Tom's Recent Forum Activity

    > 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.

    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.

    >

    > 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.

    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.

    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.

    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?

    [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?

    Previously with Construct 2, these users didn't really have any impact on what we do. They are happy to pay us, use it for a brief while then move on for whatever reason (we think it was mainly impulse purchasing - I've bought AAA games on Steam before that I've barely played, guessing it's the same sort of behaviour).

    With Construct 3, we're wanting to keep and engage users more, we're obviously incentivised to do so.

    The shift from Construct 2 to Construct 3 will force us to invest more in retention rather than purely attracting new customers. This can come in lots of forms, better learning resources, better community engagement, free asset packs/game templates etc etc. I know I would say this, but even if you're cynical about the whole subscription thing that has to be a positive for customers.

    The fact is we feel the market is fairly saturated, and we're relying on a steady flow of new customers. Nothing wrong with this, but we have bigger plans. We feel adjusting our revenue model is our best shot at achieving those plans.

    Currently due to new hires, expenditures etc we're running marginally profitable/break even. This is fine as we're on the cusp of a new product launch (a lot of companies lose money in this period!) but we've pretty much hit the ceiling of how far we can grow the Scirra team with our current revenue levels.

    [quote:38mi2na3] I don't think these users will be entirely trusting to dish out $100 for the first year without first testing it adequately, and from my impression the free version is very limited

    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).

    [quote:2otb9n5v]As with C2, if someone complains about a bug in an old version, they are told they need to update first, which in this case would mean re-subscribing - which to me is fair enough, as one of the benefits of subscription is updates and bug fixes.

    If a breaking change is implemented by Chrome, the old version could be rendered completely useless. So what's the point? I can imagine the uproar from that, bad publicity and a bad taste left in everyone's mouth.

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    We can't do that with the online version of C3, since Scirra want to maintain a single version which is fair enough, hence my proposal to allow edit access with the standalone version.

    This severely complicates support. If someone on a 6 month old version complains about a bug - what do we do? Or, Chrome introduce a breaking change. We have to go back and update every single version. This quickly becomes a maintenance nightmare. We prefer to just have everyone on the latest and greatest version.

    We hear you loud and clear RE monthly option. Right now as someone else guessed we're too close to change anything. We've had discussions in the office which we're all quite positive about where once you've paid for your first year you can then pay monthly.

    Again, this is only internal discussions at the moment, and there's no rush to implement this as we've got a lot of other things to be getting on with and if we did implement it it would take a year before anyone could take advantage of it anyway.

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Tom

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