Trees in the house

[prog]

(x-posted to the devblog)

I am stoked to announce that you can now buy both flavors of Treehouse from our store.

There's a lot of nice things going on with Treehouse, actually. It is apparently the first retail configuration of Icehouse pyramids that the Looneys have been able to sell at a profitable pace. It turns out that the concept of $9 for a fun, complete game is a much stronger sell than $9 for some pieces with no rules included.

Phrased that way, it sounds rather well, duh, but it took many years for both the Looneys and their many fans (myself included) to come to terms with the fact that an abstract board gaming system just won't sell if you only sell it as a system. Selling it as a fun but rigidly defined (and inexpensive!) game that, oh look, happens to have an entire rich and storied game system attached to it is really the way to go.

Volity Games can take a lesson from this. One way to really grow our userbase - in terms of both players and developers - involves putting out a great game and saying "Hey, come play this great online game with your friends! It has its own chat lobby and friends roster and everything!" Hook the user with that, and then let them discover the whole Volity Network from there.

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

I run into this all the time at work, where many of my projects travel from "solve this problem" to "I made a tool that solves that entire class of problems". When I present the tool, I get blank stares.

'Normal' people are *really* bad at thinking in abstract; they want the story, the plot. Like you say, it's obvious in retrospect, but not always obvious ahead of time, especially for programmers who are always used to thinking in patterns and trying to figure out how to generify something.

For Volity, I think the approach you're taking -- having a stable of games, plus a nice way to extend that stable -- is the right approach; but obviously you'd be best off if you had a 'killer game' that you could suck people in with.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Thinking in patterns vs. thinking in applications... yes, that's a great way of putting it.

Fluxx and Werewolf, which we already have, both have potential as a killer app. Because of the programming deal brewing in the background, we've been thinking about ways to "Brand" the initial Volity experience so that, as far as you know or care, you are downloading, installing and running the online version of this game you want to play. We'd leave enough tantalizing trails leading off that game, though, into the larger world...