?

[mazzz]

will it be free?

[edit by Mark to change thread title from '?' so it was a bit more informative.]

[Mark_Everson]

Hi mazzz, welcome to Clash!

In any case, development demos will be free for quite some time going forward. Here is the current plan on the longer-term commercial/free issue. It may change in the future due to the desires of project contributors.

I want us to be able to gauge the commercial success of the project, and, if Clash is a reasonable success, be able to return something in the way of cash to those who worked so hard to make it so. If after some period of time Clash turned out to be a commercial failure with only a small core of enthusiasts, I would certainly be willing to release the entire code under the GPL, depending on the wishes of others in the project of course.

Now, to make any of my desires work we need to come up with a marketing model over the web, where the market is not immediately destroyed due to pirating. I'm not sure I have the answers for how to do this, so the whole point on commercial success may be moot. Provided we could figure how to do this, the price of Clash would be something fairly minimal like $20, EUR20, or equivalent. I know this sounds like money-grubbing to the open source evangelists, but there is the practical issue that we might with sufficient funds be able to actually hire one of our programmers or other team members to be able to work full-time on the game, thus significantly increasing the rate of progress. My plan would be to largely pour back money created in selling Clash into the project so that they game could evolve more rapidly. The plan is to improve Clash continuously after the first release as long as the team's interest remains.

There are other options of the open source / free program choices that are available to us. I won't go into those here, but we might be moving to a more open source version in the near future.

Since this may be of interest to others, could you change the title of your post to something more desriptive like "Will Clash be free?".

[Richard Bruns]

I will state again that I do not now and have never expected to see any income from my work on this project. It is a fun hobby and a learning experience. I vote for immediately putting everything we have done under the GPL.

I think that trying to divide money among team members would be a very bad thing. However, the plan to get money and plow it back into the project, in the spirit of a not-for-profit enterprise, does have merit.

Originally posted by Mark_Everson
Now, to make any of my desires work we need to come up with a marketing model over the web, where the market is not immediately destroyed due to pirating. I'm not sure I have the answers for how to do this, so the whole point on commercial success may be moot.

What about keeping the game on a server and having people log on to the server and play the game through their web browser? Players would get accounts with passwords instead of downloading the software. We can give free trials, and then after a certain point charge for access, preferably after they get hooked. The payment could be a single lump sum for infinite access, a monthly subscription, paying for each game, or some combination. And they would have to hack the server if they wanted to copy or pirate the code.

This should also allow us to change and update the game seamlessly. Instead of having players download updates or patches, we simply change the code on the server.

That would require changes in the interface and coding, but from what little I know of the functionality of Java it should be possible. It might also make multiplayer a lot easier. The main downside is that it requires internet access even to play single player, but, realistically, almost everybody in our target market will have broadband by the time we finally get the game finished, so that won´t be a major problem.

Obviously such a plan would be very long-term, and would require quite a bit of logistical management, as well as investment and overhead for the server. But if you want to make people pay, this is what I would recommend.

[LDiCesare]

What about keeping the game on a server and having people log on to the server and play the game through their web browser? Players would get accounts with passwords instead of downloading the software. We can give free trials, and then after a certain point charge for access, preferably after they get hooked. The payment could be a single lump sum for infinite access, a monthly subscription, paying for each game, or some combination. And they would have to hack the server if they wanted to copy or pirate the code.

That wouldn't be very practical. I know I wouldn't play such a game. Making it an applet would kill the game because of the loading time. Requiring a download and then to log on the web in order to play would give more money to the ISPs than to Clash IMO. I know we may all have broadband by then, but I am not so sure of it.

As for commercial aspects, I agree the only thing which would be interesting would be to allow us to hire/pay someone to work on the game, in whatever area we need work. (I know that I'd like to code Clash as a job for instance, but I am quite sure that it wouldn't pay enough for make a living and there may be carreer issues afterwards because working on Clash wouldn't last eternally.)
I think the most interesting aspect in having people to pay for the game would be to find a distributor who would be willing to fund some PR/advertising to get the game sold so more people can play the game (and we can have more feedback).

[Richard Bruns]

I was thinking in terms of active server pages rather than an applet. If we do an applet, than it is fairly easy to copy and pirate the code. The idea is that the user´s computer does not have to load any game code or data. The only applet code is the interface, which is only concerned with turning user commands into data to be sent to the server when the end turn button is pressed. The server crunches all the numbers and sends the output back to the user. There should be no need for any kind of downloaded program or huge applet to be run off the user´s computer.