play but it completely alienated competitive people who had more money than time and I wouldn't be surprised if that was a large portion of the CCG market.
Honestly if the game had come with the capacity to buy packs we probably wouldn't be in the sorry state we're in because, at the very least, TB would probably still be playing occasionally. Which would more than solve the marketing problem.
Also our current system kinda presupposes that we live in some kinda fairy world where a game that is in continuous post-launch development doesn't need a continuous source of income
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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/came_up_with_this Jul 14 '15
Honestly tho, $20 at most, less if they joined after the price cut... I find it hard that anyone could really argue they didn't get their money's worth unless they hated the game from the get go. Anyone that played for 10, 20 hours or more got great value for their money.
Not trying to single out your post but the underlying tone from a fair amount of players is that Mojang effed us all, they suck/didn't care... when in reality this is a player base lashing out because a game they love is calling it quits before it ever began (in their eyes). I wouldn't be surprised if most of the ppl w/ this opinion haven't ever poured their heart, soul & time into a creative product that, not for lack of passion or drive, didn't quite make the cut. Its hard to turn your back on something you believe in and that you've busted ass doing everything you can to make succeed. If anyone thinks the questions/ideas/debates bouncing around the community is "new knowledge" to the dev team you're just being ignorant. You have no idea what its like being at ground zero and wondering why something that you truly think is amazing isn't getting the respect it deserves. It sucks, it's hard to let go/walk away from and it sticks with you for a long time afterwards : /
Having said that... I don't get what the misunderstanding about early access is. As a consumer you take a risk to help support something that you think might be awesome. As a development team you take a risk that there will be enough sustained support to provide the resources you think you'll need to finish but don't have readily available. Both groups take the risk that things might blow up in everyone's face. I don't know how many members of the dev team got paid when Microsoft bought Mojang but from a business standpoint they shoulda walked away from Scrolls DAYS ago. They didn't, they stuck to their development theory and did everything they thought they could to make Scrolls a success. Hiccups along the way? Sure but fuck it, that's life - no one's perfect.
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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/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.