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[yuma]

4)  A high level of consumer confidence that Goko will survive and that the product I purchase will not just disappear.  A confidence level on par with Blizzard or Amazon is probably fair.

Ultimately Goko's success will revolve on whether or not it is able to implement other games in the future and continue to do so as new games are published. Because eventually the money coming from Dominion is going to drop off, especially in the months after the expected wave comes for Guilds. Because of the way they have set up their payment model it isn't sustainable to expect to generate enough revenue from Dominion alone.

As I understand it they have other games lined up to be adapted--although I don't think any of them are quite as popular as Dominion.

So the question then becomes, will Goko be able to stay afloat long enough to implement games other than Dominion and become a premiere establishment for online games?

Add another question to that... If you were a game developer/publisher would you be seeking out Goko to publish your game? Or would you be looking at other options?

Because right now, after the disaster that has been and in many ways still is Goko Dominion, if I had a game that I wanted to put on the online market, Goko would not be my choice of doing so.

So honestly, I don't see myself buying into Goko until they successfully implement another game system w/o all of the bugs, controversy, false starts and general sense of apathy toward the fan's wants. If they can get another game off the ground successfully, then I might be willing to invest--yes I consider it an investment because I am putting money down with the expectation, but not guarantee, that I will be able to have a sufficient amount of fun for my money--my money in Goko. Until then... well I will just mooch.

[rspeer]

That's a really fascinating point about Guilds and what it means for Goko.

After Guilds, there are no more known events that will generate a surge of interest in Dominion, and there will be no more sets of cards for existing customers to pay for. After that wave, almost everyone who is inclined to pay money to Goko for Dominion will have already done so.

Maybe they'll successfully transition to another game. More likely they won't. But for those of us who actually want to play Dominion, what possible motivation would they have to make Goko Dominion not suck after Guilds? Even if they wanted to, how would they justify spending their investors' money on skilled developers, for a product without a known source of future revenue?

It's not even like Civilization 5, where they can keep working on the game until one day they say "hey look we fixed it all in the expansion", and loyal fans throw money at them a second or third time. The expansions already happened.

So I predict that whatever Goko Dominion looks like when Guilds is released is going to be its peak of quality. It will decline from there, possibly quickly.

[ashersky]

That's a really fascinating point about Guilds and what it means for Goko.

After Guilds, there are no more known events that will generate a surge of interest in Dominion, and there will be no more sets of cards for existing customers to pay for. After that wave, almost everyone who is inclined to pay money to Goko for Dominion will have already done so.

Maybe they'll successfully transition to another game. More likely they won't. But for those of us who actually want to play Dominion, what possible motivation would they have to make Goko Dominion not suck after Guilds? Even if they wanted to, how would they justify spending their investors' money on skilled developers, for a product without a known source of future revenue?

It's not even like Civilization 5, where they can keep working on the game until one day they say "hey look we fixed it all in the expansion", and loyal fans throw money at them a second or third time. The expansions already happened.

So I predict that whatever Goko Dominion looks like when Guilds is released is going to be its peak of quality. It will decline from there, possibly quickly.

That's very depressing.

[SCSN]

So I predict that whatever Goko Dominion looks like when Guilds is released is going to be its peak of quality. It will decline from there, possibly quickly.

I wouldn't be too surprised to see them go bankrupt, but I can't imagine any sort of gradual decline over a time span shorter than years. I mean, they aren't going to deliberately plant bugs that weren't there before, are they?

[pst]

But for those of us who actually want to play Dominion, what possible motivation would they have to make Goko Dominion not suck after Guilds? Even if they wanted to, how would they justify spending their investors' money on skilled developers, for a product without a known source of future revenue?

[...]

So I predict that whatever Goko Dominion looks like when Guilds is released is going to be its peak of quality. It will decline from there, possibly quickly.

It's certainly a possibility, but if they succeed in bringing in more games they do have motivation for doing general stuff better in a way that will also benefit their "old" games, like Dominion, for example improvements about game lobbies and matchups.

Also, if they succeed, there will be lots of players playing lots of different games there. In that case there might very well be future revenue in players who are there for some other game that get interested in trying more games there. "Hey, they have Dominion! I played that a few times years ago. That was fun -- I wanna try it again!" (Probably "old" games won't cost as much.)

[Davio]

I keep reading the topic title as "redli-ness", oh Goko is just too red!

[qmech]

I keep reading the topic title as "redli-ness", oh Goko is just too red!

Ruddy Goko.

[Watno]

I think they have RFTG in beta atm, and with them planning to become a platform for multiple games, they have an incentive to keep players from their previous games happy...

...assuming they don't go bankrupt.

[Davio]

I wouldn't be surprised if they mixed the lobbies for different games together.

[eHalcyon]

I wouldn't be surprised if they mixed the lobbies for different games together.

Surely not all of them.  I mean, have Outpost be for Dominion and Settlers, sure.  But Outpost II should of course be for RftG only.  It's obvious.

[SCSN]

This is the first time I hear of RFTG, is it worth playing? How does it compare to dominion?

[eHalcyon]

This is the first time I hear of RFTG, is it worth playing? How does it compare to dominion?

I haven't actually played it, but it's fairly popular.

[Watno]

I dont think they will mix the lobbies together, or at least theyre not planning to so atm.
The whole site layout suggests otherwise, and the other games theys currently have aren't mixed in either.

RFTG is a pretty good game, and since Goko is working with Keldon, who made quite a nice AI, along with an interface to play against it. So maybe they won't screw this one up.

[GendoIkari]

This is the first time I hear of RFTG, is it worth playing? How does it compare to dominion?

It's awesome. I'm terrible at it, but I still love it.

Hard to compare to Dominion. Maybe a cross between Puerto Rico and Dominion. If you've played San Juan; even more similar to that. I like that it goes really fast. It only has as much player interaction as a game of Dominion without any attacks.. that is to say, you still need to pay close attention to your opponent, but no direct interaction.

[ConMan]

Also, RFTG cards almost all use icons that make for an extremely streamlined, concise and comprehensible game ... once you've learned what they all mean. You will have to learn the difference between -1 and -1, and what it means for a blue rounded rectangle to have an arrow pointing to a hexagon with a 1 in it and another rounded rectangle with a 1 in it. And Keldon's AI is really quite good, in that I as a sucky player can only win about 1 in 10 games against it and people I know who know the game much better can bring that up to about 1 in 5, which presumably means that learning to beat it is a good way to learn how to play the game well, unlike playing against the Goko Dominion bots which teaches you to win against a Scheme rush.

[rspeer]

So I predict that whatever Goko Dominion looks like when Guilds is released is going to be its peak of quality. It will decline from there, possibly quickly.

I wouldn't be too surprised to see them go bankrupt, but I can't imagine any sort of gradual decline over a time span shorter than years. I mean, they aren't going to deliberately plant bugs that weren't there before, are they?

Here's a really belated reply.

Software rots on its own. It doesn't seem like it should be true, but this is what happens, especially when said software involves the Internet. People discover security holes in code you built on, for example, and then you have to update or actually change the code. Server components stop working. In a multiplayer game, people discover unfair exploits.

So, I'm not suggesting Goko would deliberately add bugs. I'm saying if they stop paying their developers, the bugs will show up, and I can't believe they're making enough revenue at this point to pay even a single competent developer who can maintain the game. (And they'd better be paying more than a single developer.)

RFTG might help them, but when people who are going to pay for Dominion have already done so, why would they spend any more time (and therefore money) on it?

I sort of hope I'm wrong. I've tried Goko with the extension, and it's not so bad. It's not good enough for me to pay for, but if they added a decent automatch and fixed a few bugs, maybe it would be. In that case I'd really hope they're not going bust in half a year. But I also hope this. And it's the middle ground, a slow fade into decrepitude, that would be worst for Dominion.