Skwish-E

I was looking for Devil's Advocate Cake.

I have two fire arms in mine.

It's more effective to throw the rock at the cpu unit instead of the monitor. I'm just saying...

Some worthless stuff does get stuck in the junk bag, but unless you go rummaging around in it looking for something, you'll probably never know (or care).

Icy Lance with shades and a leather jacket.

Jeff's blog entry today is about writing shorter games.

Old People Don't Finish Stuff

For some reason, I can't comment on his blog anymore, so I have to post it here. The thing about Jeff's games that make them so great is the sweeping scope and sheer length of time it takes to get through them. My attention span is much longer than 10 hours, and I want a game that I can play for a year while waiting for the new one. Of course a full year for one playthrough is a bit too much even for me.

 

So here's the question:

Should future games be Avadon Length of Avernum 1-3 length?

 

But at $50 I would have to turn it down since I have a family of 7 to feed, clothe, and school. $45 is my upper limit for a game, and about all I can spend on games in a year, so Jeff pretty much gets all my Gaming $.

In every marketing and pricing campaign, you look for the sweet spot of pricing. There are two curves. One that goes down, and that is the number of people who will buy based on increasing price. The other curve is based on the total sales dollars based on the number of people who buy at that price, and it ususally looks like a skewed bell curve. While you could sell the game for $100,000 to one guy, and make $100,000, you probably won't find that one guy. You could sell it to 100,000 people for $1 and make pretty much the same amount of money (By not considering incremental sales costs, I'm being over simplistic here.) Somewhere in between there is a peak. Say you sell it to 10,000 people at $20, but when you drop the price to $10, you sell it to 18,000 people. Then dropping the price is a bad idea, even if the 8,000 people scream about it. A LOT of money and research go into these decisions. I don't know how Jeff makes his business decisions other than what he puts on his blog, but I'm sure that he was surpeised at the increase of sales due to lower prices for his games. Now, he may be in the "How low can you go?" phase, but I wouls hate to see him drop the game to $5, then not be able to sell 50,000 copies, and have to raise the price back up for the next version. He would likely lose even core customers if that happens.

Fireball can only be cast if she is holding a staff or rod. It does get the advantages of increased critical hits, and it has no cooldown period, meaning yoiu can cast it as often as you have the action points to do so. Icy Lance can be used from the Use Ability button, and it does have a cooldown period.

OK! I'm excited!!! Does this count?!!!!!

My weirdest one was a slith named Missle. Then again, I did have an all nephil party named after cats I have owned.

I sleep with a night light because the dark is afraid of me.

And this is how the game gets corrupted, and Jeff ends up losing his PC customer base. I'm willing to put up with "Achievements" because I can just ignore them, but this...

Maybe I am TOO old school.

No option for both?

I am in full agreement here, though even the thought of Jeff diving into a huge bin of coins and swimming around is just a bit disturbing. Thanks for that image. Now I need to wash out my brain with tequila.

That is not at all enough for healthy salaries for three people. You have to consider that you are talking Revenue here, not profit. To see how much the company makes, you have to know what their expenses are. You need to account for taxes, taxes, and more taxes. You also need to account for insurance. There's also legal fees, web hosting fees, keeping a good set of equipment running, paying for music, graphics, etc. On top of that, if there are any employees (other than just Jeff himself), there is Workmans Compensation Insurance, Unemployment Insurance, and all kinds of other money-sucking government regulations. I would not be surprised if half of that Gross Revenue is eaten up before any profit at all appears. That comes down to a decent salary for ONE person when you consider the market Jeff lives in, his skills and talent, and the fact that he has to pay the full cost of health insurance for his family.

I hope his sales are in the hundreds of thousands rather than the tens of thousands, but the real point to all of this is: If I am satisfied with their product and they sell it for a price I am willing to pay, then t does not matter to me how much money a person/company makes. This is not a land where we should be looking at others and saying, "He shouldn't charge that much for his product, he doesn't need the money."

The salamanders carry the gold in their mouths, under the tongue. They like the way it feels after they radiate fire, it's like malleable, metal chewing gum.

"No,... This is what going crazy feels like" -- Simon (upon seeing the statue of Jane Cobb)

In geneforge, I paved the floor outside of the magical forge with gemstones. Then one time in Avernum 5 I tried to see how big a pile of skulls I could make by picking up every skull I found and dropping it in the corner of the portal room.

Dr Demento?

 

Fish heads, fish heads, roly poly fish heads ...

My guys used to use the imagined spell "reverse time" just as they died. Here's how it works: You save the game before going into a potentially dangerous area, then if you die, reverse time to before you entered (reload), then use different tactics, or don't go there yet. When I started playing my first SW game (Avernum 4 on Normal), if took me a death or two to figure this out, then I managed to bumble through, learning as I went.

The wolves eat the bats and chitrachs. That's why there arent 1,000 chitrachs and 10,000 flesh-eating bats.

Yeah, my dislike for Austen is most likely as result of me being shallow and easily bored. Now if she would have written Pride and the Assassin, or Sense and Explosions, maybe we would have been better friends.

 

As far as Piers Anthony goes, the psychic spambot DID seem to make a lot of sense. I had a hard time getting my wife to let my son read "The Color of Her Panties."

Well, you know Eeyore has to be a zombie. His tail keeps falling off.

Jane Austen made me want to strangle kittens. It's been 28 years since High School, and I don't remember many of the things I did back then. I loved Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, Antigone, and Slaughterhouse 5. Not so big a fan of Catch-22, The Crucible, The Scarlet Letter, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, Siddhartha. I have blocked some of the others out of my mind.