Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor is being worked on heavily. This week we started implementing a new feature that allows players to have the AI design ships for them. So for new players in particular who just want a decently designed ship, they can now get it with this new option.

Obviously the AI is going to be a major element of what we start working on. Beta 5, which is due out later this month to those who have pre-ordered it, will be the first beta with significant AI enhancements. It will also have a host of other tweaks based on increased internal play testing.

The last beta, beta 4C, was the first one to provide updated AI to the minor races. We haven't seen too many reports on any differences in their behavior. We'll be making a lot more tweaks to them. Basically, minor races will behave the same as major races in the final version except that they won't colonize new planets. But they'll invade, research, and just generally behave smarter than they have in the past.

For the past couple weeks, Stardock has had its collective attention on Sins of a Solar Empire. It's been a lot of work to get that out but the results have been fantastic. It's currently the #1 game in North America according to Gamerankings user interest polling. Sales have been phenomenal as well and the first few reviews have been very positive.

In the next week or so, we'll be migrating to an updated forum back-end that should be (in theory) much faster than what we have today.  It should also have a lot of cool new features. Naturally, everyone will hate it.

Most of the Stardock games team is working on the upcoming 4X fantasy strategy game which will be turn-based and have turn-based tactical battles and support multiplayer.  It uses a brand new engine we've been developing that allows players to zoom out and see the world as a cloth (Tolkien-esq) map or zoom in to see individual leaves on trees. The reason we've developed our own engine is so that we can have fine control on the hardware requirements. We want people with 5 year old systems to be able to play the game easily (and I mean play it VERY easily) but at the same time allow players with the latest DirectX 10 cards to get an incredible visual experience too.  We'll open that up for pre-orders (which will allow users into the beta) probably by end of Spring.

So that's what's happening.  Let us know if you need anything.

Cheers!

 

So you make a product and somehow you manage to get it at the store where millions of people see it. Pretty exciting eh? Thanks to the support of PC gamers, Sins of a Solar Empire is now at retail in most of North America.

Now, to thank you back, here's what we're going to do:

Take a picture of you (or a loved one) holding a Sins of a Solar box at a store, post the picture here in the comments along with which store you were at and get a chance to win an official Sins of a Solar Empire T-shirt.

The first 20 people to post pictures will automatically get one (we'll email you with shipping info and shirt size).  After that, we'll randomly select good pictures and keep sending shirts out while supplies last.

 

When skinning first got started, there was a kind of unspoken understanding between the people who made software and the people who used the software. There would be a symbiotic relationship between 3 groups.  The first group, the developers, would create software to customize the look and feel of your applications and desktop. The second group, the skinners, would create the content for these programs. And the third group, the users, would work with the first two groups to help test and ensure the software worked fine by giving detailed reports on betas and even releases to help perfect the program in general.  In return, the software was far far cheaper than software in other markets. Thus was borne the "skinning community".

Even into 2008, where a typical new game is $50 to $70 and the typical utility software is $50 to $70, the most popular desktop enhancement software programs remain $20 or less.  In fact, Object Desktop, an entire collection of desktop enhancements, is only $50. To put it in collection, WinRar, which is most commonly (let's be honest here) used to compress pirated software, is about $40 all by itself.

As skinning has become more mainstream, the relationship between the three parties has evolved.  Increasingly, the content creation is shouldered by fewer and fewer people. We created the Master Skinning program as an effort (a successful one) to encourage skinners with high degrees of talent to continue sharing their creations.  The net result is that content is starting to cost money because so few new users are creating it (even for relatively simple things).  Similarly, users are much less inclined to participate in open beta programs.  Look at the CursorFX release. There's multiple posts complaining in the vaguest terms that it doesn't work on their systems.  It works here just fine. Nearly everyone here is running CursorFX on XP or Vista without incident. We had an open beta but we received very few reports on it. 

The reality is, while the skinning "community" still exists, it is now a small sub-section of the "skinning market" which is made up of traditional consumers who simply expect (with good reason) to pay money in exchange for a program and content that just works.  There's nothing wrong with that. That's how every other market works. But those markets don't support products that are $10 to $20.  Those products are $50 to $70.   The only reason WindowBlinds isn't already a $40 program is because of the skinners and that it still gets significant help from the community in testing new beta versions (though drastically less than in the old days when, ironically, it had far fewer users).

Skinning is continuing to evolve. It's evolving increasingly into a more traditional consumer-oriented market.  Stardock, I suspect, will have to adapt with some system that allows users who are contributing time and effort to the community to get credits which lets them buy the software at a less expensive price while traditional consumers pay the un-subsidized rate for the products. 

I've written an article that goes into more detail.  Click the link below to check it out. 

Skinning first started getting popular around 1999. Back then, it was mostly about skinning Winamp and WindowBlinds.  Today, people expect to be able to customize virtually every aspect of their PC experience. From the moment someone boots to the time they shut down, everything a user sees they now anticipate the ability to personalize somehow if they choose to.

In the beginning, the content came from the community. The software itself was developed within the community as well. A given program would go through many beta iterations and technically savvy users would report problems they had, post their system info, and work with the developers to fix the problems. 

Because the community was essentially a partner in the production of the software, the software was relatively cheap. $10 to $20 was the typical price for any customization program. After all, if the user base was actively part of the development process and they were the ones providing the bulk of the content, how could anyone justify charging more than that?  And, as a practical matter, community participation drastically lowered the cost to develop skinning software which in turn opened the door to lots of freeware and shareware developers, working out of their houses, to create cool stuff.

When Windows XP came along in 2001, things began to change. Skinning became much more mainstream. The ratio between consumers of software/content to producers of software/content changed dramatically.  Once skinning went mainstream, users expectations began to change.  The number of people willing to create content dramatically decreased as a % of the user base.

In addition, the community that once would provide in-depth reports on bugs evolved into a community that increasingly would provide reports like "This is broke, it don't work on my computer. How could you release this buggy mess????" The same community that produced incredibly talented skinners increasingly became a community of consumers waiting for someone else to make things for them.

As the skinning community became more consumer-centric, the costs of providing software and content for that community increased. In many respects, the "community" of year year is long. Now it's a "market". Increasingly, unconsciously, even internally the word "market" has begun replacing the term "community".  The "skinning market" differs from the "skinning community" in that the former expects the software developers to do it all while the latter sees themselves as part of a team with the developers.

The net result is that most users simply want to buy a product and get really high quality content and not mess around with "community" content. Which, naturally, means that fewer people, as a % are willing to use the various editors and tools to create community content.

Similarly, today's users often become irate at the notion of running into bugs in software marked as betas. Very few users are willing to even try out betas and give feedback. Moreover, some people who do try out betas and do post expect that every issue they consider important will be quickly addressed and will stop contributing feedback if their particular issues aren't responded to in a timely way.

So what does this mean?

I predict we'll see the following trends:

1. Content will begin to be provided as an additional optional service. For example, a user might buy WindowBlinds for $20 OR have the option to buy WindowBlinds Plus for $40 which includes a 1-year subscription to WinCustomize.com.
2. WinCustomize.com subscriptions will continue to evolve to where content becomes increasingly the value-add users get.  Discounts on "Master Skins" and free content from Stardock Design will become the norm.
3. Users who contribute help in testing betas, giving feedback, generating content, helping in the community will get free subscriptions.

That's the 3 thigns I think will happen in the future as the skinning world adapts to becoming mainstream. In my mind, that's the best way for skinning to grow while saving its own soul.

Hopefully, people aren't taking what I'm writing as "complaining".  What I am doing is making observations about how the skinning world is evolving over time. The mainstreaming of it is altering the perceived relationship between the people who make stuff and the people who use stuff. The unspoken social contract between the two was traditionally that we developers make our stuff cheap and in return the users make the content and help us track down problems in an open and symbiotic way.  But that relationship has changed to being more akin to a traditional producer/consumer relationship. Which is fine if that's what the...market has chosen.

Wow.  We're just so happy that people are liking the game.  We're also happy that the reviews are coming out very positive so far.  And, well, we're definitely happy with the sales.  It's doing even better than Galactic Civilizations II did which was really well.

Here's our upcoming schedule:

1. Get a v1.03 update out
2. Make Demo
3. Start work on v1.04

We hope to get v1.03 out by the end of the month (no promises though). Ironclad (and Stardock) are pretty exhausted from the final weeks of effort and the first week of launch so resting will be done.

So think of v1.03 as a few key tweaks that you think would really make the game more enjoyable not just for you but other people.

Here's an example of things we're talking about right now:

• Updated AI players
• More Game Speed Options
• More aggressive AI players replacing dropped players (i.e. active AI)
• AI surrendering
• Improvements to ICO
• Unit cap increases

We have lots of ideas. But the key thing to remember, we want to get 1.03 out this month if possible. So sure, we can all imagine things like random events or fancier diplomacy or other things of that nature but those would take far too long to get into the game.

 

GameSpy has released their review of Sins of a Solar Empire. The first review from one of the major game magazines.  From the review:

The reason that Sins of a Solar Empire works is that it truly respects and celebrates both styles of strategy gaming. It marries the grand scope and Nietzschian will-to-power embodied by the best "4X" conquer-the-universe titles with the adrenaline-fueled immediacy and moment-to-moment decision making of a great real-time strategy game. More than that, it uses the best aspects of both styles to create a uniquely enjoyable experience that shouldn't be missed by any strategy gamer out there who thinks they've got what it takes to rule the galaxy.

The final score was 4.5 out of 5 with the primary negatives being that the game doesn't include a story-driven campaign (it includes massive sand box creation tools instead) and some problems with Ironclad Online which are addressed in the 1.02 update.

We highly recommend you check out the full review as GameSpy's Allen Rausch is one of the top strategy game reviewers in the industry.

View: GameSpy Review

I hope to do this every month or so. I love to read and I tend to go through books like nothing. In January, I didn't get a chance to read anything as I was so busy with recent projects. But things have started to return to some level of normality and so I've got a bunch of new books on my night stand to read.

So now I'm starting to read again.  This month I'm reading "Arrest Proof Yourself" which I got to learn more about what types of people the police run into. Fascinating stuff.  I'm getting caught up on Ultimate Spider-Man comic books

Liberal Fascism, a book that outlines how modern liberals (left wingers) are quite similar in their behavior, backgrounds, and goals to fascists of the 1920s and 1930s.  I havne't read this one yet but I suspect you right wingers will like this.

Freedomnomics, a book that explains why free markets provide a better way of life for people than the alternatives.

Your Inner Fish is a fascinating read on how many of our weird physiological issues can be traced back through evolution to our rise from fish.

Hostile Takeover is a far left book outlining the argument on how right wingers, the rich, and corporations have conspired to take over our lives. A sure thing for you left wingers out there.

The World Without us is a book that outlines what would happen to the planet if humans disappeared.

I didn't get to read much in January. I basically got up, went to work for 8 hours at the office, came home, worked for another 8 hours, and went to bed and repeated that. Very busy time in those last weeks of Sins of a Solar Empire, new year business work, GalCiv II: Twilight of the Arnor, MyColors, WindowBlinds, DeskScapes, Impulse, etc.

But now I'm back.

So now I'm starting to read again.  This month I'm reading "Arrest Proof Yourself" which I got to learn more about what types of people the police run into. Fascinating stuff.  I'm getting caught up on Ultimate Spider-Man comic books

Liberal Fascism, a book that outlines how modern liberals (left wingers) are quite similar in their behavior, backgrounds, and goals to fascists of the 1920s and 1930s.

Freedomnomics, a book that explains why free markets provide a better way of life for people than the alternatives.

Your Inner Fish is a fascinating read on how many of our weird physiological issues can be traced back through evolution to our rise from fish.

Hostile Takeover is a far left book outlining the argument on how right wingers, the rich, and corporations have conspired to take over our lives. A sure thing for you left wingers out there.

The World Without us is a book that outlines what would happen to the planet if humans disappeared.

I'm going to go into this more when I have more time. It saddens me a bit that people let their ideologies determine their realities to such a large degree.

If we had a doctor writing articles about tips for better health, I would take those articles pretty seriously.

At the risk of being an "arrogant prick" I think that having someone who started with nothing who is now "rich" providing observations on behaviors and about how the world actually works as opposed to how people wish it worked would be considered valuable. But to each their own.

So let me briefly summarize by pointing out two truths about life:

First, the world can broadly be divided between people who do things and people who don't do things. The spectrum is broad between the extremes but it isn't that graduated (that is, most people are significantly in one category or another, they aren't skirting the gray area in the middle as much as one might think).

Second, the world can broadly be divided between good people and evil people. I know the word "evil" makes some people uncomfortable. So when I say evil, I mean people whose natural instincts are so destructive to civil society that great harm emerges when they gain power over others.

The people who do things always have the power. How that power manifests itself depends on whether they gravitate towards the public or private sector.

Most people are good and so most people who do things are good too. 

The public sector and the private sector are neither good nor evil. Individuals are good or evil but institutions are neither.  However, the public sector has a monopoly on the use of legal violence.

Evil people who do things will tend to gravitate towards the public sector either directly (rarely) or more commonly manipulating the public sector through corrupt private organizations.

That is why it is never a good idea to allow the public sector to get too big. Because people who do things who are also bad people will be more inclined to make full use of the fact that the public sector has a monopoly on the legal use of violence to their own end.

What most people don't seem to realize is that in the end, the people who do things almost always end up on top of any situation while the people who don't do things are largely at their mercy.

Whenever the government does something, the people who do things are rarely impacted because they simply adapt.  Change campaign finance laws and the people who do things will find a way (such as the 527's).  Taxes too high? People who do things outsource jobs. Raise minimum wage on them and they'll replace workers with automation (think about that next time you're checking yourself out at the store). Regulate an industry too much and the people who do things go elsewhere.

The important thing to remember is that because most people don't do very much (and I don't mean that to be insulting, but it's all relative) they end up the victims of the unintended consequences of policies they probably supported.  Usually, the people who don't do much don't even recognize what's happened to them until after the fact.  To them, everything that happens probably seems like it was "bound to happen" when in fact it happened because specific people did things largely in response to a recognized opportunity.

So next time you're supporting some policy that targets the people who do things, just remember that it doesn't actually affect them. They'll adapt. Most people won't and they'll be left with the consequences.