I've also followed Amplitude Studio's games, and they are mostly very good, although I do feel that Endless Space is very 'sparse' in terms of actual gameplay. It certainly feels like a mish-mash of features that people voted for and were stuck together without really any idea of how they should fit in with the other gameplay mechanics.Cabrelbeuk wrote:Since we are in casual discussion, I was wondering if you (Egosoft) have ever considered to do a fully open development system like Amplitude Studio (endless games, last one being endless space 2) ?
Idea being every design/mechanics choices is detailed and given publically and the community do vote, give ideas of improvment and for the part who have access to alphas give feedback (I guess the last part is similar to DevNet, so already have. Difference being almost everything is public).
It worked for them, and Sega accepted to edit them despite having this unusual organization..
They did got a few months of early-access on Steam with limited access to the contents but was in the last stage of development. Ideas is not crowfunding or years of Early access.
Not to mention that their turnaround time for patches and updates was excruciatingly slow for even the smallest of features.
There are negatives to this method that obviously CBJ and the team have considered and wouldn't work for them, in the same vein that 'early access' wouldn't help them much either (too much resource needed to essentially project manage the feedback and corralling users into accepting the direction the devs sometimes need to go in).