http://pockettactics.com/2012/08/18/dominion-online-makers-goko-un-launch-retreat-back-into-beta/Interesting comment therein:
othiym23 Member
August 18 Posts: 6
Speaking as someone with a fair amount of experience with the Bay Area startup scene, it only took a little reading to recognize what Goko did: get a fat Series A and then use that venture capital to buy traction by going after the biggest brands in their target market. Rather than concentrating on starting small and getting the fundamentals right ("HTML5" games will never be truly platform-native, but a skilled team could make them good enough to satisfy even the most finicky BGG poster, including things like async play and AIs), they went for a broad land grab by locking down as many partnership deals as they could (Goko has separate VPs for business development, marketing, developer relations, *and* monetization).
On the one hand, this fiasco is at least as much the fault of Rio Grande and the other games companies involved as it is Goko. It's really important to sit down and think through the opportunity costs of signing exclusive, long-term content deals. If things go awry and the company holding the deals gets bought out by a company like Zynga, the companies and the designers are going to find themselves confronting a lot of hard-to-counter legal chicanery from people who have spent their whole lives figuring out how to maximize revenue from marginal properties. It seems totally irresponsible for Rio Grande and the rest to have signed so many deals with an unproven company, regardless of how shiny their pitch was.
On the other hand, the distribution and traction a company like Goko can offer has to sound totally preposterous to small companies that, in turn, get most of their revenue from small specialty retailers. Who wouldn't want the possibility of getting their work in front of several orders of magnitude more people than would see them if they were only in physical form or released as niche apps? The Playdek games are some of the best-designed apps on the App Store (except for Nightfall, which still completely baffles me), and gamers sing their praises, but I'd be interested to see how their sales compare to something like Plants vs Zombies or Angry Birds. Contrast that with Zynga, which doesn't have a lot going with gameplay in most of their games, but does get them front of the sizable fraction of humanity on Facebook.
For those hoping for a quick and punishing failure for Goko, the flip side of them being VC funded is that there are now concerned parties at Alsop Louie Partners, Redpoint Ventures, and the other investors in the Series A working to ensure their investment gets made good. I wouldn't want to be working at Goko right now – not only do they have to recover from an embarrassingly poor launch, but I'm sure there was already a lot of pressure on them to prove out what seems like a pretty risky revenue model (ad-supported freemium: pretty well-tested; subscription service: pretty well-tested; freemium based on hella-expensive expansions: not so well-tested).
Speaking for myself, the whole thing is irritating. Battle of Gundabad is a pretty joyless clone, the unauthorized iOS version was painfully stark but more or less cut the mustard while being totally illegal (I haven't had a chance to play Androminion), and Isotropic and BSW were probably at least violating trademarks and copyrights. Donald X has said some pretty jerkish things about people disappointed with Goko, but he deserves a lot of credit for leaving the clones alone. It was exciting to hear that Dominion was getting an official iOS version, and it would be great if BGG favorites like Race for the Galaxy were to get high-quality implementations that could be played on the go. But the lack of offline multiplayer excludes a good chunk of my game-playing time (commuting to and from work on the train, which involves going through Mt Sutro, where the coverage isn't so great), and I already paid too much for the Dominion expansions once. Doing it again, only this time for the privilege of using the cards in a virtual environment that could vanish pretty much whenever, is a no-go for me.
Also, as a professional software developer, reading about all the corners cut to get the beta out the door just offends me. Plaintext passwords? Pushing the whole game state of games based on hidden information to all clients? Not validating client input? That says louder than anything else that they're not really trying to build a high-quality platform, because that is stupidly bad software engineering.
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