This strategy can backfire if your game gets popular enough. If both versions are counted separately and they each pass 1mil downloads and the 12 month revenue threshold then you’re paying the higher per-install fee brackets twice.
To demonstrate, let’s imagine a game like this has 4 million installs in the first year and uses the Enterprise plan for the best pricing structure.
Scenario A: single version
First 1,000,000 @ $0.00: $0
1,000,001-1,100,000 @ $0.125 : $12,500
1,100,001-1,500,000 @ $0.06 : $24,000
1,500,001-2,000,000 @ $0.02 : $10,000
2,000,001-4,000,000 @ $0.01 : $20,000
Total cost: $66,500
Scenario B: two versions priced separately, 2 mil installs each
Each one is the first four lines above, so the total cost is $46,500*2 = $93,000
In either scenario, additional installs beyond these 4 million cost $0.01 each (regardless of which game it’s installed on). There’s a fine line of staying below the annual revenue thresholds (or not too far above) where this strategy does save you money.
Unless we sell less of it than the arbitrary sales number we used a bunch of estimated pseudo math on to ultimately guess. Because if we sell less than that number we pulled out of our rectums with a faulty Excel sheet, we'll just shut the thing down immediately. Because, you know... fuck you.
If people stopped renting games developers would start selling them again. Until then, the incentive is for them to keep pulling this nonsense.
There’s a difference between a game having online elements, such as a MMO, and games that require a connection just so they can keep charging you. Even in the first case though, you should own the client, and ideally it either has a single player mode, or the developer releases the code for a basic server when they shut it down.
That’s why I stated that it should be illegal to promise product while selling a undefined time limited license, there should be a clear minimum time stated when you “buy a subscription” for (single player?) games.
Fair, stating a time-to-live when you’re paying might make some people think twice. At this point though, I think people need to just not be paying unless they get to keep it permanently. Paying for access to the online portion is fine, but the rest should keep working and you should be able to get your data out of the developer’s system.
I concur Buyer should not gain rights to product, so they should not be allowed to profit from it, but they should be able to preserve it, unless the license that you actually buy had a time limitation, but that should be clearly stated when you buy it that you only buy access to it to (at least) X amount of time like you have with online subscriptions.
This is the natural progression of the games-as-a-service model. Any game that relies on online support of some kind just to function will eventually cease like this.
Is it stupid that a vr game about a pet relies on online support to function? Absolutely. But it is what it is. Buy more offline games.
This is also the reason I’m all open source. Not just games, but seeing someone abandon a program hurts. Or just wanting to make a change on your own to suit your needs. I don’t have any big fancy programs, but I at least put my code openly on github.com for that reason. Both my “big” ones are just me using another program and realizing I could make something that worked better for me. At like 100x the time investment, but programming is fun.
Looking at the retro computer scene should make anyone a diehard open source fanatic, it’s god awful how much retro stuff relies on a single guy happening to find an old disc in their basement and upload it to the internet, and a lot of the time that never happened and so the software is just lost forever and the only way hardware can be used is by people writing their own software completely from scratch and sharing it with others.
And of course if they then don’t make it open source that’s extra fun.
“The doting husband has gained thousands of followers on Instagram by sharing insights into his life with Miku, but things took an unexpected turn during the pandemic when Gatebox announced it was discontinuing its service for Miku.”
this is why I have trust issues with proprietary software
hmm not sure if that would work as the model that he was using would be different from what’s available so he’d probably notice some differences which might cause a mix of uncanny valley and surrealism/suspension of disbelief where the two are noticably not the same
plus using a chat-only model would be real tragic as it’s a significant downgrade from what they already had
his story actually feels like a Romeo and Juliet situation
Doesn’t even take a change of service provider to get there.
Replika had what had very obviously become a virtual mate service too, until they decided “love” wasn’t part of their system anymore. Probably because it looked bad for investors, as happened for a lot of AI-based services people used for smut.
So a bunch of lonely people had their “virtual companion” suddenly lobotomized, and there’s nothing they could do about it.
At first the idea was it’d be training an actual “replica” of yourself, that could reflect your own personality. Then when they realized their was a demand for companionship they converted it into virtual friend. Then of course there was a demand for “more than friends”, and yeah, they made it possible to create a custom mate for a while.
Then suddenly it became a problem for them to be seen as a light porn generator. Probably because investors don’t want to touch that, or maybe because of a terms of servce change with their AI service provider.
At that point they started to censor lewd interactions and pretend replika was never supposed to be more than a friendly bot you can talk to. Which is, depending on how you interpret what services they proposed and how they advertized them until then, kind of a blatant lie.
LLM is capable of role-playing, character.ai for example can get into the role of any character after being trained. The sound is just text-to-speech, character.ai already includes that, though if a realistic voice is desired, it would need to be generated by a more sophisticated method, which is already being done. Example: Neuro-sama, ElevenLabs
Next thing you know, he doesn’t read the fine print, ther “brain” is internet connected and, sooner or later, he won’t have a Miku talking back to him again
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