Alathon wrote:

The proper way to do it is to earn revenue from games and earn developers from click-backs to BYOND that people will naturally reference when they talk about their game.

I'm sorry, but I'm not exactly sure how I should envision this? How would BYOND earn revenue from games? Would you mind to elaborate on this point?
Oh, and if you're not busy, I lack a link to an educational blog.

SuperAntx wrote:

Just like with isometric support, native pixel collision will make things much faster and easier.

Whenever I read this, I wonder what people are thinking that 'pixel collision' is. There is no catch all implementation for this idea. I'd say that collision detection/physical engines are one of the topics with the most possible solutions asides of database, sorting algorithm and path-finding (which even interacts with collision detection on some level).

Regardless on what you'd implement, you can not get your customers happy. This is where it would seem a lot more beneficial to include canvas, client sided processing (including icon arithmetic) and UDP/TCP stream. Getting libraries on that base for various possible implementations would be easy enough and should allow for a 'native, built-in pixel collision'-feeling.

Schnitzelnagler wrote:

Does this concept include transfer fees and fraud security?
You'll easily need half a million dollar annual subscriptions to only compensate for the lack of advertising income.
That sounds like a tough venture there.

Ads and revenue are not exclusive; they'll still make similar money off the ads. The whole idea that BYOND.com will be much less frequently visited if people advertise outside BYOND *as well as* at BYOND is an argument made without any sound proof of that. Its a panic reaction, in other words.

It is equally likely, if not much more likely, that increased developer traffic and increased game production will bring in many more clicks through the model where BYOND.com isn't always centric, than the current user count and numbers.

Whats more, this model scales - The current BYOND model does not.

Schnitzelnagler wrote:

Alathon wrote:

Ads and revenue are not exclusive; they'll still make similar money off the ads.

Hmm, now I'm a bit puzzled. I was under the impression that your concept would encourage the use of ones own web appearance as hub, instead of BYOND's built-in hubs (which is where the main ad revenue derives from)?
I'm sorry if I misunderstood you there.

The idea is to severely downscale the freedom to basically use the hub as a web-page embedded at BYOND. There are several issues with the current hub:

1) You're forced to use a small section of space, on a website where you have no control over choice of colors. This makes virtually every hub entry look very unprofessional and malplaced.

2) You can't put very much info in it without making it a 'wall of text', because you have no control over the panes at the top.

If you severely limit the hub entry to some text and potentially a video or two, and prominently have a large link to 'Game's official website', people will be more inclined to make use of it.

This doesn't preclude you from adding ads to the hub or having any of the existing ones. It simply moves what looks horrible away from the BYOND website. If you then also give them a handy way to link to their game with a graphical banner, that has a little 'Made in BYOND' in the bottom right corner, that links *back* to the hub entry and selects the 'Play' button, then you've got backlinking to BYOND.

Schnitzelnagler wrote:

Alathon wrote:

If you severely limit the hub entry to some text and potentially a video or two, and prominently have a large link to 'Game's official website', people will be more inclined to make use of it.

This doesn't preclude you from adding ads to the hub or having any of the existing ones. It simply moves what looks horrible away from the BYOND website. If you then also give them a handy way to link to their game with a graphical banner, that has a little 'Made in BYOND' in the bottom right corner, that links *back* to the hub entry and selects the 'Play' button, then you've got backlinking to BYOND.

But if they link back to the hub, playing the game becomes one more click away, gives an even worse impression of lacking professional layout and would rightfully annoy people. I'm still not sure I fully understood your plan. I guess I'd have to see it in action since I'm too dumb to grasp it (likely ;)), or you didn't design it all the way through.

These are just random ideas. As I mentioned in the blog post, I have the luxury of being able to suggest things without having to think them through fully. However, what *is* clear is that the current model doesn't work and doesn't scale.

You can then go back and forth discussing how to tweak my thoughts into something workable, but I never intended to do anything of the sort - I got asked about some things in Chatters that I then posted here.

My intentions haven't been to actually spend any time trying to figure out how to 'fix' things at BYOND, I spent far too much time on things falling on deaf ears in the past for that.