ID:1737115
 
So I am not sure if this should be posted here or in feature requests but feature requests are usually dealing with game engine features so I am posting this here. And I am especially sorry if there is something like this already and I have missed it. So my idea comes from the stigma that it is hard to make a popular byond game because being multilayer games you have to meet a critical mass of users for it to be any good. So it seems that only the popular games are the ones that get noticed and just become more popular. Now I know most people will say if you make a great game then it will speak for itself and become known but I know there are some hidden gems out there that are never given a chance because most people just go to the game listings and just click on "popular" games. So my proposal would be that instead of just popular, active, and newest categories that we could add like a games of the week section where just a few random games are highlighted for the week. Or have like a promotional section for randomly promoting games made by members so not only are you promoting games but you are promoting byond membership. Or you could always just have a section were people could pay money to have their game listed for a month or so, I mean I know if I poured that much time into making a game that I wouldn't mind paying a few bucks to at least get my game noticed. Hope this post hasn't offended the "popular" games or anything and sorry again if this has already been proposed before just thought it could not only help existing byond games/members but also promote growth. Thanks.
This would have been an interesting addition to the website but sadly the website is going to completely change and they are going to remove the ''Games'' section to encourage people to advertise their BYOND game outside.

It's been awhile since I've been on BYOND so I have no idea what happened since than and when they are planning to start the changes.
Oh wow I had no idea they are doing that. To me that seems like an insanely stupid idea. I mean yeah I understand for byond to grow the good games do need to be advertising outside of byond but getting rid of the "Games" section would be like Google getting rid of the Play Store and telling their developers "Hey you can still develop for android but good luck getting people to find your app/game." Doesn't make much sense. Like take Clash of Clans for instance, yeah everyone knows about that game because of their tv ads and what not but they would have never got to that point without having been promoted within a community(Play Store and App Store).
BYOND is in desperate need of money. Long story short, they do not make enough revenue to keep the business alive.

They tried many things: Donation bar, Ads, Exporting games to HTML5 and no success.

I guess their last hope would be to force people to advertise their games outside of BYOND so more people hear about it and give it a shot to develop games. (Which anyways is the main goal of BYOND...It was never meant to be a social network)

But yeah, I've been off BYOND for a long time now and I'm not really up to date with what happened and their current plans etc...
They're shutting everything done soon from my understanding. BYOND will be a suite of programs you can use for making games but you'll have to post your creations on your own websites.
In response to Kidpaddle45
Kidpaddle45 wrote:
BYOND is in desperate need of money. Long story short, they do not make enough revenue to keep the business alive.

They tried many things: Donation bar, Ads, Exporting games to HTML5 and no success.

I guess their last hope would be to force people to advertise their games outside of BYOND so more people hear about it and give it a shot to develop games. (Which anyways is the main goal of BYOND...It was never meant to be a social network)

#Learn_to_indiedb

In response to Maxsteel13
Maxsteel13 wrote:
Kidpaddle45 wrote:
BYOND is in desperate need of money. Long story short, they do not make enough revenue to keep the business alive.

They tried many things: Donation bar, Ads, Exporting games to HTML5 and no success.

I guess their last hope would be to force people to advertise their games outside of BYOND so more people hear about it and give it a shot to develop games. (Which anyways is the main goal of BYOND...It was never meant to be a social network)

#Learn_to_indiedb

#Learn_web_development_and_programming.
In response to Lavitiz
Lavitiz wrote:
Maxsteel13 wrote:
Kidpaddle45 wrote:
BYOND is in desperate need of money. Long story short, they do not make enough revenue to keep the business alive.

They tried many things: Donation bar, Ads, Exporting games to HTML5 and no success.

I guess their last hope would be to force people to advertise their games outside of BYOND so more people hear about it and give it a shot to develop games. (Which anyways is the main goal of BYOND...It was never meant to be a social network)

#Learn_to_indiedb

#Learn_web_development_and_programming.

What is your point?
In response to Maxsteel13
You shouldn't rely on just one avenue to advertise your game (such as a BYOND hub, or an IndieDB page). Unfortunately, almost every single developer here fails to understand this.
In response to LordAndrew
LordAndrew wrote:
You shouldn't rely on just one avenue to advertise your game (such as a BYOND hub, or an IndieDB page). Unfortunately, almost every single developer here fails to understand this.

Well said.
The comparison to the Google Play store is unfortunately a little ... misleading, here. The Play store has the benefit of a captive audience of close to 1 billion users through Android, being the primary means of getting an Android application.

BYOND has a captive audience of what ... 5,000, 10,000? And it's not the primary means of getting games onto your Windows PC, it's one of many choices / mechanisms, some of which have considerably bigger markets, are better known and have superior selections of games to their users.

Listing and distribution mechanisms tend to need either a critical mass of content and users (like Steam, GOG) or a captive audience / segment dominance (like Apple's App Store, Google Play). BYOND doesn't presently have either of those, which makes it very difficult for BYOND as a business to monetize it's listings and make that self-sustaining.
In response to Maxsteel13
Maxsteel13 wrote:
Kidpaddle45 wrote:
BYOND is in desperate need of money. Long story short, they do not make enough revenue to keep the business alive.

They tried many things: Donation bar, Ads, Exporting games to HTML5 and no success.

I guess their last hope would be to force people to advertise their games outside of BYOND so more people hear about it and give it a shot to develop games. (Which anyways is the main goal of BYOND...It was never meant to be a social network)

#Learn_to_indiedb


I have no idea what you meant by that. I've already used indieDB to advertise some of my games and building up a solid community to test out my upcoming games.

The issue here is not about what BYOND is doing wrong but what us, the DEVELOPPERS, do wrong. It's not about our advertisement either. It's about our ways of developping games. BYOND is somehow limited in certain ways compared to other engines. Most programmers use this as an excuse to stop the development of their over-ambitious games but we all know the real reason behind it is lazyness.

BYOND never moved for the past 4-5 years. In a community composed of around 10 000 members, how many GOOD/POPULAR games have been released in the past years? I can count them on my fingers.

AND THIS, is not normal. I guess BYOND was unlucky to see all of it's great developpers such as Forum_account (He's the only one that comes to my mind at the moment but there are many more) never develop games and focus more on helping a community which sadly, was never up to the task so far.

Now this, is more of a personal opinion, but I also believe BYOND developpers have a very strange way of developping games. Some of us use terms such as "iconer", "coders", "hosters","idealist" on other advertising platform. This may seem like no big deal but to pro/good developpers, this simply says: "Hey, I'm an amateur, looking for someone to create my game." On another side, we set limits to our games which should never exist.When developpers find out that too many players reached the max level or the games gets unbalanced, they "wipe" the game. Why in the world do we have to play games for hours if it is to find your character wiped in the end because it got too strong or everyone else is too strong resulting in one hit killing.

BYOND has no problems. We, the developpers need to leave our little bubble and learn from other games outside of BYOND.
Yeah Stephen I definitely see what you are saying and if them shutting down the hub/website is just so they can save money then thats understandable but if they are shutting it down so as to make people do their own advertising thats not going to work. The reason I personally have always liked byond is because of the social experience that no other game engine offers but I also have never expected to make money from games developed on byond but just as a fun hobby. If I am planning to pour hours into a game and into advertising I am not going to do it for a game made on byond(not saying there isn't or hasn't been money to make) I am going to keep developing on unity or etc. This is nothing against byond or its developers and they probably know a lot more than me but to me personally if the hub/website goes then I probably won't use byond anymore. That may come off really selfish but its true. I honestly wish I had the money to pay to keep byond running because it is definitely a great and unique experience you won't find with other engines. Tom and Lummox have done a phenomenal job with byond with the resources and circumstances they been dealt but if byond does just turn into a suite of programs into "just another game engine" it will get lost among the sea of game engines and be out shined by better options.
In response to Kidpaddle45
Kidpaddle45 wrote:
Maxsteel13 wrote:
Kidpaddle45 wrote:
BYOND is in desperate need of money. Long story short, they do not make enough revenue to keep the business alive.

They tried many things: Donation bar, Ads, Exporting games to HTML5 and no success.

I guess their last hope would be to force people to advertise their games outside of BYOND so more people hear about it and give it a shot to develop games. (Which anyways is the main goal of BYOND...It was never meant to be a social network)

#Learn_to_indiedb


I have no idea what you meant by that. I've already used indieDB to advertise some of my games and building up a solid community to test out my upcoming games.

The issue here is not about what BYOND is doing wrong but what us, the DEVELOPPERS, do wrong. It's not about our advertisement either. It's about our ways of developping games. BYOND is somehow limited in certain ways compared to other engines. Most programmers use this as an excuse to stop the development of their over-ambitious games but we all know the real reason behind it is lazyness.

BYOND never moved for the past 4-5 years. In a community composed of around 10 000 members, how many GOOD/POPULAR games have been released in the past years? I can count them on my fingers.

AND THIS, is not normal. I guess BYOND was unlucky to see all of it's great developpers such as Forum_account (He's the only one that comes to my mind at the moment but there are many more) never develop games and focus more on helping a community which sadly, was never up to the task so far.

Now this, is more of a personal opinion, but I also believe BYOND developpers have a very strange way of developping games. Some of us use terms such as "iconer", "coders", "hosters","idealist" on other advertising platform. This may seem like no big deal but to pro/good developpers, this simply says: "Hey, I'm an amateur, looking for someone to create my game." On another side, we set limits to our games which should never exist.When developpers find out that too many players reached the max level or the games gets unbalanced, they "wipe" the game. Why in the world do we have to play games for hours if it is to find your character wiped in the end because it got too strong or everyone else is too strong resulting in one hit killing.

BYOND has no problems.
It does technically have it's own limitations and problems. It's still an extremely usable platform though.

Kidpaddle45 wrote:
We, the developpers need to leave our little bubble and learn from other games outside of BYOND.

Good points.

On the topic of indiedb, their community can be somewhat...shite, but it does make for good advertisement/promotion if you can get people looking at your game.

Moddb still feels like the bigger draw of the two, even though the latter is strictly for mods.
In response to Kidpaddle45
What you're rehashing has all to do with the kids and pre-teens who are involved with ripped content, and none to do with Byond's developers*.
In response to FKI
FKI wrote:
What you're rehashing has all to do with the kids and pre-teens who are involved with ripped content, and none to do with Byond's developers*.

That would be assuming all kids and pre-teens use ripped content, which isn't the case. Young developers that are new to programming do not have to use ripped content.
Young developers that are new to programming do not have to use ripped content.

I didn't say they did, nor did I imply that (because that's obviously not the case), so I'm not sure what you're going on about.

Kidpaddle's post tries to throw everyone into a "fits all" box, when he's really just referring to those who are working on ripped content. How do I know this? Because you don't see any of his described mannerisms coming from actual developers. You can look around and tell who's actually developing something and who's not, who is actually taking their work seriously, and so on.

In other words, the point of my post was to make light of his misuse of the term "developer." Personally, I could care less who uses ripped content, but to call them developers is incorrect.
In response to FKI
FKI wrote:
Young developers that are new to programming do not have to use ripped content.

I didn't say they did, nor did I imply that (because that's obviously not the case), so I'm not sure what you're going on about.

Kidpaddle's post tries to throw everyone into a "fits all" box, when he's really just referring to those who are working on ripped content. How do I know this? Because you don't see any of his described mannerisms coming from actual developers. You can look around and tell who's actually developing something and who's not, who is actually taking their work seriously, and so on.

In other words, the point of my post was to make light of his misuse of the term "developer." Personally, I could care less who uses ripped content, but to call them developers is incorrect.

Sorry if it sounded like that. Indeed, there are still some very good developpers around here and some very promising games.
I misread what you wrote, I apologize.

I can see developers themselves needing to make improvements on how they go about doing things is all I'm saying. Not just those who rip content.

That's just life though, practice and experience.