Pulled from the AW Facebook Group: http://pastebin.com/tmn2EhMa
TL;DR Cits will be free, world license fee is going away, world pricing is becoming cheaper, with much more capacity for users at a much lower price. CAV Clothing/micro-transactions appears to be the new business model, on a “credits” system for micro-transactions and world purchases. Expected changes within a few weeks.
So, what shoulda happened 2003
Should this be posted in news board?
I agree it should’ve happened in 2003 instead of now but you know AWI.
I am taking a cautious outlook on this. Whether it can attract and then sustain a large user population after those changes is an open question. It’s good moves but it should be coupled with other changes later on in near future such as a new graphics engine (and better performance) and reworked interface (they still look awful and feel clunkly).
I like this. It feels like a part of me is missing when my citizenship is expired.
Can’t wait for this, actually. I will most definitely be popping into AW on regular intervals to fart around in the city.
It makes a lot of sense, from my perspective.
Aside from the human aspect (i.e. maintanance) the operating costs can only have been dropping over the years as hardware and bandwidth have gotten cheaper. Even with an order of magnitude more players than now… the biggest factor in the ongoing running costs will be staff.
As I see it, they can take two approaches to the AW universe; either see it as an advertisement for their commercial/private offerings, or as a potential source of profit.
In the case of the former, an active and vibrant user base can only help them. In the case of the latter, a user base in terminal decline isn’t exactly a good future outlook, and it’s perhaps time to consider better monetization strategies.
From both perspectives this can only be a good move. Now if only they’d replace their damn rendering engine with something from the last decade…
yes nice news yessssssssssssssss
Yea, this gets a resounding “meh” from me. Alls it’ll do is create another temporary spike on Ferruccio’s little chart before everyone says “derp it’s still the same ol’ AW” and go back to fighting off kamikaze shrubs or whatever the kids are doing these days.
The thing about F2P is you don’t do it to bring in more people, you do it to bring in more money from the people you already have. It’s not as if there are people saying to themselves “Man, I’d really love to play this game, but I just can’t afford the $8/month!” If you’re product is awesome enough, people will find a way to pay for it. And if you’re product is awesome enough, a community will organically form around it and find ways to sustain itself. You shouldn’t have to bribe a community with freebies to get them to stick around. If AWI thinks this will save their product, and if the community thinks this’ll save themselves, then they’re both in for another round of disappointments.
I agree. When a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it make a noise? Aka this release of free citizenships. No one around to care, basically. But it still means we, as a city, can login every once and a while (like we do with Minecraft) and screw around in the city again instead of being completely locked out.
I hope this will boost the community, but I know, like you said, will be a small spike, then back to the status quo.
This will probably be the extent of my activity, unless I get some building bug in me. I really do miss tinkering around with SWI, even if nobody ever plays the content I put out. :p
While the appeal of AW to us will do little to bring money to the company, do not underestimate the stupid stuff people insist on buying. Making the program free is the least AWI can do, at this point, to justify having such an outdated, clunky piece of software. I do not think this is so much about extracting money from people they already have. Making AWI free will certainly bring in a lot more people who will, more likely, stick around. There is little incentive for a 13 year old who just spent hours or weeks making permanent creations to leave the program, now. From what I have seen, few people get ticked off because of a program being clunky, unless they have “seen the light” and have been exposed to something better. Overall, AW is pretty unbearable for me to use, at this point, after using Second Life, Blender, and various CAD tools over more recent years. However, for youngins who go bonkers over paying for ringtones and putting stupid spoilers on their Honda Civics, there is a high tolerance for cheap crap. This business model of theirs might pan out in their favor. Remember how old most of us were when we started using AW.
I suppose I can always drop in and build some more rail from time to time
Well said. I agree with all of what you said, because, well, once you take away free citizenship, credits, and waiving of world license fees from equation for this, what do you have left here? A software with shitty interface and outmoded graphics engine. I still think AWI need to do more work beyond those announced changes or else those changes will be in the vain.
For some reason SWCity popped in my head tonight, jumped on and saw this. Now I can justify coming on every now and then despite all the reasons goobs listed above.
(I did miss the swian community thou :/)
Long life for sw city yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
One word: Finally!
oh hi legolas brother
hmm one day before the big day
free citizen is arrive now on aw go on go go go
Classic E
O_O
oniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii go to back in awin sw city for big party
Oh.
or upgrade some old build
What would you like to see upgraded? How would you like to see it upgraded?
Go E!
some building built with only window lol and some mountain
So you’d like to see a mountain with 1 window?
landb.rwx with some pp17.rwx.
This has potential!
no lol some building near kringlan subway station
What dimensions would you like this building to be (please specify in feet as I do not know metric. Btw I mean the imperial feet, not actual feet.)
And whatever momentum AW had following the cit going free had been broken by a prolonged downtime yesterday and day before it. AW’s usercount just dipped back down to 30s to 40s from peak of 70s it had. And communications were lacking from AWI during all of this downtime. Great job, AWI! Pathetic.
This is why I didn’t exactly cheer up at cits going free in AW, because once you take away all of this changes of equation, you still have AWI whose communication with community, especially regarding downtime, is pathetically almost nonexistent, and their software with interface which is clunky at best and outdated engine. I don’t believe there is really a hope for AW as long as AWI still have their head stuck in the ground, which they’ve been like this for years anyway.
All more the reasons why I’ve been spending more time in Virtual Paradise than AW even when cit in latter went free. At least VP’s owner communicates more better with users there.
It’s honestly just an all-around terribly run company by some really bad businessmen.
OK, seriously Legion? Why are you even still here? I love whining about AWI as much as the next Eep, but it’s all you ever do anymore and it’s getting old. Maybe you missed the memo, but relentlessly bashing AWI for every little hiccup went out of style around the same time as the newsgroups did. All the cool kids now are doing their own things and mostly ignoring AW altogether. You should do the same.
Go play in your Virtual Paradise and be happy, or better yet… Go. Play. Outside.
There are lots of old builds near there (eight years plus). As well as a fairly new RER station. Ill hop on later next week and do some tinkering but don’t be hatin on the old builds sure they dont stand the test of time but a lot of the stuff I built before 2005 is like that.
E demands perfection, syn, hop to it!
Heh, interesting point. I should go through all my old builds to look at how…dated…they are.
its time to update your buold cmm example your highway
Yeah! You tell him E!
Time to update your attitude, CMM!
But not too much…stay sucky, because those t-shirts are single handedly funding the whole enterprise here
Well overdue. Despite being free now my accounts are still banned, so I just created another one. lol. Rick tells me that I am not banned and my email is not blocked. I think Chris is having some fun, or Rick is playing with me.
Looks like the same ol place, except the LZ is now an unfinished AWMall. The user count is slowly, by a couple a day, growing from what I can see. By mid next month maybe we’ll be back to a hundred on at peak times.
Well shit, I might start building again now that people can see the stuff I build!
yes you build bueny peninsula at 2016s 4843e