Re: Starlanes: Audio only MMORPG for Amazon Echo
Honestly, they've moved international far quicker than I expected. I've actually be caught flat-footed without a good structure for localization. That's part of the delay in StarLanes 4.0; I'm putting in the infrastructure necessary for translation. Doing multi-lingual audio apps is hard. The speech recognition part is a complete rewrite on the back end.
The thing is, they've sold millions of units. From 4 to 40, depending on how you listen to. (Amazon doesn't give numbers.) Yet the engagement with 3rd party skills is rock bottom. I've got about a dozen skills out there, and the most popular gets close to 150 unique users a day. From the stats I've seen others share, that's actually pretty good as far as 3rd party skills go. But as a fraction of the millions of users... it's pathetic.
I think part of the problem is Amazon hasn't really decided what the Echo is really going to be. Is it a gateway to the Internet of Things and the automated home? Is it a hand's free music streaming service? Is it a concierge and sales assistant? Really, they want it to be all of these things. But their message and support for any one of these things is diffuse with goals so broad.
As Google Home enters the market, they will, hopefully, either sharpen their message, or collapse. People talk about the "founder's effect" a lot. The advantage for being first in to a new market. And, yes, that can be a factor. But in new territory (as opposed to undeveloped territory) I think that the advantage can often go to the second entrant. They can enter cognizant of the mistakes made by the first, and plot a more efficient course. We'll just have to see.
_______________________________________________ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
