Well, this is where we come back to resources. Making tutorials is not exactly fun, nor is it an end unto itself. The purpose of them is to train the players to play the game, and that includes getting new players interested enough that they continue on with the game. Now, to add a "series of short missions" that are well designed and fun and which magically explain the game without any text (or without lengthy voiceovers, which of course require both voice actors AND enormous disk space / bandwidth given their combined length, and which will have to be re-recorded every time the game evolves, which is frequently), we're looking at a pretty enormous expense, as well as a month or possibly more of development time, before we get to all the inevitable bug reports. Meanwhile we're not really adding anything exciting to this game, or making new games.
In order for that to make economic sense, I'd have to have a reasonable assurance that doing an activity like that would lead to a substantial return. In all my experience, in talking to other indie game designers, and in observing other games, I've not witnessed any such correlation. Some of the most popular strategy games have utterly wretched tutorials. Depending on who you ask, ours are either really good or really terrible or somewhere in the middle. A lot of that boils down to taste: but, more often than not, the people who are in our key target demographic are the ones that like the tutorials here the best.
So I'd call that a win, personally. Sure, there are infinite things that one could do with the game. I could add PVP. I could add some sort of "mini AI War" mode to appeal to those with shorter attention spans or those who want a more bite-sized experience. We could pour thousands of dollars and hundreds of man hours into tutorials. We could rewrite the game engine to be fully 3D (or at least try -- whether or not that would succeed would be another story). We could try to adapt it to other platforms, or any number of specific in-game features.
But the fact remains that I don't think any of those things would make a stratospheric difference in the number of players we'd have. I could be wrong, but I just haven't seen evidence of that anywhere else with a game this mature. Instead, we build on what we have, and our main thrust of new players comes from those who have never heard of it (which is a lot of people) but who would like it more or less the way it is, as well as those people who've been meaning to try it for a long time but haven't yet. We won't get super rich doing that, but then again -- three of us can make almost a year's salary with nine man-weeks of work on an expansion, which isn't too shabby. I think a lot of larger companies would kill for that kind of ROI, not that we can tap that endlessly, or even too frequently.
But all that is beside the point, even. More to the point, it's about the best ROI on how we spend our time. And about where risk is, etc. Pursuing Alden Ridge is far less risky and far likelier to have a greater return compared to doing the massive tutorials for AI War. AI War seems to grow steadily with or without tutorials with voiceovers, but that's a market it will eventually tap out at some unknown point in the future no matter what we can do: there are simply only so many people who like this sort of game, and we're not likely to be able to get much magazine coverage for the game at this stage, which is what we'd really need to expand. So, short of spending money we don't have on advertising we aren't good at making, there's not a ton we can do there -- even if we did have better tutorials, the people that would matter to would likely never even know. The most likely result is that we'd get a slight bump in revenue, while sales continued on at a largely-constant pace.
On the other hand, pursuing a game like Alden Ridge has a fresh new concept that appeals to a lot of our existing fanbase as well as an even wider market than AI War was ever designed to appeal to. We have the chance of making new sales to our existing customers, as well as bringing in a ton of new customers -- and with the magazine coverage we will hopefully be able to get, the increased interest will likely bring added exposure to AI War and Tidalis, as well. Our biggest problem isn't that people don't like our games, it's that few people have heard of AI War and almost no-one has heard of Tidalis (well, now that almost 30,000 people have bought the latter I guess I can't say that anymore, but it's still not exactly a huge percentage of the overall gamer population).
Reviewers are in a tough situation. They have to play a lot of games, probably a lot of which they won't really like, and so it starts to feel a lot like work except for the ones they're predisposed to really love. I wouldn't want that job. When I see a game that doesn't grab me, I just don't play it, which means I only play the games I do like or love. That gives me, or indeed most gamers, a much better experience overall. And in fact most of my play-or-not-play decisions are made long before I ever get to a tutorial; that's why some really popular RTS games with terrible tutorials have been really popular. People were already excited enough to buy them, and when they encountered the tutorials that was a minor roadblock at worst. Not that I think our tutorials are that terrible.
Anyway, people love to give advice on what we should or shouldn't do to the game, and that's appreciated, but what a lot of folks forget is that whenever we add a feature I'm reaching into my back pocket and paying for that. If it isn't something I'm personally interested in, then it's got to make an excellent case for ROI, or be sufficiently low-risk / low opportunity-cost to be something I'd do. Maybe that makes me sound conservative like the big AAA companies, but that's not what I mean: it means I'm a risk-taker where I'm passionate about the subject and think I can do a stellar job, and conservative where I'm not.
It's always a fine line, and there's always 1000 things that can be done. The trick is to do the ones that give you the quality of life you want, enough income to sustain you, and which lead to something you're proud of at the end of the day. Not to say that they never would, but at the moment the super-tutorials don't factor into that for me.
