2022-02-01 02:14:38

Paypal may work but I've written 3.5 billing systems somehow, and had a good experience with Stripe on multiple occasions (the .5 is one we designed but never coded).  Writing billing systems is incredibly terrible and boring and makes me want to scream, but I do know how to do it.

Whether I will even succeed in the first place with my overambitious project though, who knows.  If I can get it to the point where I'm coordinating building content out though, probably lots of people here will pay for it, yes.

My Blog
Twitter: @ajhicks1992

2022-02-01 03:20:08

hell if what you are working on if that is a thing I would be willing to pay for it too

2022-02-01 03:22:13

How much would it cost?

If you wish to contact me privately, you can do so in the following ways.
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2022-02-01 03:27:47

hmm, that's weird.  someone fucks up, and then comes the Hacker's excuse?  It may be true, but I have my doubts.

once upon a time, a beautiful little girl who wore a beautiful red hood.  while she was passing through a forest, she was killed by Captain America.  The end...

2022-02-01 04:07:20

Plus Paypal's opened the virtual debit card option for virtually anyone (may be region-specific) so using Stripe won't lock paypal users out completely, i.e. if you're doing subscriptions and people want to put their eggs in one basket when it comes to recurring payments.

2022-02-01 04:08:11 (edited by camlorn 2022-02-01 04:08:53)

@53
Very tbd, depends if I can get someone to give me a deal on the transaction fees or not.  Probably in the $5/$10 a month range, but we are talking World of Warcraft for the blind and reinvesting the money into it without trying to be profitable so that seems reasonable.  Like you'd be getting value for the money as a new area comes online every month or two or whatever.  I don't think people appreciate how much being able to pay for content and involving actual money can increase quality; volunteer content creators who mostly happen to be 15 does not a quality game make.

But if someone will wave their fees or at least not take a large cut then I can be more toward the $5 range, maybe less, I dunno.  The problem is that most processors take 30 cents or more base per transaction and then a percent on top of that, so if you do $1 for example you actually only see 50 cents of it.  It's hard to get something that'll work with a small number of what they consider microtransactions, but also hard to get anyone blind to afford more than what they consider microtransactions.  They won't want to be like "o you want to only send 10000 tiny transactions a year through us, of course we'll give you this amazing offer".  And yeah you could do larger lump sums with discounts or something where you buy by the year but then that runs into that being a harder pill to swallow for most folks, who can regularly have $5 but don't regularly have $30 or $50.

Or, put another way, it's complicated and depends on lots of things and we'll see how hard I crash and burn or what before we even get there.

My Blog
Twitter: @ajhicks1992

2022-02-01 06:33:41

Only 10000 transactions? That's a lot.

If you wish to contact me privately, you can do so in the following ways.
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Battle tag, Rich#12744. You can also add me through my email address.

2022-02-01 07:32:21

No, 10000 microtransactions a year is only $50000 at most.  That's small potatoes by the measuring stick of sighted apps/developers/stores.  Start talking 500k to a million and you might get a deal.  Possibly start talking games for the blind and you get a deal, but it certainly won't be based off your pathetic volume.

Most MMOs for the sighted are $15 to $20, for perspective.  Microtransactions aren't a hard category, but the fee structures that you can get without arranging things or making enough that it doesn't matter aren't friendly to it.  1 microtransaction per user per month is a really weird use case that no one is set up to cover.  I think the cheapest subscription I can think of offhand is Dropbox for $7, but even then you get a discount by buying it yearly and processor fees are probably part of why.  If I thought the market could bear it I'd do $10, and maybe the market can, but I don't think so; but until $10 or so you lose part to the payment processors and most of the rest to taxes of one sort or another, either directly or indirectly because of accounting/bank/llc-maintenance fees.  If I could get $10 per user per month and 1000 active accounts then we'd be cooking, but cooking actually only means paying two people U.S. minimum wage at most in this case after paying for all the things involved in being able to bill properly.  Swamp and etc. can kind of get away with a half-assed thing: they make way less than this likely ever will, they don't have professional consequences, and they're not being as aspirational as I am.  But I can't get away with it so sigh, too bad for me/us.

I can go into more hard numbers w.r.t. projections but that's really off topic and I'd also sort of hate to bury it in this thread, so whatever  But it's not sighted-centric enough to make an interesting blog article and I don't ahve a blog running for this yet anyway, so meh.

My Blog
Twitter: @ajhicks1992

2022-02-01 13:16:01

50k microtransactions is...about five minutes if you happen to have Take 2's level of insanely aggressive monetization, or, you know, wo seconds for your big advertizing everywhere, mobile game as well. On that note...

I need to find the video that talks about how fucking predatory microtransactions are from certain mobile game devs, too. Paypal's virtual debit card's all well and good...

But just look at the number of folks who get locked out of an account with their actual card details stuck in there however. The big names have multiple ways to pay however

Warning: Grumpy post above
Also on Linux natively

2022-02-01 13:47:45

WOW for the blind makes no sense, I wouldn't pay for that. Mods are being made to make the original game accessible, why do we need a blind specific game to imitate the atmosphere? Even if the original WOW costs more, if I could choose between playing with sighted people vs playing in a blind specific area, I'd choose the former.

2022-02-01 13:59:20

@60 agree, @56, I am one who will not pay because it is not like hit A  button and bamm where I live, I think you have too take in to account other players from sanctioned countries, after all we did not choose where we live!, I did not mean  any  offence

"But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain,
ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker?  Did you ever wonder what
made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?"

2022-02-01 14:02:15 (edited by targor 2022-02-01 14:03:28)

There is more than one MMORPG in the world, you know. Not just WOW. Why shouldn't we have our own? Also I think Camlorn meant that the scale of this project would be like WOW, not that he wants to make a WOW version for blind people.

We are pleased, that you made it through the final challenge, where we pretended we were going to murder you. We are throwing a party in honor of your tremendous success. Place the device on the ground, then lay on your stomach with your arms at your sides. A party associate will arrive shortly to collect you for your party. Assume the party submission position or you will miss the party.

2022-02-01 14:48:48 (edited by Lucas1 2022-02-01 14:52:23)

@60: Lmao every mainstream fantasy MMO other than WoW you could argue is imitating its atmosphere as well given that WoW is one of the first of its kind. Camlorn's comparison is about scale and general atmosphere (WoW did not invent fantasy atmosphere).

2022-02-01 14:59:14

@60.  I prefer to play what was made for me.  I don't have this habit of wanting to imitate everything a sighted person does.  strength in this beautiful project, camlorn.  when you manage to overcome the advantages a person with vision has when it comes to playing wow, then I waste my time with him.  and its accessibility is not perfect, as we still need help from sighted people.

once upon a time, a beautiful little girl who wore a beautiful red hood.  while she was passing through a forest, she was killed by Captain America.  The end...

2022-02-01 15:34:45 (edited by Lucas1 2022-02-01 15:34:58)

It's not about whether I want to imitate things sighted people do or whatever, hell I might not even play this game. It's just about games for me, and if Camlorn will manage to hire people to make actual good content, the game will be better than most other games we have. I have no idea where the accessibility efforts for WoW are at, but you show me a fully playable game and I still won't say Camlorn's project is pointless.

2022-02-01 16:04:25

Ok then @60 then you can go ahead and play your WOW with it's mods and all that. No probs. But there are other people (like me) who would actualy pay to play a game. Yeah I get it, some countries make it hard to purchase games or it might be expencive and all that, but it doesn't meen "if 1 can't play, nobody should play."

best regards
never give up on what ever you are doing.

2022-02-01 16:33:39

agent47 wrote:

@60 agree, @56, I am one who will not pay because it is not like hit A  button and bamm where I live, I think you have too take in to account other players from sanctioned countries, after all we did not choose where we live!, I did not mean  any  offence

You mad bro?
One of the reasons Swamp has a manual renewal model is so that someone can buy you a gift subscription more easily, and if they want to renew it for you, well in Swamp's case you'd have to have them login to your account and renew for you. But we've come a long way since that was implemented and I am sure some gift code system could be worked out for some bulk payment options such as 6 months to a year. The real solution to combatting the market would be a distribution network, but that too has its limits.

2022-02-01 16:37:38

Yeah, the thing is that whatever you do there are two things that won't ever happen with a mainstream MMO like World of Warcraft: you won't play competitively at the higher levels, and the mechanics will always be based on being able to see.  You will find for example that most MMOs are click the attack and watch the multiple-second animation.  I get the hope, and perhaps sometime between now and me being done someone proves me wrong, but at the end of the day there is a place for a game by/for the blind where we can actually focus on fun first and foremost rather than shitty hacks that let us get 20% of the thing if we're lucky.  I'm reasonably sure that WoW can't ever be good enough for a blind person to go on a raid with 10 other people and keep up with them for instance, and as far as I can tell those of you who believe that are in the minority of people who are happy with "well I can follow walls by hitting them with the sword" levels of sophistication when it comes to sighted games.  My target audience is people who want to play something complex, not fight complex accessibility tools and/or have the game play itself for them.  If your primary thing above all others is play with sighted people then you are indeed outside my target audience, but I'm pretty sure there's a large untapped target audience.  Specifically, blind adults who bounce off audiogames because audiogames are super super immature, and who bounce off the current accessibility attempts of things like the Last of Us or WoW because they either want to actually play the game or they don't want to always be a second class citizen who can't keep up with everyone else.

But in either case I'm using WoW as a shorthand for a thing that only like 10% exists which you will hear more about once I get a prototype going, not as a "I will now go copy it".  Because for example when you can't see the animations you probably want more interactive mechanics than WoW has to offer, and when you're blind tracking huge swarms of enemies in something with more complex fighting than Swamp isn't really fun.  I'd say: think of it a bit more like audio Conquest.  That's still not quite what I'm going for but what I'm going for won't be finalized until the engine exists, and if nothing else most of what I'm putting out for the engine right now is reusable.  Beyond the sophistication/skill of new coders, but still nonetheless reusable.

I'm sure there will now be a flamewar, but at the end of the day I'm betting that the problem those of you on the "but WoW accessibility mods" side want to solve is unsolvable by virtue of owning 4 videogame consoles and having had enough vision for such things in the past.  And usually anyone else who has actually truly played sighted games ends up agreeing with me, so for the time being I shall be proceeding; if you want to change my mind, prove me wrong and do well enough to steal my target audience, then we'll talk.  What I think a lot of you don't get is that I would be thrilled to wake up tomorrow and go play sighted MMOs and get as much out of it as I used to get out of being able to see the videogame well enough to play; I just have absolutely no reason to believe it's achievable and certainly it's not achievable with the current targets.

And as for sanctioned countries: I'm sorry, I don't want to exclude you, but again it's not possible for someone in my position and doing what I'm doing to help you out by skirting the edge of it or providing backdoors or whatever.  That's a luxury of 15-year-old minors without an LLC or the need for a legal structure/copyright assignments or whatever--as soon as you're paying people and doing taxes, basically, you lose that sort of flexibility.  It's going to be hard enough for me to legally allow EU players.

My Blog
Twitter: @ajhicks1992

2022-02-01 17:15:49

Most of you were absolutely clever and grabbed two words from my post, nice job there, everyone gets a pat on the shoulder. What I actualy meant was that we are almost reaching a historical change regarding gaming for the blind. We are living the end of audiogames, since many mods are being created for mainstream products so we could also enjoy it. After Hearthstone was made accessible, most of us who played only the battle part of crazy party, left CP because HS simply offered more. If WOW finally becomes more accessible, who would pay for a blind specific game if you are going to be able to play with sighted friends? An audiogame doesn't have graphics, how surprising that a sighted person will never ever touch it. My sister once tried to play swamp and watched me playing shadow rine, but she said it's too boring. When I was younger, I was more naive and asked her if she wants to play QuentinC playroom... She did. For two days. When I asked her what's wrong with it, she said it's boring, graphics aren't good and it's so slow paced that she falls asleep while playing. It's not only about my sister though, this applies to all the sighted people I know. I've never attended any blind specific schools and in primary school I've always had sighted friends. Some of them liked computer games a lot, but I couldn't play with them because whatever I suggested, those were too boring for them. And if I was sighted, I'd say the same. We need equality in gaming, and not blind specific games that sighted people will never play with us. Honestly, I'd play clash of clans with my sisters, maybe Fortnite or league of legends, although I know in such kind of games we wouldn't be equal. Developers should finally wake up and understand that audiogames won't be that profitable and a good business than before. This is a different decade, we aren't in the 2010s. Equality is the future.

2022-02-01 17:26:02

But we aren't there yet, not at all, and if we stopped making audio games today, we won't have anything new for a very long time.

We are pleased, that you made it through the final challenge, where we pretended we were going to murder you. We are throwing a party in honor of your tremendous success. Place the device on the ground, then lay on your stomach with your arms at your sides. A party associate will arrive shortly to collect you for your party. Assume the party submission position or you will miss the party.

2022-02-01 17:36:17

I'm not telling to stop. I just see that many developers want profit from it, but it won't work. Many audiogames are indeed fun, but mostly from the free category. Many developers ask for 30-40 dollars for a game that has like 5 hours of gameplay and nothing more, and some japanese and chinese developers give us free titles with which you play as much as you want, see BK2, BK3, etc etc. That is why I didn't buy any of the manamon titles, and will never do so.
Another reason why I'd prefer mainstream titles over audiogames is that nobody gives a damn about our products, if you mention let's say Crazy party to someone, they will laugh at you and won't know what the hell you are talking about. If we never try to be a part of the sighted world, we will always be in our little corner and dig our hole deeper and deeper. I don't want to bury my head under the ground and stick to the stuff that I, as a quote, stupid blindie end quote, am able to do. In a sighted's eyes we will always be those stupid blindies who aren't capable of doing anything if we don't show them. It's true that we aren't there yet, it takes a lot of steps to reach true independency. It takes a lot of time until some mainstream games become accessible, but if all of us, and even mod developers were thinking like most forum members here, we wouldn't reach anything.

2022-02-01 17:41:04

IDK I guess if you want to play a game and be stumbling around in it forever, not being equal to your sighted counterparts without handholding, that's fine. Hearthstone is a different matter than realtime games like Fortnite or League, a far more realistic accessibility target. So is Slay the Spire, for example. But some of us might want to play games where we don't have to disable things to be able to play (Hades, Last of us) or have a far less comprehensive grasp of the environment around us so that sighted people run circles around us in PVP (Fortnite, other FPSs).

2022-02-01 17:44:50 (edited by Lucas1 2022-02-01 17:46:11)

Destranis wrote:

I'm not telling to stop. I just see that many developers want profit from it, but it won't work. Many audiogames are indeed fun, but mostly from the free category. Many developers ask for 30-40 dollars for a game that has like 5 hours of gameplay and nothing more, and some japanese and chinese developers give us free titles with which you play as much as you want, see BK2, BK3, etc etc. That is why I didn't buy any of the manamon titles, and will never do so.

Seems to work fine for STW and Constant Battle. These are of the microtransaction variety, but we have so far mostly been talking about games that are played online. If you want to bring manamon into it, I mean those games have far more than 5 hours of playtime, please don't mischaracterize them.

Another reason why I'd prefer mainstream titles over audiogames is that nobody gives a damn about our products, if you mention let's say Crazy party to someone, they will laugh at you and won't know what the hell you are talking about. If we never try to be a part of the sighted world, we will always be in our little corner and dig our hole deeper and deeper. I don't want to bury my head under the ground and stick to the stuff that I, as a quote, stupid blindie end quote, am able to do. In a sighted's eyes we will always be those stupid blindies who aren't capable of doing anything if we don't show them. It's true that we aren't there yet, it takes a lot of steps to reach true independency. It takes a lot of time until some mainstream games become accessible, but if all of us, and even mod developers were thinking like most forum members here, we wouldn't reach anything.

So we choose to make mods for games like Fortnite and say "hey guys look, I can stumble around more effectively now!" as opposed to sticking to realistic targets like Hearthstone and STS? IDK this seems like coping.

2022-02-01 17:51:48

I'm not trying to profit.  But you realize that just a server for something bigger than Swamp is going to cost $100/month?  And someone has to pay for your sounds.  I intend to reinvest all the money because frankly my salary has 6 figures in it, even at $10/month I'm not making enough to quit my dayjob.  But if you want a new area every month or two someone has to be able to go out and throw money at the problem, or somehow get an army of high-quality volunteers.  You also need mods, etc.  I have to be able to pay for things.  I'm going to front the initial cost because I make enough money for that, but if I have to keep paying for it out of pocket it's not going to happen.  It needs to break even or it's going to get shut down/stop getting new content.

We aren't living the end of audiogames either.  We're living the end of the billion arcade whatevers or the 20 shooter clones.  There will always be a target audience for this stuff until blindness is cured.  You can dream big all you want but you're going to reach a point in any MMO or whatever where you're left behind.  No mud and no audiogame that I am aware of requires you to process as much info as something like a WoW raid.  At the end of the day audio isn't good enough to let you track 20 people's positions and their health and everything wile also keeping up with the fast-paced party chat.  Online games will be the last thing to fall to this hypothetical "we can mod everything" approach; the people who will use the mods that are coming out are the people who are fine only getting a partial experience.  Go look at the WoW thread.  People are having trouble even walking around still.  And on top of all of that, assuming you do solve the problem, WoW is the rare MMO that has lasted forever.  Most are only around for 5-10 years, which means it's a never-ending battle to keep up and every game is going to need a different modding approach as they come and go.  Perhaps you will one day get MMO authors to take us seriously but I doubt it will ever happen, let alone enough to ensure a reliable stream of options as the ones who bothered shut down.

But I've never succeeded at getting the believers to understand the challenge, so I doubt now will be different.

My Blog
Twitter: @ajhicks1992

2022-02-01 17:55:24

You're comparing two completely different types of games and treating them the same, which is not going to work in practice.
Hearthstone is a perfect example of mainstream accessibility. You want to play that with sighted people? Go right ahead.
There is equally no reason why we can't have accessible Spades, Hearts, Chess, Dominos, every single game that is on the Playroom can be accessible on a mainstream site and we could be playing with thousands of players instead of limiting ourselves to a group of close friends / finding random people amongst 200 online users. However, do you know why the Playroom even started in the firstplace? The developer described it perfectly in a blog post once in French. He wanted to play all these board games with his friends, there was no accessible place to do so, and he started his own. 11 years later, there is still no accessible place, other than a few exceptions like Chess.
Perhaps you're surrounded by people who don't enjoy card / board games, Playroom has graphics for Chess, Connect 4, Reversi, Battleship, Backgammon. Overly simplistic, absolutely, but working, and certainly better than nothing, with all other games of course as you describe in a text interface. In fact, if I was sighted, unless I had a blind relative / friend, I'd have no reason to go on QC. That's nothing strange or unexpected. Why do you even expect that people should know about audiogames / what makes it weird when they don't?
But then we go to the second type of games. Fortnight, League of legends, World of warcraft, you can't reasonably keep up and enjoy playing with your sighted friends with a limited mod that gives you only so much.
Ok, so they'll laugh at you for playing Crazy party that they never heard about, but they won't laugh at you for bashing your head against a wall and taking 2 minutes to aim at someone?
That's showing to them that you're a capable blind person playing a game? I really don't think so, that's just embarrasing. Look at this poor blind person, they have no games to play but they're trying. Claps.
Maybe your friends will even be willing to  slow down for you so you can keep up, that's great, but after a few weeks they'll feel like they're back on QC and will get bored.
I very much believe that we will reach a stage at one point where we will have action games that are actually playable with sighted people, but we aren't nearly there just yet.
I have absolutely no issue with you playing whatever you want and whatever you enjoy with your friends though, but for god's sake, stop feeling like you're above everyone else and we're all doing wrong but you people who make all these mods that cover 15 percent of the game are actually right, and if it wasn't for us preventing you, so much progress would have been made by now.
Don't forget that the only reason an audiogame is made is because a mainstream equivalent does not exist. It's easy to say Hearthstone now, but Crazy party was translated to English in 2016, and back then, Hearthstone was just a dream. Not  to  mention that I didn't even leave it because of HS and I doubt many people did, I left it because I can't play the same game for 5 years for the same amount of time, and because, as expected, its development is considerably slower than it was a few years ago so there isn't as much new content to mess around with.