Honestly, I've been pretty vocal about both my love for BYOND, and my dissatisfaction with it over the last 12 years.

I can't help but agree with what Tom has to say, that the business model has largely been a failure.

When I got here, I was probably one of the youngest people using the engine and trying to program. I grew with the engine, but the community didn't. Back when I got here in 2001, I found a community of really amazing, eccentric developers:

Gughunter
Lexy
Foomer
Kunark
Zilal
LummoxJR
AbyssDragon
Deadron

Unfortunately, the big names of 2001 began to fade out around 2005, right as BYOND 4.0 was prepping to drop.

The community became a nexus of teenage angst, of willful copyright violation, and of e-thug shenannigans.

Now, BYOND is known for its drama-causers, and problem children around the net. We aren't represented by people like Gughunter, Deadron, and Lummox anymore. When people see what BYOND does, and what it's capable of, they see names like Wizzkidd, Developous, and the silly flamewars between MasterDan and Silk back in the day. (Silk's games have largely been the only successful projects on BYOND, along with Aaiko and a few others)

Largely, the failure of BYOND's business model is that it needed people with the vision and ability of the gurus of 2001, not those of 2005-2013.

What's killing this platform isn't the engine itself. It's the community.

That said, I cannot any more emphatically disagree with Kumorii's statements about guilds and blogs. It's not a coincidence that the launch of the blogs and guilds where the beginning of the fastest downhill slide for BYOND since the site went live. Just trimming the rips out was most major "gurus" of 2005 were all for, but it was too little, too late, because the audience that BYOND catered to after the rips became a majority was embedding itself like a tumor in our community. Serious development became next to impossible due to the audience BYOND provided for the developer, and because of that, most good developers leave quickly. If we don't have quality games because the community spurns them, we don't get quality players. If we don't have quality players, we don't keep good developers. It's that simple.

We have to break the cycle, and the only way that we can do that, is find a new niche to attack, and try to slowly starve out the negative elements in the community by complying overly with takedown notices and cease and desist notices. We can't eject the fangamers all at once, or BYOND dies. We can't remove them too slow, or we don't see growth.

Can you imagine how insulting it's gotta be for Tom to have to keep coming down here and answer to this cesspool of a community for his supposed failures, when the reason his model failed, is because he overestimated the people on this portal? Even if he did think this, he couldn't just up and say it. He'd have to choke back his indignation and slap a cool face on it, in order to avoid alienating the very people that ARE paying what little goes toward keeping the lights on.

So think about that before you try to have Tom and Lummox massage your sense of self-entitlement.

Magicsofa wrote:

I think Tom has done more than enough, as he will continue to with the flash client. The real solution to these issues is to make good quality games - good enough to be advertised on other websites.

I agree wholeheartedly. BYOND games don't work all that well for standalone windows titles. Though, the engine is a LOT more powerful than most of the people on this site actually know. (Look at D4RK3's work recently).

Honestly, I think a more successful business model is going to be to stop trying to provide our own userbase, and get as many individual players away from the website as possible, but make developers able to find their way in.

BYOND's focus needs to be "Make", and not "Make and Play". In addition, the big direction, I'm thinking, is probably going to be in additional portability. If we could get a single-player standalone system set up for Android/IOS devices using Java, I'm pretty sure we could get some *real* development going.

It wouldn't be a bad business model either, because there just aren't decent free/low-cost point-click&code game developemnt suites out there for mobile devices, and BYOND's niche of retro pixel games is really well suited for the medium as well as for flash portals.

I know this is old, but there are so many rips listed nowadays on this website, it is not even funny. Seriously we have at least 5 Naruto games, that are almost all exactly the same. There is a Naruto GOA rip, there is various games that are almost exact duplicates of each other listed. There is one admin/moderator listing most of these, mainly because it is usually his friends game, and he lists the games for them. I'm not trying to start any drama, by saying his name, but Tom or any one of the admins, should know who this guy is.

There are various clones of each other, on this website. I am not fond, of the idea to get all fan games off this website. Though, getting rid of the clones will defiantly help this site's reputation.

Yes I've seen that, Final Resurrection, a game that has been ignored for years, has finally got decent recognition today, and the server almost crashed from the influx of players, just because it was on the front page.