Gun Monkeys is a multiplayer versus game through and through. To succeed it needs players. All the players. To aid the accrual of everyone developer Dan Marshall has permanently dropped the price of the game and now bundles a second copy with every sale.
Speaking about the hurdle of getting players into his game, Marshall says ”I’ve oh-so-slightly mis-jumped, smacked my testicles into the hurdle and have gone arse over tit, my grinning face thumping directly onto the tarmac and knocking out my two front teeth.”
That’s not all the colourful language he used to describe the problem.
“Gun Monkeys needs players in order to play it,” writes Marshall in a post explaining the game’s new price. “You need other people milling around. At times, the servers are quite busy, you can quite happily play for hours. At other times, they’re dead, because everyone who owns a copy of Gun Monkeys is at work or at school or sleeping or playing Rogue Legacy. You have to sell HYPER-LOTS of copies in order for the servers to have anyone in them, triply so if you’re trying to get a game at 4am. This is a fact I now know that I didn’t really appreciate before.”
“It’s something I’m doing *extremely* reluctantly, because I don’t want to devalue the game, I 100% think it’s worth $10,” Marshall continues. “But I’ve come to the conclusion that the game’s multiplayer-only concept is a tough sell, so a pricing change is a necessary evil. It’s just not fair on the people who are playing and enjoying the game that they’re struggling to find people to play, so I’m doing everything in my power to remedy that.”
It’s a move that may anger a lot of players who bought the game when it released at its higher price point. Hopefully, floods of new players will salve any hurt.
Marshall ended with advice/warning for other indie developers working on a multiplayer game: “any indie dev considering adding multiplayer to a game: the number of games you have to sell in order to have people playing *constantly* is HUGE. Hugerer than you think, even. Even hugerer than your revised figure. It’s massive, and it might not happen.”