Well, for what it's worth, the primary motivation of this site update is to help improve our community by better organizing the content and better managing the discussions. We have a lot of good users here, and they, not the trolls, need to be the focus. That will in turn encourage more good users to join up, and hopefully we'll evolve to a community that you'll be proud to advertise. In other words, more like the community we had back in the "fond days of yesteryear", except with more than 100 users :)

It was actually like that during testing but it got very cluttered feeling according to Tom.

Airjoe wrote:

So make up your mind. Are the key, hub, and subscription systems some of BYOND's most useful features, or does it make sense to skip them entirely?

BYOND's greatest strength is its ability to rapidly develop a game, publish it, then get some players. Aside from that BYOND is behind almost everything in terms of performance and features. Getting a simple sidescroller to run at 60fps (with screen tearing) already takes sizable chunk of CPU, adding effects and AI on top of that can be quite taxing. Game Maker for example has a feature where you can take a blank image, scribble some lines on it, then import it as a map object and have your scribbles act as solid surfaces you can collide with in-game. This takes about 15 seconds to do and has virtually no impact on CPU usage.

Comparing those $40 features to BYOND's $25/year features which can be easily cut out, which sounds better? If you weren't already a BYOND developer, which would you use?

Tom wrote:

It's true that people can gain subscribers by advertising off BYOND-- and I've been telling people to do that from day 1. However, that doesn't mean that the hub isn't worth something. IMO, there's a lot of value in being able to put up a game and get some feedback without having to do the legwork. Whether that value is worth $24/year or whatever is your decision.

For $0 you could throw up a Tumblr blog or a Wordpress blog and get just as much feedback. In some ways either one of those might be better since players wouldn't have to register an account in order to contact you, they could just do so via email/twitter. At that point you wouldn't be dealing with the BYOND community, but rather a new community formed around your game.

If we can't make money through Memberships, we'll have to look to other ways to sustain ourselves. The web/Flash client presents opportunities of doing so (for instance, we could charge a fee for offsite distribution of games, or enforce a sub cut for such things). In my mind, I'd prefer to give developers and players as much as possible and not have to put these kinds of restrictions in-- but that model only works if we can get a certain volume of users contributing the bare minimum (what I'd call a BYOND Membership) to keep us going.

The Flash client would make a great "pro" feature. Rather than doing anything invasive like sticking ads in it I think a simple watermark would do the trick. A watermark would push the BYOND brand while giving serious developers an incentive to pay for the software they're using. Once the client goes off-site the watermark goes along with it!

You could probably do the same thing with the big blue splash screen we see right now. It would be really nice to get rid of that thing when booting up a game.

We will likely have to pursue "pro" software upgrades if we can't make enough with the donation/Membership model. Certainly the Flash will provide opportunities. Although if we are talking from a business POV, it makes more sense to target players over developers, or else raise the fee for deployment of an add-free / off-site Flash game beyond the trivial amounts we currently charge for Membership.

But I don't really want to get into that. We will do our best to keep the system as free and widespread as possible because, at its core, BYOND is catered to hobbyists who are mostly in it for fun rather than profit.

What I do want to address is this idea of the BYOND community being a negative for your game distribution. Logistically, I disagree that its easier or better for most developers to use a blog or off-site over the hub. That takes more groundwork to establish an audience. Some of our more popular games do have an off-site presence, but it's not like it happened overnight. A hub gets you immediate playtesters and for most developers that is useful.

But, more importantly, we need to work to make this more beneficial by improving the community (the impetus for this site). As an example, if you make an Anime game right now, there's no better place to advertise it than on BYOND because we have so many users looking for that sort of thing. Imagine if that were the case in general-- that would be win/win because you would get more users and our distribution platform would gain more value.

I hope more people can think positively about the community and look at it as a good thing, or at least a potentially good thing. We're doing our best at least make our public presence (obviously we can't control the in-game interactions) a good one so that new developers and players can get the help and encouragement they need to stay in the community and themselves hopefully contribute one day.