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[polonkus]

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.
[\quote]

[blueblimp]

This was just posted in the questions thread too. It's a good post.

The follow-up is also worth a read. It explains why most of the f.DS crowd doesn't need to worry so much. It's really people who play on mobile devices who are in trouble. (Me, I'd like a nice iPad version, but desktop play is more important to me.)

After looking at the Dominion Strategy forums, where they've had a lot longer to wrap their heads around what funsockets / Goko are trying to do (sidenote: I want to believe everyone is calling Goko "Goku" by accident, because that's both adorable and hilarious), I think those of us coming at this from as iOS gamers have, at worst, been a little misled. The Dominion Strategy folks are by and large serious competitive card gamers, and they're looking at Goko's offering as "Dominion Online," which is to say a replacement of the unofficial PC version and Isotropic. Because of that, they're pretty excited! By and large, everyone there wants Goko to fix bugs and create a solid competitive space with trustworthy rankings, etc. They really don't care about offline play, async, or any of the things iOS board gamers have come to take for granted.

Also, from that perspective, Goko's monetization strategy looks pretty reasonable. Only the person who starts online games needs to own a given card pack (let's not get into the Zynga / XBL-style funny money or disguising the high cost of the expansions by splitting them into pieces), and these are people who play Dominion like it's their job. Some of them are, in fact, even advocating a $7.99/mo subscription model to get access to all the cards, which I'm sure Goko would be incredibly enthusiastic about adopting if it weren't for the fact that it would put a very hard limit on the size of their customer base (I have a background in subscription music, and our business's biggest issue was churn - it is very, very hard to get people to continue to pay $5 a month even if you're offering them access to practically every piece of music ever recorded).

However, I really don't care about any of that, and I know I'm not alone. That same group of posters offhandedly dismiss Ascension as a badly-designed piece of trash, which it probably is if you're serious about competitive play. But I don't care! The iOS version is a fun, absorbing diversion as a single-player game, and most of my friends are only slightly less inept at it than I am when I feel like playing online. Same goes for Dominion / Neuroshima Hex / Carcassonne. I play these games for fun, and when I feel like getting owned by 12-year-olds, there's always Starcraft (BRONZE 4 LYFE), chess or go.

Here's my point: Goko's play here is wildly (over)ambitious – they're trying to pitch the same product to a small, very dedicated audience and a much larger, but also much more casual, group of gamers, and they've let the hardcore crowd set the product parameters for both audiences. Maybe they'll be willing to tweak things if they fail to hit their goals, maybe they'll jam microtransactions into the mix, whatever. But it seems to me like they guaranteed that a huge number of us were going to be disappointed by promising an iOS version of Dominion and then shipping something that was almost, but not completely, entirely unlike what we expected.

[Captain_Frisk]

This was just posted in the questions thread too. It's a good post.

The follow-up is also worth a read. It explains why most of the f.DS crowd doesn't need to worry so much. It's really people who play on mobile devices who are in trouble. (Me, I'd like a nice iPad version, but desktop play is more important to me.)

After looking at the Dominion Strategy forums, where they've had a lot longer to wrap their heads around what funsockets / Goko are trying to do (sidenote: I want to believe everyone is calling Goko "Goku" by accident, because that's both adorable and hilarious), I think those of us coming at this from as iOS gamers have, at worst, been a little misled. The Dominion Strategy folks are by and large serious competitive card gamers, and they're looking at Goko's offering as "Dominion Online," which is to say a replacement of the unofficial PC version and Isotropic. Because of that, they're pretty excited! By and large, everyone there wants Goko to fix bugs and create a solid competitive space with trustworthy rankings, etc. They really don't care about offline play, async, or any of the things iOS board gamers have come to take for granted.

Also, from that perspective, Goko's monetization strategy looks pretty reasonable. Only the person who starts online games needs to own a given card pack (let's not get into the Zynga / XBL-style funny money or disguising the high cost of the expansions by splitting them into pieces), and these are people who play Dominion like it's their job. Some of them are, in fact, even advocating a $7.99/mo subscription model to get access to all the cards, which I'm sure Goko would be incredibly enthusiastic about adopting if it weren't for the fact that it would put a very hard limit on the size of their customer base (I have a background in subscription music, and our business's biggest issue was churn - it is very, very hard to get people to continue to pay $5 a month even if you're offering them access to practically every piece of music ever recorded).

However, I really don't care about any of that, and I know I'm not alone. That same group of posters offhandedly dismiss Ascension as a badly-designed piece of trash, which it probably is if you're serious about competitive play. But I don't care! The iOS version is a fun, absorbing diversion as a single-player game, and most of my friends are only slightly less inept at it than I am when I feel like playing online. Same goes for Dominion / Neuroshima Hex / Carcassonne. I play these games for fun, and when I feel like getting owned by 12-year-olds, there's always Starcraft (BRONZE 4 LYFE), chess or go.

Here's my point: Goko's play here is wildly (over)ambitious – they're trying to pitch the same product to a small, very dedicated audience and a much larger, but also much more casual, group of gamers, and they've let the hardcore crowd set the product parameters for both audiences. Maybe they'll be willing to tweak things if they fail to hit their goals, maybe they'll jam microtransactions into the mix, whatever. But it seems to me like they guaranteed that a huge number of us were going to be disappointed by promising an iOS version of Dominion and then shipping something that was almost, but not completely, entirely unlike what we expected.

That is a good article - but I really don't feel like we as the hardcore crowd have set the launch parameters.  We were involved very very late in this process.  The beta started what - 2 months ago?  Even if we had all yelled about offline play - it wasn't going to have shown up at launch.

[LastFootnote]

That is a good article - but I really don't feel like we as the hardcore crowd have set the launch parameters.  We were involved very very late in this process.  The beta started what - 2 months ago?  Even if we had all yelled about offline play - it wasn't going to have shown up at launch.

Well, I'm not entirely clear on the ins and outs of HTML5, but either offline play it possible or it's not. If it's not, then nothing anyone says or could have said would have made Goko incorporate it. They're an HTML5 game platform, end of story. If it is possible, then I'm sure they'll incorporate it soon in an attempt to avoid alienating the iOS crowd.

On a side note, I get irrationally angry when people suggest that Dominion should have asynchronous play. It's a godawful idea. It would take unnecessary time to implement, and then nobody would use it once they understood how terrible it was.

[blueblimp]

As far as HTML5 in general goes, offline play is possible. (I've written simple HTML5 games that play offline on iPhones/iPads. Those used HTML5 caching, which is a bit of a nightmare to get working reliably. )

The trouble is that their platform might not allow it easily. They seem to keep most of the game logic on the server, which is good design, but that likely means they wrote the game logic in something other than Javascript. (I'm guessing Java, because during the aborted launch, their captcha generator was a Java library.) That means they will need to port all their game logic, AI's, etc., to Javascript in order to support offline play.

I wouldn't count on this happening anytime soon, given that they have, what, 150 licenses to implement.

Edit: Also, async play can be made to work. I made a post on the Variants forum analyzing the possibilities for async play, and it's a relatively small number of cards that either need to be banned or tweaked. It wouldn't be full Dominion, but it'd be pretty close. Would it be fun? I don't think so, but then again I don't play much async in general.

[rrenaud]

GWT includes a java to javascript compiler.

[blueblimp]

GWT includes a java to javascript compiler.

Huh, that is a good point. So maybe it won't take that long after all.

[theory]

That is a good article - but I really don't feel like we as the hardcore crowd have set the launch parameters.  We were involved very very late in this process.  The beta started what - 2 months ago?  Even if we had all yelled about offline play - it wasn't going to have shown up at launch.

When we found the final product is dissatisfactory, we tried to justify it by saying Goko was catering to the casual crowd.  When the casual crowd found it dissatisfactory, they tried to justify it by saying Goko was catering to us.

In reality, I don't think anyone outside of Goko has really had that much input into its design. 

[GendoIkari]

Man, a very recent XKCD is quite relevant to this whole thing: http://xkcd.com/1095/.

I find it highly amusing (and a little offensive) that "we" are getting blamed for Goko not having offline and asynchronous play. As if Goko is really catering to what we want in an Isotropic-type implementation. I'd say giving us logs is about the only thing Isotropic-like that we've asked for and gotten.

I'd be all for offline play; solitaire and against AIs. I also think a native app would be a better experience on iOS than a website would. I think those things aren't at all at odds with "serious competitive play."

On the other hand, I still truly cannot understand the mindset of someone who would want asynchronous play. Sure, if it's a game without any attacks or reactions or any other form of player interaction, you might be able to play a game in a reasonable amount of time. But just thinking about trying to play out my Scrying Pool turn while my opponent has a Moat in hand... it's just not a game I can imagine anyone enjoying.

[blueblimp]

On the other hand, I still truly cannot understand the mindset of someone who would want asynchronous play. Sure, if it's a game without any attacks or reactions or any other form of player interaction, you might be able to play a game in a reasonable amount of time. But just thinking about trying to play out my Scrying Pool turn while my opponent has a Moat in hand... it's just not a game I can imagine anyone enjoying.

It's simple to deal with this problem: for cards make async play unpleasant, either make them auto-play somehow (e.g. auto-reveal Moat), ban them from the kingdom (e.g. Envoy), or tweak their rules to make them work (e.g. move Saboteur's gain effect to the beginning of next turn).

I made a big post in the Variants forum about possible rules tweaks here, but even if you just straight-up ban problematic cards, there are still a ton of cards left to play with.

[GendoIkari]

On the other hand, I still truly cannot understand the mindset of someone who would want asynchronous play. Sure, if it's a game without any attacks or reactions or any other form of player interaction, you might be able to play a game in a reasonable amount of time. But just thinking about trying to play out my Scrying Pool turn while my opponent has a Moat in hand... it's just not a game I can imagine anyone enjoying.

It's simple to deal with this problem: for cards make async play unpleasant, either make them auto-play somehow (e.g. auto-reveal Moat), ban them from the kingdom (e.g. Envoy), or tweak their rules to make them work (e.g. move Saboteur's gain effect to the beginning of next turn).

I made a big post in the Variants forum about possible rules tweaks here, but even if you just straight-up ban problematic cards, there are still a ton of cards left to play with.

Yeah, I don't see any problem with simply only supporting non-interactive cards. Though that does remove a fair amount of variety from the game, there's still enough left that it can be fun. You could still have attacks that give curses, just not attacks that force discard. I would have a problem with any changes to the card rules though. That would turn the game into a variant, and while there's nothing wrong with variants, an official Dominion app should not have them.

[blueblimp]

I'd say giving us logs is about the only thing Isotropic-like that we've asked for and gotten.

There's also the grouping of cards in big hands. Although that matters to every player, it's more relevant the more experience you have, since (IMX) newer players tend to not draw quite so many cards at once.

[Donald X.]

In reality, I don't think anyone outside of Goko has really had that much input into its design.

I don't know which part of the design you're referring to, but for sure there has been plenty of input into how the game actually plays when you are playing it, both before the beta and during it.

[werothegreat]

To all of you who want offline play:

Blizzard killed it with StarCraft II and Diablo III.  At this point in time, anyone who is going to be playing your game is going to have an internet connection.  There's really no point in even making an offline option, at least for widely marketed games.  And it's not just Blizzard - Steam requires you to be online when you're playing any of the games you got off of it, and there's still a plethora of MMORPGs out there (by definition having to take place continuously online), including the much-anticipated Guild Wars 2.

So while I can sympathize that your connection may be faulty on your train ride, in all honesty, at this point, that is a fringe case.  >90% of the people who will be playing on Goko will have a continuous internet connection the entire time.  And there are great benefits to being online continuously - the game updates automatically, so you're not stuck with the same bugs for however long it takes you to realize you need to download the newest version - bugs are more easily found and fixed, and it just promotes a more active relationship between gamer and developer (though it'd be nice if Goko had a bit more such dialogue).

[blueblimp]

StarCraft 2 and Diablo 3 are not mobile games. I don't think anyone is suggesting offline play is important for laptops/desktops, because yeah, they can reasonably be assumed to have an internet connection. We're not yet at the point where most tablets are within Wi-Fi range or able to connect to a cellular network (and even if they can, cellular network internet is not the greatest).

So the question is more about whether the mobile market is significant enough to warrant offline play.

[Tombolo]

I would like to go on record as stating that I really like Ascension from what I've seen.  I don't think it would've been the one to hold up with me if DougZ had thrown up a server right alongside the Dominion one, but I sometimes steal my friend's ipad to play it, and quite enjoy the change of pace.

[blueblimp]

I would like to go on record as stating that I really like Ascension from what I've seen.  I don't think it would've been the one to hold up with me if DougZ had thrown up a server right alongside the Dominion one, but I sometimes steal my friend's ipad to play it, and quite enjoy the change of pace.

I like iPad Ascension, but more because of the app than the game itself.

The app is really, really good, and avoids a lot of Goko's interface problems. The cards aren't fanned. The deck, discard, and trash-equivalent piles go in different corners. Its interface is built around dragging (which is appropriate for a tablet game), but it can be played without dragging at all if you prefer. And of course, it has offline play and the interface is completely smooth, barring very rare brief slowdowns.

(Edit: I also forgot to mention that the animations are pretty but never get in the way.)

The game itself I don't like as much, but that's another topic entirely. (Edit 2: Or maybe not, because Ascension has some aspects that make it work well in limited screen space: you never get all that many cards in your hand, and the number of centre piles is small.)

[Kirian]

What I've seen of the Ascension app makes me wish Goko could put together a Dominion system that looks as good.

That said, Ascension as a game doesn't hold a candle to Dominion.

[Cave-o-sapien]

To all of you who want offline play:

Blizzard killed it with StarCraft II and Diablo III.  At this point in time, anyone who is going to be playing your game is going to have an internet connection.  There's really no point in even making an offline option, at least for widely marketed games.

This sounds like someone who doesn't play a lot of iOS games.  I'd bet you 1,000 gokoins that the majority of iOS Carcassonne|Ascension|Ticket to Ride games take place offline.

[Cave-o-sapien]

So the question is more about whether the mobile market is significant enough to warrant offline play.

It seems like most game apps these days are targeted to the mobile market first.  Goko seems to be targeting "large computers" first, mobile devices second.  I don't really understand why.

[werothegreat]

Seems I'm in the minority here.  Well, pardon me for not owning an iPad, and still owning a phone that flips open and only calls and texts.

[def]

[...] Steam requires you to be online when you're playing any of the games you got off of it [...]

False. I'm playing all my 20 Steam games in offline mode. Going online once a week would be enough to get all the updates I want, so I don't see any advantages of being only all the time.

Online multiplayer online; everything else, and of course singleplayer, offline. Don't see what's wrong with that concept.
Not that I care much about goko, this just addresses your point.

[ashersky]

What I've seen of the Ascension app makes me wish Goko could put together a Dominion system that looks as good.

That said, Ascension as a game doesn't hold a candle to Dominion.

I'll second this.  The goko flap actually got me to go and buy Ascension, which is a fun, if not very interesting game that works very well offline, on an iPad.

Dominion is far and away a better card/board game/concept.  Ascension is what I hoped "iDominion" would be.

[theory]

werothegreat, I used to think just like you, and then I realized -- what game do I play most on my phone?

Tichu.  Not Bridge, which I like 10x better, but Tichu, because my Bridge app requires an Internet connection to play, and the only time during the day that I have free time to play on my phone is during my subway commute. 

And since Tichu broke on Jelly Bean (and is hopefully getting updated soon), I've even started playing San Juan.  San Juan.  That is how important offline play is to me.

[Captain_Frisk]

On the subject of offline play vs. online.

Blizzard can do whatever it wants with SC2 and D3 because those are properties that will sell regardless - and piracy is a problem on the PC.

Piracy on the ios appstore isn't as big of a problem.  Ascension seems to be doing pretty well - and that works offline.  Steam lets you play offline. 

You'd like to play dominion when you don't have a net connection.  For me - this is when I'm commuting (rarely), or travelling on business.  Other people may just prefer playing bots.  Right now there are 8000 people ranked on isotropic.  Only 2,000 of them are ranked higher than rank 10.  I'd venture to say that on most boards, the conq. bot will be competitive against 6,000 of those players.  I can understand why they might prefer to get their dominion fix from a bot instead of some jerk like myself.