*AHEM*

“drive their herds to their farms”

And that’s what keeps people going back to Aurora or Novus, hell, WoW is built on it, so’s every Final Fantasy game, many games are and all sell well. If you dole out little treats (especially for repetitive behaviour) every so often, they’ll keep playing. Or in the case if animals and treats, keep doing what their told.

Veemee took a risk, they asked the gamer to take interest with no incentive, and they charged while doing so. By doing this they’ll no doubt get a sturdy stable of gamers who enjoy NML, but they’ll always be watching nDreams and Lockwood drive their beards to their farms.

How many people run around the Lockwood Showcase mindlessly for hours stomping eggs? The activity is hopelessly repetitive and gives me a headache after about 10 minutes. I gave up that one quickly. From what I’ve seen, the rewards aren’t even that great. But they’re free and people want them.

How much effort and expense would it have taken for Veemee to create some sort of rewards system for NML upon its release? You personally may not feel that rewards are an essential element of the game. Veemee, however, is trying to sell this game to the Home community at a premium price. Major blunder on their part.

I do agree with you that a Home game needs to do more than just try to compete with disc-based titles, because that’s a losing proposition; the more money is sunk into a game, the higher the buy-in has to be (either all at once or over time) to generate sufficient ROIC. Hence why I suspect there’s less resistance to cheap, limited-use commodities (Midway, Casino), because the consumer rarely bothers to add up what they’ve cumulatively spent. Cutthroats could have been a smash hit with this formula, as it’s a game that actually plays to Home’s strengths, but the pricing structure was egregiously high. Should that change, I suspect the game would be more successful at long-term user retention.

Rewards, it seems, are the easiest method of stretching out a game’s longevity in Home. The reward itself rarely seems to be worth it — with the exception of truly fantastic rewards such as the Aurora Champion’s Apartment, or rewards which take considerable skill such as the Midway jackets — but it’s an excuse to keep playing. And if it takes so little to motivate the Home audience, then it is a trend that will continue.

I’d say Home can definitely support shooter games; SodiumOne, which is generally considered to be one of Home’s most successful games, is a third-person shooter — it just uses mechs instead of people. Even if we limit the argument to multiplayer PvP games, the multiplayer version of MiniBots Battlebox is almost certainly going to be a hit, and that’s a third-person shooter, just like No Man’s Land.

Granted, not every shooter game in Home works. Bootleggers ’29 is a ghost town, for instance. And I will be fascinated to see what VEEMEE has up its sleeve to drive traffic to No Man’s Land long-term.

The key with a Home shooter game is that it has to offer something which can’t be found in disc-based AAA-games. No Man’s Land faces a major challenge here, because it’s going for realism over whimsy, and that’s where your point about the limitations of Home start to come into play. Although the cover-based mechanics of the game are ironically more realistic than most shooter games, it’s a matter of what the gaming audience is used to experiencing. By making a game whimsical or unrealistic in some fashion, it deviates from that template and ironically makes the audience more receptive to a new experience.

No Man’s Land raises an interesting question: whether or not Home games are more about the game itself, or the meta-game of achieving something and being rewarded with various tchotchke for the effort. I freely admit I’m hooked on this game — it’s chess with guns, and it’s got a surprising amount of depth to its strategy — but I wonder if “fixing” the unbalanced nature of the game would even be sufficient for the Home audience.

That said, I’d love to read a review and business analysis of the game. If you’re up for writing a spec submission, McJorneil, we’d be interested to read it.

So for people who enjoy the game and want to keep playing, they can purchase various scrolls that restore their stamina and grant other gameplay enhancements. They also sell power weapons, armor, and other things that give you unique abilities and advantages while playing. Most recently they added ingame currency that can be used to buy clothing rewards for your avatar and ingame weapons like a bazooka and sword (originally sold in the store for yen). My friends and I play it often, so if you need more details you can PSN message me (McJorneil is my screen name).

I would like it if we chose a faction and fought against opposing factions for control over “zones”. And my mind just went off on a “what if” tangent that would make No Man’s Land an entirely different game so I won’t share. lol

The more significant point is that Home games are different from standalone games in one massive way. Home is not based on the games themselves. In my opinion, more Home users are concerned with collecting stuff. Be it personal spaces, clothing, free rewards or winnable trophies from freemiun games…Homies like to have stuff and show off their stuff. Ornaments for apartments or avatar items are the symbols of success in Home. Leaderboards may work fine to showcase one’s abilities in many games but they’re not the priority in Home. That’s why the average Home user would shell out hundreds of dollars for personal spaces and clothing but not $10 for No Man’s Land. Many people on Home will play games that they do not like because they want the rewards. Most people will not trudge through a game to earn a space on the leaderboard unless they actually like playing the game. How many people play a Home game until winning the top prize, never to play it again? Do you think I’ve ever considered playing Orb Runner again since I earned the Champion Apartment? Not a chance.

Clear objectives or missions in No Man’s Land could possibly make the reward issue a moot point. Alas, Veemee missed the boat on that one too.

Regarding the comment that “no Home game is worth $50″, I would tend to agree with that opinion. In fact, I’ve probably said it myself at one time or another. It’s not that I believe a Home game can’t be worth $50. I’ve just yet to see one that is. I played Salt Shooter and Project Velocity endlessly for months with upgrades and boosters galore. I know that I never spent $50 combined. Maybe a Home game will be worthy of such a price tag one day but not yet. I still think that a Home game is more likely to peel $50 off of users in microtransactions than an up-front cost. That’s just the way that Home users are conditioned to spend their money.

At least you would if the central concept of the game wasn’t flawed. As I’ve noted previously, gamers need a goal, and blasting away at random strangers in pursuit of a spot on the leaderboard simply doesn’t have enough cache to generate mass appeal. We want trophies. We want rewards. Without those things, you’re left with a considerable investment of time to learn the mechanics of a complex game and nothing to show for your achievement.

There’s a very simple truism in online marketing: The competition is just a click away. The same is true for Home. If the player doesn’t like a particular game, there’s another one waiting on the Navigator, and if nothing in Home looks appealing, there’s a pile of disc-based games sitting next to the console, and hundreds of games to buy in the PS Store.

This puts Home games in a difficult position. Either the gameplay needs to be so incredibly good that someone genuinely wants to play, or there has to be some point to investing the time. Novus Prime and the Sodium games hit it on the fun factor. Granzella’s fossil hunting, which is barely a game, succeeds because it delivers so many rewards, with the ultimate goal of completing a museum.

Where No Man’s Land breaks the mold, more than in its lack of free items, is in its complexity. This is a game that is far more complicated than a quick taste will reveal, and the full range of the experience can only be achieved through purchases. If you’re going to separate a large number of players from their cash, you need to give the free player some sense of progress without the add-ons, or dazzle them with some hard-to-achieve reward that is highly coveted. These are the formulas that work, not just to sell product but to provide the level of engagement needed to make a complex freemium game a long-term success.

Freemium is a model that could easily rewrite the fortunes of game companies, if they did it correctly. Imagine a free-to-play Pokemon game with 100 unlockable characters. You get one for free when you start, but it costs $1 to own every Pokemon that you capture. The whales who want to own every character now have to pay $99 to complete the game, while more casual players might invest $20 to build a full stable of fighters. What was a retail item with a price tag of $40 now has a potentially higher per-customer margin, and in-game store distribution eliminates the resale market. (Seriously, Nintendo, drop the Miiverse and start building this now.)

The biggest benefit of freemium is that it lets players try before they buy, which overcomes the reluctance to shell out $60 for a title that may or may not suck in epic ways. With some design thought, the monetization opportunities can be structured to build engagement and the desire to buy more.

But dying every few seconds is not enjoyable; we also need to experience the pleasure of success. Even if that success is gained against an AI opponent. A more complex tutorial, which would function as a full single-player version of the game, would give us that. And, as you stated, a more advanced tutorial would let us test-drive the premium gear — win in several dimensions.

I would suggest making the a full single-player version of “No Man’s Land” available for a one-time fee — which is then deducted from the cost of any premium weapons you buy for the multi-player game. A paid test-drive, in other words, which pays for itself if you continue. I think that would work.