Tom's Recent Forum Activity

    • Post link icon

    Can I just mention that Scirra has never offered an indie humble bundle deal?

    We were offered inclusion into a Humble Bundle but turned it down for a variety of reasons which we thought quite long and hard about.

    • Often in our opinion is a market signal for product end of life
    • We'd get a tiny amount of money from each sale (even big sales numbers transpire to fairly mediocre final amounts for a business employing several people)
    • It opens up secondary markets which threatens your revenue streams indefinitely (eg resellers)
    • Construct 2 sales were and continue to be strong - strong market value

    For us, not a good business decision because we're still confident in the value of Construct 2 going forwards. This is evidence based as sales from Construct 2 have shown no signs of slowing down even since the Construct 3 announcement.

    Also scirra has an upfront fee if you want to sell items on the scirra store

    Again, a business decision for a couple of reasons:

    • Having a credit card fee to open a seller account gives traceable accountability when someone breaks the law and tries to sell illegal goods
    • It serves as a good barrier of entry preventing lower quality goods

    The revenue from the sellers fee is not simply just to get more money.

  • Sorry Kiwi's Adventure was made specifically for Construct 3 and is not licensed for use in Construct 2.

  • Try Construct 3

    Develop games in your browser. Powerful, performant & highly capable.

    Try Now Construct 3 users don't see these ads
    • Post link icon

    We have a steady flow of new customers every day. As you've identified, the difficult part will be one day switching over that traffic into buying Construct 3 instead of Construct 2. As long as it happens reasonably smoothly and at similar levels then we won't have any problems.

    RE subscription companies losing money that's mainly if you're aggressively look to acquire customers, EG spending $150 to acquire a customer you know on average will subscribe for 3x years at $100 p/y. You'll not see a return on that customer until their 2nd years payment. Without investment or reserves, you'll have big cashflow problems. This is an option to explore perhaps in the future, and if we do we're well funded enough to do it if we wanted.

    Launching a new product is always a high risk pursuit for a company (don't underestimate this). Switching to a new payment model also adds more volatility but we're not worried as we're confident in our direction, well funded enough to not have to worry financially and highly confident in the product itself which is the main thing!

    • Post link icon

    It was worth trying to convince you how you may hit more customers by letting us continue to work on our projects (at least!) on the standalone version, even when the license has ran out.

    Emphasis on "may". It may work out, it may not. We'll find out soon enough.

    • Post link icon

    tunepunk

    Old versions are served from a unique URL so they can be run independently of each other.

    • Post link icon

    > I don't understand why Tom keeps inviting all this dialog when Ashley is just going to shut him down. I grow tired of the mixed messages. It doesn't give me a lot of confidence.

    >

    Eh? What mixed messages? Please be specific and quote me and Ashley where we contradicted each other.

    • Post link icon

    Right so your assumption is subscription = no impulse buyers. Or re-reading your posts, are you saying monthly option = impulse buyers but yearly = no impulse buyers? I really don't follow.

    RE impulse buyers and C3, we just wont know until we try. Also not sure why this is a concern when this is a business concern and not something that would directly affect anyone else.

    • Post link icon

    >

    > We were surprised when we looked at our data at how many impulse purchases we see for Construct 2 (people who seem to buy and only use for a short period of time).

    >

    No, the real way to finish that sentence is: ...and we'd love to find an infailable method of stamping out this suprisingly large proportion of our customers; subscription was the answer.

    What do you mean? I don't understand.

    • Post link icon

    I'm even more concerned now, based on your response- because I now feel like Scirra is focusing on other things outside the scope of developing a game making tool. It makes me feel less confident in where you are heading.

    We have 3 full time engineers working on C3. Don't be concerned there is no work going into the tool itself.

    • Post link icon

    Are you saying the stand alone version will use and be reliant on the current Chrome version rather than be a self contained package?

    No sorry, I mispoke. It could be in a self contained package.

    [quote:2tkjawlq]That's one of the reasons I was advocating the option to suspend your subscription, so you could put your subscription on hold for several months if you know you're not going to use it, with this option limited to a few times per subscription so it's not abused.

    That is an interesting idea I will raise with everyone when we next discuss options.

    • Post link icon

    But you said these are to help with retention- how does all this help with retention? How do these make people feel more inclined to subscribe?

    Retention is for currently subscribed people. Not sure why you don't get why all those things wouldn't help with retention.

    The other languages might introduce it to more people, but that doesn't address retention.

    Yes it would, people native in other languages with be better supported and engaged.

    I don't think a lack of game jams is a reason why people stopped using C2. In fact, when there were any, there was a lot of criticism the community had over it.

    Why are you taking each thing I said as an absolute? It's all part of a bigger picture.

    People may have loved the 3 games you included, but how does that help retention?

    New games/assets being given for free would help with retention. If you don't see that, then it's probably simply because it's not what you're interested in.

    If you ask a person whether they want custom assets for their game that fit specifically for their use or a copy of assets everyone else is using, people will choose the custom ones because they suit their game more closely.

    Good observation I guess, not sure how it's at all relevant. We obviously can't create custom assets for everyone. Or am I misunderstanding your point?

    Let me ask you a a question now, how would you improve retention of users?

    • Post link icon

    [quote:1pr8ghu8]Better learning resources would be what? Their are already plenty of people providing tutorials as well as responding to questions users have. What would you consider a better resource than this?

    Better tutorial/manual systems, better language capabilities. More official tutorials. etc.

    [quote:1pr8ghu8]Better community engagement? There is already a very active community of users- how do you plan to force people to engage more than they already are- seems like you'd have to somehow give them more time to do it, or make it easier

    You misunderstand me, I mean we engage better. One example would might be a regular schedule of game jams and competitions. Ashley's already making progress in better engagement with a proper suggestions platform as another example.

    [quote:1pr8ghu8]Free asset packs and game templates.. Users already make these, so I don't see how this improves anything for C3.

    People love the 3 games we've included with Construct 3 so far (there's another on the way).

    [quote:1pr8ghu8]but users would rather pay someone to make exactly what they need personally instead of have to rely on assets that are general and for use by anyone

    Sounds like that's what you want, not what users generally want.

    Note I used the word "better". We can always improve in all these areas. I don't really understand what you don't get about that?

Tom's avatar

Tom

Early Adopter

Member since 10 Jun, 2007

Twitter
Tom has 1,538,241 followers

Connect with Tom

construct.net

Trophy Case

  • Entrepreneur Sold something in the asset store
  • Jupiter Mission Supports Gordon's mission to Jupiter
  • Forum Contributor Made 100 posts in the forums
  • Forum Patron Made 500 posts in the forums
  • Forum Hero Made 1,000 posts in the forums
  • x6
    Popular Game One of your games has over 1,000 players
  • x5
    Famous Game One of your games has over 10,000 players
  • Viral Game One of your games has over 100,000 players
  • x44
    Coach One of your tutorials has over 1,000 readers
  • x5
    Educator One of your tutorials has over 10,000 readers
  • Regular Visitor Visited Construct.net 7 days in a row
  • Steady Visitor Visited Construct.net 30 days in a row
  • Enduring Visitor Visited Construct.net 90 days in a row
  • Unrelenting Visitor Visited Construct.net 180 days in a row
  • Continuous Visitor Visited Construct.net 365 days in a row
  • RTFM Read the fabulous manual
  • x14
    Quick Draw First 5 people to up-vote a new Construct 3 release
  • x4
    Lightning Draw First person to up-vote a new Construct 3 release
  • x6
    Great Comment One of your comments gets 3 upvotes
  • x4
    Delicious Comment One of your comments gets 10 upvotes
  • Email Verified

Progress

37/44
How to earn trophies

Blogs