Free, as in Whine
Yesterday, Spotify announced a change to their free and open accounts. Full details are available on their blog, but in short: Free and Open accounts will be limited to 5 plays per track and 10 hours per month.
As we have come to expect from our gimme-gimme generation, an internet backlash occurs. Wails of torment and woe, and cries of “Bye Bye Spotify”, “Spotify commits suicide” and “It was good while it lasted” are abound.
Shut the fuck up you cantankerous, over-priveleged, whiney bastards.
You don’t get anything for free, and before you waste my time and your own by filling comments with “but that’s what the ads are for”, I’ll explain a few things to you.
Spotify was in a unique position with their ad-model. It had both the potential to be incredibly profitable or an abject failure. Being an on-demand service by nature, spotify should be constantly gathering information on the listening habits and preferences of their users. This would provide a level of demographic segmentation that most advertisers would crucify their own grandmother for. With some clever analytics and a bit of marketing savvy they could provide people with advertisements so targetted that not acting upon them would seem like an offense.
Unfortunately, no matter what I listened to, I always seemed to to inundated with requests for me to listen to Rhianna, or whatever Simon Cowell was farting out at the time. Segmentation, I see not. Maybe if Spotify had fully explored the scope of this I wouldn’t be writing this now, but I’ll leave my speculative exposition on the potential and actual advertising models of spotify for another day, and just drive home to my point right now.
Spotify seems to have approached itself as it would a commerical radio station, and although stations can survive on the traditional ad-model, as noted by commenters on spotify’s blog, spotify cannot. The extra overhead of being an on-demand service, as opposed to single-stream-broadcast service, can not be adequately covered this way. Spotify needed another revenue stream, and from that Premium was born.
Since its inception, they have tried to incentivise their users to adopt premium. Mobile applications, offline sync, no ads, unlimited plays etc etc. Obviously with each incarnation they eeked a little more out of you freeloaders, but obviously not enough. So like all good newtonians, when pulling doesn’t seem to be working, you get behind it and push.
Prior to this move, Spotify’s pushing had been kind and gentle. A mere suggestion of what direction you should go. Now they’re serious. Riot gear and cattle prods at the ready. If only a few more of you had been gracious, the plebs could have been spared this horror.
So, take a lesson from this, you mooching trolls. If something is free, then you have one of two choices. Assume its temporary, and that it will be taken away from you at a moments notice… or pay the bloody company who have worked quite hard in bringing the free service to you in the first place.
Landlocked Update #1 – “2 Years Behind”
I said in the last post that this game was Minecraft inspired – Well today Minecraft gets wolfies – and I get “Creative” mode!
It may not seem like much, but its all been done very sensibly and modular. This means that I can easily switch out various components to mix and match and try to make varying combinations that could aid in finding this elusive fun everyone keeps talking about.
I also leveled-up my commerce and photoshop skills, with Mochi ads and transparent fluffy clouds respectively.
PLAY HERE:
Landlocked – An OCD Puzzler
Since I have a bit of free time on my hands the last few days, I’ve started work on a tile based puzzle game in Actionscript 3.0. I’ve done a lot of work in AS3 before and actually competed in the last Ludum Dare using AS3 and FlashPunk. (I’ll polish up that compo entry and post it up here at some point).
This time around I’m using FlashPunk again, might actually use it in the intended fashion too, instead of all the manual rendering I was doing for the snow storm in Cold Fusion. I’m using this project shaped stone to kill a few other birds as well. One to finally prototype using Daniel Cook’s awesome “Space Cute” tile set, two to pop my professional cherry, get the finished article up on FGL and make some money from my favourite hobby and finally, three, to break in the new name, Rush The Fence.
Landlocked is intended to be a Minecraft-inspired tile-based puzzler, digging up blocks, and placing them elsewhere to achieve a myriad of goals. I want to try and steer away from the worn-out match-3 rigmarole (but if the mechanics lend themselves to it, and its fun, I’ll not deny it). I have a few other, more out there, ideas that I want to chase down, but my focus first will be on getting the basis of the game engine up and running. From there I can play with different game modes and mechanics until I find the fun.
I’m going to try and keep a regular dev blog during the evolution of Landlocked, for both journal and motivational purposes. So hopefully I’ll have a little more to put up soon.
P.S. I mentioned “OCD Puzzler” in the title of this post because one of the ideas I have is for a time-attack sorting game. Not sure if everyone would find it fun, but hey it’s still only an idea at this point.
Audeat Autumnus: 21 Days
Today, after much faffing around I officially kick off my October Challenge game. After a long and heated debate between myself and an empty page in a notebook, I’ve decided to lower my sights considerably. I had intended to make a non-traditional tower defense game, I had two interesting aesthetics for this. One had the working title “In the Loop” and was centred around espionage networks intercepting information to stay relevant. The second was a hacker-orientated TD, where the towers are the various applications deployed in an effort to usurp control of the system.
Upon thinking about it, I realised that even though I have one of these ideas quite well fleshed out in design, to make it fun and interesting will take a hell of a lot of playtesting and iteration. So for this month I’m going to stick to tried and tested mechanics and make a traditional TD. The working title for this is “21 Days” since that is exactly how long I have to finish it and set it free.
My goals today are to get stand in creeps running around a tile-based map with quick and hacky A* directing them. Then get some grid-control and be able to plant towers (that do nothing yet). If I get this game polished up enough in the 21 days I might add a bit of meta-research, between levels you task scientists with researching technology dropped by creeps during the last mission, in order to develop more effective towers to help as the levels and creeps escalate. However, I’m going to focus on having a playable TD first.
Feature creep begone.
I’m developing in Flex/AS3 with Flashpunk. This is counter to my plans, as I had spent the better part of last week messing around in flixel. Flashpunk just seems that much more sensible, I can work far more quickly in it as I find its structure and usage much more intuitive, seems to me it was written more for programmers than flixel is.
Now, if I can resist the urge to play more Civilization I might actually achieve today’s targets….
Why I Stopped Playing #1 : “Jumping Without Feet”
A reasonably long time ago I purchased Borderlands for the PS3. I didn’t finish it. I didn’t buy any of its many DLC. This is why I stopped playing Borderlands.
Although I largely enjoyed the Mad Max inspired rompery, Borderlands is a not a game that ever really leapt out at me, well except for its shiny packaging. Its is a self proclaimed R.P.S., that is, a Role Playing Shooter. That’s all well and good and I support the formidable attempt at combining loot-based, skill-tree adventuring with all the fun and satisfaction that comes from shooting some desert psycho in the face with a neon yellow lightning-augmented shotgun from a first person perspective, it works, what doesn’t work is asking the player to retrieve seemingly pointless quest items from a cliff face when their only option to do so is employing a method of video game locomotion that I can only describe as blind platforming.
Fuck me, 99 words, two commas and a full stop. Yup, that’s a sentence all right. Anyways, back to the point.