I am going to post a wall of text, yay!
and no Tl:dr too!
I like GOIO, I play GOIO and there is people here that can testify I spend way too much time explaining stuff to scrubs than checking my loadout. Heck my pyra was named Noob Academy for a reason. Still if I have to play it lately, it is only clan or friends because of time constrains and I see the amount of damage stacked ships can deal to the new players. The Underdog mechanic should be better explained with a lenghty popup, btw.
So, I spied some steam raw data and I found some interesting numbers about our precious game/community/concept/religion.
GOIO is a
product, made by a game studio to bridge the first GOI to the new GOI. As a video game the objective is the entertainment of the people of today, not yesterday, not tomorrow. Today. This way it is going to sell and pay the bills of the studio. GOIO never took off, will never take off and is more of a economic resource for the development of GOI than else.
Right now the biggest problem is: how to make the game fun for sufficient time that buyer A will ask buyer B, C and D to buy it so that they can be awesome in the sky and join the other
774,634 ± 22,360 players [931,664 (± 24,514) owners]?
How long will they play it?
hh:mm 09:12 (average) 03:46 (median), which is, oh the irony, one of the lowest in the industry for multiplayer only games. There are many reasons for that and most probably the main reason is that
GOIO can be no fun at all. With other games you can have varying degrees of fun, in GOIO you can actually pretty quickly get into negative fun. We all know why and the different NO-fun elements in today's GOIO account for the fact that almost a million owners of GOIO never played for more than 3 hours or played at all.
When MUSE talks about the veterans (±500) being a small niche, it is really very very small. Ridiculously small.
So what do we get from this? We have a product that is at the level of Risk of Rain, Stanley Parable, Banished, World of Goo in terms of sales (top 100 out of 2400 indie games), yet in terms of game hours is ±750th, surrounded either by trash or single player games. How is it possible?
The current generation of teenagers that have time to devote to the game and maybe a superficial curiosity of steampunk might be attracted to GOIO, which is why it is still selling after so many years. Yet server population never takes off. Almost a million people essentially left some money at MUSE, said "be right back" and never showed up again. Good for us, thanks to these buyers we still get to play the game.
But if you were MUSE, what would you do of this thread, of the whole forum? GOIO sells through some high profile sponsors such as Angry Joe, some cool aesthetics that are unmatched, a game structure that has no competitors in the industry and the promise that it will be fun. Fun like all the other underdog indie multiplayer games that try to shoot for the stars.
Does it sell because people want the honor of flying against a Ryder ship? Or be part of Ceresbane's AI, Cake, Ducks, Gents or any other historical clan? I'll answer for you: no, they don't. they don't care. They want to fly a ship, shoot with a gun and jump around goofing, while having fun. This is the essence of every game and it makes all of us very mad that they want to do it.
Can they really do it today?
NO, THEY DON'T because the game has the flaw of letting you do what you want (it took this long to change the code and make the pilot class unavailable as a crew member, this long)
even if by not thinking ahead you can't have fun. And I am not talking about clan stomping, I am talking about those matches where no one of us is present, zero experience and training, all levels 10-20 with engineers carrying kerosene and ships hitting the trade winds. i entered some of those games, I ended up flying with two gunners a flakfish with an allied carro galleon against a double flak pira and a squid in the map dawn. No-Fun-At-All.
The much vaunted novice matches are an exercise of frustration. Yet MUSE as a responsible company tries to make a profit and keeps shooting for the stars, I salute the effort and I want you to succeed. Adventure Mode is the dream of MUSE, not a perfect GOIO, yet they still need this game to make a wage and keep working.
I I arrived in this community very late, I might say toward the end of the cycle. It feels like a sitcom at the end of a very long list of theater seasons where all the character arches are explored, all the things that could be done has been already done (amazing tournaments with more than 3 teams? Forget it) and yet casual viewers are still keeping the product on air. Some people changed career and went doing something else, some just log in now and then.
The problem is that the few that still log in and play as a clan can't have adequate opponents and stomp the other side, adding an unexpected element of No-Fun-At-All. MM and all the other gizmos that are being added are designed to ease the game of new players but fail with a low online population that is absolutely not representative of the real numbers.It is only thanks to friendships and a general appreciation of the developers toward the stable, veteran community that some things are changed, but don't expect them to go in your direction: MUSE aim is not to make the game more fun for the people who know the game and played more than 1000 matches; instead is to remove the No-Fun elements that make the game one of the most owned and least played of the indies. And it is not unfair, it is not cruel, it is not derived by some hate of the developers toward the veteran's community. It is a business necessity, the strongest and most important motivation you can bring to the desk of a production manager. if game is No-Fun for some inherent mechanics, those mechanics must be changed so that the majority likes the game and plays more.
Remember, like it or not GOIO is the bridge built by MUSE for another game, it was never meant to be something as important as some people consider it here. With the failure of FotI the people there had to decide what to do with their lives, move on or keep shooting for the stars. All the assets were converted into a PvP that kept the boat floating this long but the adventure game, the coop gamemode is what MUSE wanted since day one and it is something we will all wildly enjoy since it will remove many No-Fun elements that today plague GOIO.
