Does anybody know what's going on with GameClub? The last new release was in March and that was from their PC port project, the last mobile game they released was in SEPTEMBER. Eight months ago. Their social media has been silent for over a month (and even then it was just generic "Try this game on GameClub!" posts). There's a rep for GameClub on their Discord named Eli who's attitude doesn't seem all that great, or maybe his tone and posts just don't make me feel confidant about what's going on. Most of his posts addressing things seem to "fuck you, pay me." He's said that they aren't focusing on releasing new games because it doesn't bring in new subscribers. He has said that they don't pay attention to game suggestions submitted via their website or app because that doesn't bring in new subscribers. He has said they don't want to revive old games anymore because it bogs their support box with people asking to help unlock previously purchased games. Etc., and etc. One thing Eli addressed was that instead of releasing new games, they want to focus on the social/club aspect of GameClub. Okay, ignoring the "instead of" part, I do really like the systems GameClub has in place. However, Leagues were introduced in December and no new games have been added since. I'm not sure how long any games had Challenges added, but other than the three PC games having them baked in, I feel like that's been a while too. So yeah, I love GameClub, more that Apple Arcade in some ways, but I'm starting to wonder what their deal is.
Hey buddy, apologies for my bedside manner in Discord. Our Discord community is ... interesting. We kicked things off when GameClub was in beta, and we were basically just giving away free games every week to just get more people testing our games than what we could do internally. The unintended consequence of that is we have this group of people who don't subscribe, have told us they won't subscribe, and never intend on subscribing, but have all these ideas on everything that we're doing wrong. When you get asked the exact same thing every day, by the same people, when you make it clear that they'll be the first people to know if anything changes it wears on you. It actually has a net negative effect beyond just support overhead, as it's making the vibe of our Discord turn into something that causes people like you to raise your eyebrow. It's a tricky situation, and reminds me a little of what we went through with the TouchArcade community here. We had a really cool enthusiast community that, as free to play became a thing, just got really REALLY mad about everything. Anyone who was around on the forums in around 2011 can tell you, we just had the most nasty, vocal free to play haters that chased everyone else off including other people and developers. I didn't know what to do about those people then, and I'm not sure what to do about this similar situation now. I don't mean to seem to have a "fuck you, pay me" attitude, but the reality is we're a small venture-backed company under pressure to scale. We've found that adding tons more content to the library (which many people get for free) doesn't really result in a huge influx of new subscribers, and even though we had tons of people telling us what they wanted was new games that were never released before on mobile... that also didn't turn out to be true. What we have had luck with is building engaging social features, multiplayer experiences, and expanding to new markets, which is what we're focused on now. We need people to pay us to grow, which in turn results in more content, more cool features, and similar. Right now we're using markets like Egypt as a test bed for cellular carrier billing, which is providing a really cool opportunity. In these parts of the world, people don't have credit cards, and treat their prepaid cellular account balance like a bank account. You can't buy things off the App Store with this credit, so the games they can play are basically just anything that are free, which basically is just ad-laden junk. GameClub provides these people real, premium mobile games, which some of them are experiencing for the first time. Things we take for granted here, such as playing a multiplayer FPS like Neon Shadow blows this demographic away. With tons of people coming in to play things like Neon Shadow, it makes a ton of sense to improve the social experience of GameClub so those people can find existing friends, make new ones, and play with everyone else in the club. You don't see this reflected in the GameClub Discord because these people speak Arabic, and we have an English Discord. (Another community management challenge!) As much as I would absolutely love to live in a world where GameClub could exist as a non-profit where we just take people's requests of games to update and release for free, that is not the reality we're in. Again, we're a small company, with limited resources. I'd love to have GameClub's engineering team in a place where we have the head count that we can have a team that does nothing but release games, and a team that handles these different tech integrations to get GameClub in other markets... but that's not where we're at yet. Opening GameClub up in other markets is showing real promise. Maintaining a very aggressive release cycle has not. So, right now, we're focused on one, and not the other. That will change in the future.
That makes total sense to me, Eli. And frankly, my backlog could use a pause in new titles. For me, it’s worth what I’m paying to have access to a lot of fond memories — everything else is a bonus.
When you get back into incorporating more classics, the Bean’s Quest duo and League of Evil series seem like the GameClub mission more than anything else I can think of. Both were pulled from the App Store and the latter even from purchased downloads. No pressure, but they’re App Store forgotten veterans captured by Apple updates and you’re App Store Rambo who never leaves a good app behind, so you’re our only hope.
This was one app I really wanted to work out in the future,shame to see it won't. I personally was pretty excited by the idea of replaying all of the best mobile games from back in the day on my brand new iphone and I downloaded the app the moment it was available on the store. The first thing I felt upon opening it was a huge disappointment. The catalogue of games was a joke. There was like one or two titles at the time which I tried cause I played them years ago but the rest was just pure garbage just added in there to make it seem like the application was worth the montly payment. I actually think I did subscribe for some time to it cause I was hoping I could support more cool games getting added but that never happened. All I saw was one bad and pointless game added after another and in maybe two months time I had deleted the app and was done with the entire experience. Let's be honest-there aren't cult classic games on there,it's mostly things you never touched ten years ago so why play them now?What would the point of that be. Also last year I think Gameclub even released a PC game -Ancestors Legacy and after hearing of that I already knew the company has lost the main idea for the applications and is trying something new and by what I am reading here-failure all around. I know by know the application is never going to be good in the future but I didn't actually knew up until reading this topic-who was behind the app itself. Now why the application fails makes more sense to me. The people behind the app didn't understand the playerbase a couple of years ago when we were upset by how Galaxy of Fire 3 had turned out and it is now more than ever certain that they don't understand the playerbase today. Shame.
Where is the second new game that is going to be released? This service started so well but fell from grace ATFER pc games were added...
