From Benjamin Sipe over on Venture Beat / GamesBeat

The freemium or free-to-play (F2P) business model is still new. Some early adopters have used exploits or tricks to squeeze money from their players while others created what we call a “pay-to-win” experience that practically guarantees victory if you pay money. These tactics may have generated a lot of revenue for developers, but as the market, business model, and expectations mature, players will accept them less and less. They probably won’t go away altogether, but it’s better to get ahead of the curve and start designing and executing smarter games today. Here are 5 examples of what not to do.

Find out more, follow the link…[5 ways developers fail at freemium games | GamesBeat]

Its been a while since there was a good update and a lot of good reasons for that but we are close I tell you, really.   OK big the interruption lately has been a little distraction called funding, more precisely re-upping the coffers.    To get this done we’ve had to divert our time to writing proposals.   As fun as this sounds its required and when the bandwidth is limited, well er, um we go where we think we’ll get cash.  I’m just being honest here. All sots of queries on some of those proposals last week (one day there will be a very long dissertation on funding creative projects in Canada) most of which resulted in me writing tons of appendices to the proposals as opposed to writing or even fixing issues with the new adventures on the test server.

Speaking of which, yes there are new adventures, the number one request form people who do our survey, but I have to admit we missed a bit on the game engine part in that one element of the stories has to be bundled within the game code.   That’s a big no-no normally but sometimes you have to do what you have to do to make things work.   Well its creating issues now as sometimes the game code isn’t in a state to update while the story parts are.   It creates an interdependency that frankly we need to fix.   So once we get this story update out there we’ll pause and get the separation of content in the engine from the game complete.

Have no clue what I’m talking about, don’t worry its just a bit of rambling.   Long story short is there are some dirty things we need to clean out of our closet kind of like spring cleaning.  Once we do we’ll be able to move forward more rapidly.   We’re on it.

Well I/we did that and now its time to get back to it. More specifically its time to start opening up the communication a bit more and to day was the first step. I’ll try and get something out there each week, try that is.

This is the first time we’ve opened up some place where we can spill what’s going on with our products, our stories and our efforts so I know this will only find a few folks but that doesn’t matter. Let the second wave begin.

To get there we are quietly putting our games out there in what we call the Community Beta where you get to look at the game in an early state, play it, try a few things out and give us your opinion, good or bad.   We want it all.   Join our Community and see if you can’t find something interesting to play with.     Sign up on our page to get notified of the latest releases and what new features they might bring.