After the cataclysm, the mortal races with sufficient numbers organized themselves between Kingdoms and Empires.

Broadly speaking, the biggest difference in the ideologies comes down to the source of magical power their rulers subscribe to. The Channelers of the Kingdom gain their power from life – the ambient life energy. The Channelers of the Empire gain their power from death – when things die.

Men refer to “Fallen” races as those races that started out as men but were twisted by the Titans of old to serve their purposes.

The Fallen think of themselves as beings who were enhanced beyond the original base stock into something better (and certainly don’t think of themselves as “Fallen”).

By the time of Fallen Enchantress, there are 8 major factions made up by 5 “species" (Men, Quendar, Trog, Wraith, Ironeer) with men broken into 4 races.

From a UI design, there’s no nice way of distinguishing between a race and a species. So we refer to the 4 races of men by their families – Krax, Mancers, Amarians, Tarthan.

Good gravy is this cool:

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Why are computer players so often so dumb? The answer is that we expect computer players to make complex, intelligent decisions super-fast.

When we make computer games, we know that players have a very low tolerance for waiting for computer opponents to “think”. Historically, that has meant that computer players either cheat like crazy or are play terribly (or both).

In one of the minor video game history footnotes, Stardock’s Galactic Civilizations was the first commercial computer game to have a multi-threaded computer AI. This meant that while the player was taking their turn, the computer players could generate their strategy in the background.

The last version of Galactic Civilizations came out 6 years ago and a lot has changed. These days, most people have computers with multiple cores. Dual-core. Quad Core. 6-core, etc. Each core is, effectively, its own CPU. When it came time to design the computer AI for Stardock’s upcoming Elemental: Fallen Enchantress, I had the opportunity to think about how to make of all these cores.

The result is that not only do computer players "think” while the player is taking their turn. It can “think” all the time because each computer players gets its own core (ideally) or at least is shuffled off onto another core. So your animation and mouse input and sound can play on various CPU cores and the computer players are explicitly sent off to other cores so that their thinking doesn’t slow down the game.

This extra CPU horse power matters because Fallen Enchantress is a fantasy strategy game. Fantasy strategy games are notorious for having terrible computer players because the number of choices a computer player faces every move is massive. Fantasy games usually involve having to cast spells, deal with units that have special powers, deal with Heroes/Champions who are leveling up or upgrading.

If you’re playing Diablo 3, or have played some other RPG, you can probably appreciate the challenge in deciding the “right” powers, abilities, and spells to use. Now, imagine having to make those decisions in less than 30ms. Now imagine having to do all that except instead of controlling one unit you’re controlling 1,200 of them.

It seems a bit ironic that it’s not first person shooters or other seemingly cutting edge games that benefit the most from these hardware advances but rather good old fashioned strategy games.

A quick question:

Are there any privately held game studios older than Stardock still in business?

Stardock’s first game was released in 1994 (Galactic Civilizations) and was incorporated in 1993.

I don’t mean hobbyists but actual studio with full time employees.

Anyone know?

As a business model, I very much like free to play.

Free to Play is a direct response to the digitization of PC gaming. It’s no coincidence that free to play is a PC-centric phenomenon.  If we still had a handful of major PC game publications and a major retail presence, there’d be no free to play.  The market adapts, the consumer benefits.

Let’s define free to play:

Free To Play is software that is fully functional and useful/fun in its free form. It’s not a trial. It’s not a “Crippled” version.  It is, ultimately, freeware.  The difference here is that users also have the option, typically within the program itself, to add more features or content to the program. These features and content are completely optional and the user could go just fine without ever spending a cent. Well made freeware makes its premium features “nice to have” but not critical to the program itself.

Migration

Free to Play may have started out as a gaming phenomenon but it just as applicable to non-game software. About a year ago, I outlined to our software unit that all our software was going to migrate to a free to play model. You can see this with Tiles. Tiles is freeware but users can add features to it for small amounts. The base program is compelling on its own. The extras (premium) are clearly “nice to have” but not core to the program (skinning, extra tile filters, etc.).

This week, we’re releasing WindowFX 5, a program we’ve been making for over a decade.  The 5th generation version is free to play. That is, there is no Pro/Plus/Enhanced version. There is only WindowFX.  Users who want premium features can add them in the app for a nominal cost but the application itself is designed to be compelling on its own.

Meanwhile, our PC games are still pretty traditional. The upcoming Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion is a $39.95 game. There will almost certainly be a demo version but it’ll be a traditional demo.  Digital does bring some benefits -- we can offer users of the original Sins of a Solar Empire series a $10 discount.  But we are very much looking at the F2P model when we are designing new titles.

Why is F2P taking over?

Simply put, the loss of a retail channel for selling software combined with the dilution of the software/gaming media has meant that publishers now have to rely, more than ever before, on word of mouth to generate revenue for their games.

Ten years ago, if I was publishing a PC game it went something like this:

Visit PC Gamer, Talk to Steve Bauman at Computer Games Magazine, Visit Computer Gaming World, Gamespot, IGN, GameSpy, a couple of others and you were pretty set on the marketing side.  Then you’d make sure your game was at EB, Best Buy, Gamestop, CompUSA, and a few others and you could expect great sales.

But today?

According to our surveys, most users are getting their information from various sources that boil down to word of mouth (Facebook friends, Twitter friends, Forums).  And retail? Good luck getting shelf space for your PC title. 

So what’s the best way to get word of mouth? Give it away. Give nearly all of it away.  Because it turns out that even if only 1% of the users contribute, you can make a killing as long as you have enough players – which is, ultimately, the challenge.  Because if you make it extremely well and give it away, people will talk about it. And that is what publishers are counting on.

So that’s why Free to Play works and will continue to become more and more dominant as time goes by.  In the meantime, I have to go buy a virtual hat and tweet a picture of my character with it…

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64bit operating systems (like Windows 7-64bit) pave the way to expanding games in interesting ways.  Bigger worlds, more players, more unit types, more stuff.  It wouldn’t be fair to those who don’t have 64-bit OSes to have to pay for features and content they can’t use.

So the question is, would you support the creation of future DLC that is only available to those who have 64-bit?

To vote, go here: https://www.elementalgame.com/journals

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Generating about 2.5MWh per month in power.  Far more than I use.  DTE buys the excess energy at 11 cents per KWh.

In our local school district, it’s $7,600 per student.

Mind you, this is just the state’s contribution to it. That doesn’t count other sources (local and federal for instance). The total amount is allegedly $12,000 per student.

Next time someone yells about the “Slashing” of a few hundred dollars per student, we’re talking a tiny percentage cut.

If you paid a teacher $100,000 per year to teach a class of 30 students, that would be $3,000 per student.  There are, certainly, other costs involved but then again, few teachers are making $100,000 pear year (in fact, the average is less than half that).   

As some people know, the initial release for Fallen Enchantress will not have multiplayer enabled. It was decided early on that 100% of the design and development focus for Fallen Enchantress would be on delivering a world class single player experience.

But after release, lots of things become possible.  Advocates of multiplayer tend to be vocal. To gauge genuine interest, how many Fallen Enchantress players would be willing to pay a dollar to support the development time for a multiplayer mode (Internet cooperative / competitive).

To vote, go to:

https://www.elementalgame.com/journals

Please only vote if you are actually in the beta (the admin poll will display what % of users are actually registered users).

Result: 60% would not pay $1 for MP DLC. 40% would.

Let’s look at 3 web stats that tell us a little bit about the demographics of who visits us.

First, we’ll use our homepage: Stardock.com.

Then, we’ll look at our most popular game, SinsOfASolarEmpire.com

And lastly, we’ll look at our most popular desktop utility, Fences.

These stats are for the month of April, 2012.

Who visit Stardock.com?

• By Browser: Firefox (34%), Chrome (32%), Internet Explorer (24%)
• By OS: Windows 7 (58%), XP (34%), Vista (6%)
• Top Resolution: 1366 x 768 (20%)

Who asks for support?

• By Browser: Internet Explorer (33%) , Firefox (32%), Chrome (30%)
• By OS: Windows 7 (73%), XP (17%), Vista  (6%)
• Top Resolution: 1920x1080 (20%)

Who visits Sins of a Solar Empire?

• By Browser: Firefox (40%), Chrome (30%), IE (22%)
• By OS:  Windows 7 (72%), XP (16%), Vista (13%)
• Top Screen Resolution: 1920x1080 (21%)

Who visits Fences?

• By Browser: Chrome (34%), Firefox (31%), IE (29%)
• By OS: Windows 7 (64%), XP (29%), Vista (5%)
• Top Screen Resolution: 1366x768 (18%)

So what can we take from this?

Stardock.com gets the lion’s share of traffic (90%). Fences gets about 2X the traffic of Sins of a Solar Empire. And support gets a relatively small number of visitors (though bear in mind, we’re still talking about millions of visitors a month in each so it’s all statistically interesting still).

What I find interesting is that when it comes time to ask for support, it’s Internet Explorer users at the top.  It’s the only unusual bump IE gets in visitors (it’s last in every other category).