TU could easily become the next Minecraft if it were possible to host a fully functional private server. Love the game, no amount of thought policing will get families on it because no one will ever agree on moderation ethics.
It seems that Tower Unite Dedicated Server is a subset of the game functionality missing a lot of popular features.
The market for 24/7 condos visible to the public is small niche. The market for families, churches, SIGs, etc. who want a private server is massive. Private hosting is also key to TU’s monetization model: license purchase, no upsell/microtransactions.
Getting Tower Unite Dedicated Server fully functional is also inherently viral marketing. E.g. User spins up a little server and to get family and friends on it, they all buy the license to get the client so that they can log into the private server. This is an exponential boom in TU sales and a better service to the users.
The only option for family now is to let the children log into public servers and meet somewhere. Most parents would never allow this including me.
Dedicated servers for condos is a planned feature, however plaza is not due to many issues that would arise.
To make Tower Unite a family friendly experience, perhaps it’d be best to recommend further in-depth family controls that can be password locked. Such as blocking workshop playermodels under specific tags, hiding players that aren’t on their friends list, hiding gore / vomit, censoring specific words in chat, preventing voice chat, preventing canvas loading from players that aren’t friends, etc.
So those whom want to let their children play TU can feel confident their child is safe.
I only say this as TU is a social game and inherently will attract a 16+ audience.
Controls for concerned parents would be better in the long run.
Can we zoom in on the AGC issues? I may be able to help there.
Your AGC functions as the account server and such, maintains
any account state that is not stored in Steam right?
Could the schema for the AGC not just be copied to a embeded
postgres or mysql as part of your overall build process and
a configuration option to use the embedded AGC? Could omit
all Steam API calls as well in embedded AGC mode and just include
the default player models and a directory where the server admin
can drop other player models if needed. The thing to get into
a private server is the plaza, rides, laser tag, casino, arcade and
minigames and anything else that appears in the plaza going forward.
I know its nontrivial work, I don’t think it is non feasible and the engineering
cost of a few developers hammering this out over the next few months
will pay for it self exponentially and virally.
Most users are not unix admins. There are plenty of third party game hosting
services which plan to offer TU and aren’t offering it due to the AGC issue.
This investment fixes:
scaling issues, simply disappear. At some point, I think you will start seeing TU hosted on servers that you simply can’t afford right now
monetization, the increase in license sales will make your patron donations look like peanuts (thank you all still who donate!!)
viral marketing, this moves TU into the real of something that special interest groups take ownership of and share with pride, this gets you into the Minecraft style business model
very few video games have a product which can get into the Minecraft style business model, TU is one of those few
Your team has done an amazing job with your game design, I want to see this brought to the next level and become a new standard for online social activities. No need to try and go it alone, open it up so that 1000s of game hosting companies are selling your product.
Many game companies focus heavy on supporting third party hosting services while their game is either the wrong kind of game or lacking the quality that TU has. Your game has the quality and exactly the kind of game for third party server hosting services to sell. You are already past the difficult part, now it is time readjust company culture and start cashing in. Software engineers can handle a little change.
Minecraft’s user base would be almost nothing right now if they were still trying to do their own hosting. Hopefully Microsoft does not destroy Minecraft
I think you are tying to do more of a Roblox like strategy without the microtransactions. This tells me that your company culture includes a massive love for the product which you work on which is great. However, you game isn’t correct kind of game for that business model. Roblox business model is a massive amount of venture capital and is also designed for content creators, a housing system is not a unique content creation system, its extremely common. Your unique offering is your plaza and such.
When ncsoft shutdown Wildstar, their remaining user base “the asset” mostly just stuck around because of their great housing system. Regretfully, “the asset” does not pay the bills, new users pay the bills.
The AGC serves to both help verify the legitimacy of transactions, and meshes with the rest of the backend servers (both on Steam’s and PixelTail’s servers) to store items/xp/units/etc. Was going to discuss some things about transactions and game security regarding private servers, but as the original post discussing the workings of the AGC has been removed from the forums, I’d rather not state any potentially false information. However, to put things simply, I believe private servers aren’t viable due to the risk of falsifying transactions, so players on private servers would have to have an entirely separate server-specific unit balance/inventory which doesn’t mesh well with the rest of the game. Someone more knowledgeable about the topic should probably weigh in on this instead, though.
Viability of private servers aside, though, it mostly just seems like you’re trying to turn this game into something it isn’t? The current target market is more for teens/adults, while your suggestions seem like you’re trying to make this a family-friendly game for kids, when it really isn’t. Other than the 13+ age limit required to use Steam in the first place, I’m not sure the gambling (casino), alcohol/drug consumption, and gun violence (Virus/Zombie Massacre/(unreleased) SDNL) in-game is appropriate for children at all.
Additionally, you keep mentioning profits and game sales (and somehow making money off of other people hosting free server software and a very hypothetical large audience clamoring for private servers aside), but you have to consider that the game developers actually have a vision for the game outside of those profits. Sure, having private servers, making the game more child-friendly, etc. might somehow make the game more commercially successful, but if that was the direction the developers wanted to take the game, they’d probably be doing so in the first place.
Also, only one website I’ve seen that offers game servers for Tower Unite is listed as “coming soon”, with no mention of AGC whatsoever; the other sites are already offering server hosting (despite private plazas not being functional). Most likely, all of those sites are simply scraping Steam for dedicated server software and offering those on their website, rather than being added due to user demand.
I get what you mean. To clarify, its not just about being child friendly. It is about scale and SIG (special interest groups). There are are many reasons for people to play on a private server and few reasons to play on a public server.
Would units on some private server not exist in the public servers? Sure. I just mined some gold in Minecraft last week on a private server, I don’t expect that gold to exist on someone else’s server.
At minimum, recommend calling the hosting companies that mention “Tower Unite” to see if they can provide feed back on the current offering. They are your most valuable asset.
As far as free server software. It looks like your current monetization is on the game client. And for the server you are taking the entire hit on the server cost. Sure it is secret sauce, secret sauce that just costs you money.
Will some people poorly administer embeddeed AGC servers and get hacked? Of course it will happen, as with any third party hosted game. And the admins who don’t want their server hacked will install it correctly, or if it is software vulnerability they will upgrade to your latest version where it is fixed. Server hacking risk is already a sunk cost for any game server anyway.
Tower Unite is not designed to be hosted by anyone. It’s a game service that we run. If you were to make it a private hosted service, then it’s not the same game.
I do not think that there is a huge demand for private Tower Unite Plaza servers. Condos are more customizable and powerful for dedicated servers - and that’s something we plan to have.
We are developing new features for the game. Our programmers are already back logged with the game’s development. I believe you are underestimating how much work goes into your proposed changes, which just scratch the surface of the technical workings of Tower.
AGC is proprietary software developed in-house. It’s not designed to be open source or portable.
The enjoyment of the game is due to the fact that it’s centrally hosted and that all your progress is synced. The idea of multiple Plazas is something we are trying to avoid. Eventually we will have a Plaza quick join option and the list of Plazas won’t be in plain view (unless you open a separate option).
