Don’t you hate when this happens to you? You’re sitting in your attic, trying to read a book on cats, and suddenly, cats are jumping in your lap. But it’s not just one cat, it’s an onslaught of cats. So you have to build a fort to keep all the cats out. That’s the basic premise of Fort Meow, an upcoming iPad game from Surprise Attack Games and Upper Class Walrus that mixes up elements of castle defense with physics building, as you try to keep yourself from being bothered by cats.
You’ll be stacking up chairs, TVs, mattresses, pillows, and other household objects, in order to keep all the cats out. Each item has a time cost to build, and can be destroyed by being hit by too many cats. You get more time as you play, and have a flying robot friend who can get new items for you between rounds of play. It’s kind of a puzzle game in that you have to use your resources properly, though you have some real-time elements like using repair items to save your powerful defenses. It’s a game that’s got a lot of familiar elements, but the combination of them all seems to add up to something brand new. Fort Meow releases on June 25th and will be out on Steam and iPad simultaneously on that day.
Never heard a F2P dev complaining about whales spending too much before!
It could just be lip service.
As pointed out in a previous TA article, "If you're not a whale, you might as well be sleeping with the fishes," it was pointed out that 64% of the revenue from IAPs in mobile F2P games came from a mere 0.2% of consumers. To actively try to remove whales from one's consumer base and rely on the numerous smaller spenders to supply revenue is financial suicide.
I just started playing and checked out the IAP, people can't buy currency but as they said there are boosts to resource production for days at a time and also plenty of other IAP purchases to help you along a little. Nothing I can see you have to get or you'll lose but certainly things whales would buy for an extra edge even if the can't buy resources straight out.
I agree, there is no purchasing motivation stronger than pay to win, none that I can think of. They've basically wiped out 64% of their revenue by design. I hate pay to win and never wished it existed, but it's just the way it is.
Pay to win doesn't bother me if the matchmaking is fair. If a player wants to spend a ton of cash on leveling up then that's their choice, as long as it doesn't effect me and my game, I don't care.
Matchmaking is introduced in the update coming now. Looks like before the update you look for targets on the map that are near you like in other war games. But says it'll be automatic matchmaking instead of the map in the update
There are two major things that prevent myself (and others that I have this discussion with) from spending money in a freemium game. One of those, the dev quoted in this article hit on: fairness. I'm not going to spend money on a game that basically boils down to a contest of who can spend the most cash. The other is purchase value. I want to feel like I actually bought something with my money. I had no problems dropping $10 on a cosmetic avatar in Hearthstone. But I have absolutely no desire to spend a single dollar on gems in Clash of Clans just to speed something up and be left with no gems two minutes later. Once freemium developers can stick to those two concepts, I think they will find that more people would pay for stuff and they wouldn't need to rely on whales so much for income.
CoC can be played quite well with only a few gems if you use them properly. I play it very actively (in a clan always engaged in clan wars) and I only spend about $10/mo. I use it to speed up barracks troop production and spell production so I can raid faster about three times a week. I get lots of loot from it BECAUSE IM A DECENT PLAYER and it keeps the game chugging along at a decent pace.
I don't care that there are idiots out there who would drop a thousand dollars to get where I am (after 6 months) in a day. I play the game because I enjoy it, I enjoy being social with my clan, and I enjoy slowly building up my base. Why do people care who is at the top of the leader board? You can't pay to beat my clan in clan wars... In fact if you spend thousands to reach the top instantly you'll have no idea how to use your troops because you skipped thousands of hours of practice that I've had...
CoC is actually the first f2p game I've ever seriously played (aside from LoL and Hearthstone) and I'm surprised how much I enjoy it. It fits nicely into my productive life because I can play for 5-10 mins at a time .. And I'm always getting something accomplished, even if I have to wait a week while a building upgrades.
Game isn't available :-/
Game is currently available in CA/NZ/AU. An update with many new features and important gameplay rework is expected by the end of the month, worldwide...
I may see if this is still available when I get home, I've played so many of these CoC type games some with some great variations that actually made it better than CoC for me. So hoping these guys can too
Thanks for sharing Carter, great job!
The fact that whales make up 64% of the revenue is data. These devs seem to have the hypothesis that the other 99.8% of players would be willing to pay more IFF there were spending caps or other limits to the power of wallet warriors.
I am eager to see the results of their experiment.
Personally I play a lot of these types of f2p games and I could see myself spending a few bucks a month to keep me at the top of competition - as long as that amount were reasonable and not invalidated by someone else's willingness to spend ten times as much.
That of course assumes that the game is fun,too.
The screenshots make it look like a strict clone/Re-skin of travian, though, so I am unlikely to be interested.