Hello,
IF you don't want to upgrade your old windows titles any longer, making
them freewares is a good thing to do. This will let people who are under
windows for whatever reason to continue enjoying your games.
If I'm under windows today, what should I do if I want to play your game
? If you have stopped selling it to new customers, I'm stuck. The day
I'm switching to mac or iOS, I may remember that your games were
unavailable, impossible to grab or try out, be limited to demo mode,
when I was under windows, and won't search further. I can think that you
aren't very reliable. Potentially you have lost a customer.
By making your old windows titles freewares, on your side, you no longer
need to care about past customers who lost their keys. You are making
time free to invest on what you want today, develop for mac and iOS. I'm
pretty sure that, after a while, you will just be annoyed about all
those guys who lost their old windows key, and will start taking ages to
reply and eventually no longer reply at all.
I have lost my key. You don't reply within a reasponable time. Certainly
I won't ever try to buy your mac or iOS games since you dont appear very
reliable. Again you have lost a customer forever.
So if I wrap things up, be clear with your customers: you keep
supporting your windows titles as you have done until now, and so you
can of course keep making money out of them. If you chose to stop
supporting them, you should no longer make money out of them. There is
no free sugar ! Being in an half-closed unclear state is going to be
annoying both for you and your customers in the long run. Several other
audio game companies did it, and slowly, finally died.
You can of course decide to close everything under windows right now
without releasing freewares and it's a perfectly valid thinking, but you
are just losing an opportunity to reach more people wo may buy your iOS
version tomorrow, and you are frustrating your current customers who
stay under windows for the moment and with whom you will lose a little
of good reputation. It's up to you.
Thank you for reading.
With all the best.
Le 17.05.2023 19:32, Tobias Vinteus a écrit :
Hi,
If your goal is to reach the widest possible audience, then it would
seem to me that staying on Windows would be the better choice.
Technologies like haptic feedbakc and spatial audio are available on
Windows, after all.
There is one more thing to consider. I have an iPod 6th generation. Many
apps cannot be updated due to the last supported OS version for that
device being iOS 12. This means that your games might potentially stop
working or at least wouldn’t be able to update on older iOS devices.
Being able to afford newer devices might not be as easy for us in the
blind Community compared to people in general. On a sidenote this rarely
happens on my Android device despite its oS being several iterations behind.
Being no exper, I don’t know the ammount of effort it would take to port
a modern Windows game to Xbox, but I would imagine it to be
comparatively Little, furthermore strengthening the argument to stay on
Windows.
If you haven’t already don eso, I would recommend you perform some kind
of market survey to gauge which platform would be the most profitable
one to develop for.
Just my two cents. I wish you good luck and am looking forward to what
comes out of Draconis in the future.
Cheers,
Tobias
Skickades från E-post <https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=550986>
för Windows
*Från: *Cara Quinn <mailto:caraqu...@caraquinn.com>
*Skickat: *den 15 maj 2023 18:51
*Till: *blind-gamers@groups.io <mailto:blind-gamers@groups.io>
*Kopia: *Cara Quinn <mailto:caraqu...@caraquinn.com>
*Ämne: *[blind-gamers] A Dragon Reborn
It's been a long while, but it's finally time to announce the start of a
new chapter for Draconis Entertainment, LLC. The dragon is awakening yet
again!
This new incarnation of the company brings big and exciting changes. We
will explain those and some of our plans for the future here, but know
that we aren't spilling all the beans quite yet. What fun would that be!
The world has moved on!
Our first announcement is that we are bringing new and enhanced versions
of our classic games, along with brand-new titles, into the modern age
and on to Apple platforms, with an emphasis on iPhone! Thanks to
VoiceOver, the overwhelming majority of the visually impaired community
has access to at least one of Apple's operating systems, and this will
make our games available to the widest possible audience. It's hard to
believe sometimes, but that little rectangle of glass we all carry in
our pockets has infinitely more power than any of the PCs or Macs that
our legacy titles were developed on, and with the tight integration of
Apple's operating systems, we will be able to easily make new releases
available for iPhone, iPad, Mac, or AppleTV going forward. This approach
means that we can integrate newer technologies like full 3D spatial
audio, touch and accelerometer interaction, and support for console game
controllers and advanced haptics.
What does this mean for our Windows products?
We know how beloved these games have been over the years—we love them
too—and we want to bring all of them, with expansions and new features,
into the twenty-first century, so they can be enjoyed by new and old
generations of gamers alike. The support cost for the original Windows
games, some of which were new when Nintendo 64 was the hot ticket and
Xbox didn't yet exist, is simply too high to manage for a small company
like us, while also investing in the future.
We will be bringing our Windows development to a close and giving these
games new life on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and AppleTV. That said, for the
time being, we will continue to offer downloads of the installation
packages for our legacy catalog on our site, and customers who purchased
them may request replacement keys within reason. (For more details, see
the Legacy section of our new website at https://draconis.llc.)
Back in March, the legacy Draconis Score Server (DSS) and Draconis
Online License Factory (DOLF) for the Windows versions of ChangeReaction
2 and SilverDollar, migrated to a new host and received some
modernization. As you've already seen, this brought much needed
stability to both of those services.
So what’s up first?
With all of that in mind, we're pleased to introduce major updates to
the Mac versions of ChangeReaction and SilverDollar. Freed from the
cross-platform constraints of developing for both macOS and Windows, we
have been able to add some new features to these titles. The most
exciting of which is full-support for any of the console game
controllers supported by Apple platforms. These include the PlayStation
DualShock 4 or DualSense 5, the Xbox X / S controllers, the Nintendo
Switch JoyCons, any MFI controller, and others. SilverDollar now
includes a great deal of new and remastered audio, support for Apple
Silicon, and countless bug fixes and tweaks.
These upgraded titles will be available as free updates to anyone who
purchased them previously from the Mac App Store. SilverDollar 2.0 is
out now and is available for free. ChangeReaction 3.0 will have its
price reduced to $4.99 in the US when it is reintroduced in the coming
weeks. (Prices will vary based on exchange rates.)
Looking forward, the development to bring a mix of new and familiar
titles to life is well-underway, and we can’t wait to show you what
we’ve been working on! The future is bright.
We know the dragon has been sleeping for a very long time. We appreciate
your patience and support more than we can say. Thank you for the last
twenty years. We hope you'll join us as the dragon is reborn.
Cheers!
Cara
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