What does your handwriting look like?

lowpass · 1 day

bjerha · 4 days

Seems that's a popular idea in this thread, but for each user that wants not to be bothered, there's another who wouldn't have found it on their own. Just like anything else, we have to find a happy medium.

As for the thread, there's also this other one which demonstrates the folly of mistaking a consensus in any one microcosm for the consensus of the entire community.

mburstiner · 4 days

That is quite literally how we built out FTW to work.

bjerha · 4 days

Hardly! To each their own.

bjerha · 4 days

We've gotten quite a bit of feedback to the contrary, so on this point, we'll have to agree to disagree. :)

bjerha · 4 days

We don't see it as a chat program, we see it more as the way Xbox Live treats your status. Turned on by default & sharing the games you play with your friends. We'll have more granular controls eventually, too.

mburstiner · 4 days

I try not to worry too too much about what anyone else is doing right & focus on what we're doing & how we can be doing it better.

bjerha · 4 days

We agree that the game is the focus which is why we put in as much work as we did into making a system that keeps our branding off the game's experience. At the end of the day, though, for a developer of any size to take on building out a system like this isn't realistic or cost effective. We're only interested in making enough money to keep the lights on so we can keep working on ways to make gamers' experiences better & getting the tools to the developers in a form that doesn't add a ton of work to their plates.

bjerha · 4 days

Heya! Yeah, we don't feel great about having taken so long. We actually ended up gutting everything and starting from scratch after feedback from devs & bringing on a completely different team. Excuses and talk are cheap, so thanks for bearing with us til now.

bjerha · 4 days

K, I see your point. So, FTW won't work until the developer invokes a call. The way we have it set up now is that it's up to the developer whether when they make the first call. The dev can also implement a button in the settings to invoke FTW. We'll have to see what the overall response is like. If we get enough pushback from the one prompt per device we'll take a look at scaling it back.

mburstiner · 4 days

Thank you for the support!

bjerha · 4 days

Thank you so much! It's really encouraging to hear stuff like this.

mburstiner · 4 days

Indeed, this is the catch. What it really comes down to is ensuring we've made something incredibly powerful that can be supported with minimal work. We're also working really hard to make sure devs and gamers are both first class citizens when it comes to how much attention they receive. When we work with developers, our CTO and I work directly with them & I tell them straight up "Pretend we pretty much work for you for free. Tell us what you want this to do and how you want it to look and we'll try to get as close to that as we can."

mburstiner · 4 days

I'm aware of the rumors & what it'll supposedly entail, yes. This still leaves Mac, PC, handhelds, Windows Phone, consoles, and web. Our long term goals breach just syncing & one platform at a time. :)

mburstiner · 4 days

Thanks!

bjerha · 4 days

Oof, sorry about the delayed response. I only get messages in Reddit from direct responses to me otherwise I'd have jumped in sooner.

Anyhoo, I can't speak too too much to mbcook's point about existing networks. Suffice it to say we're a big fan of consolidation.

Yes, exteras is correct. We're launching on iOS and Android. PC is done on our end & Mac is almost done, too.

mbcook, based on the info from devs we've been working with. The engagement level with GC on iOS is staggeringly low. While I can certainly see, from your perspective, that there's no need for anything else, the reality is that there's a much broader picture. Our job is to make sure the solution we come up with is good enough even for those in your position who don't need something else, but want to use what we've made anyway. :)

bjerha · 4 days

Right, this was the impetus for starting FTW which is why sync is the foundation for everything else, not the other way around.

mburstiner · 4 days

I'll refer ya to my response on this topic in the other thread. :)

bjerha · 4 days

Thanks! It wouldn't hurt to let your favorite game devs know about us & that you'd like them to have a look in our direction. :)

bjerha · 4 days

Scoreloop has its own set of problems, but I get what you're saying. We do have things set up in such a way that you're not going to have a ton of crap in a game you're playing. That said, we like to think that we're working on enough for gamers that you'll want to be using the FTW app on your devices & on the web. Those things we can't go too deep into yet, though. ;P

mburstiner · 4 days

For sure. We can mitigate that by not handing off any UI. Though, some devs want a prebuilt leaderboard so they don't have to make it themselves, so we have to make something elegant & fast, but it still won't be OF level of app-inside-an-app. (we also give them the API to pull the stats for their own UI)

bjerha · 4 days

It's actually a platform native notification, so it doesn't even require your attention until you're done playing and there's no lag added to the title from it.

bjerha · 4 days

Sorry, I could have been a bit more articulate. I was responding to >every freaking game out there. We don't throw a heads up in each game. Just once per device.

As far as seeking it out, that's tough especially as we're a brand new small company. We do need some sort of distribution strategy & the developer needs to be reliably message support for a particular feature set like ours. The key is to do it in such a way that isn't doesn't feel invasive. Ours aren't in-game, they're just platform native notifications which means they're unobtrusive, easily dismissed but visible, & the developer doesn't have to bend over backwards to support it.

bjerha · 5 days

Oh, for sho. That's all already done. Right now & for a while it'll be just through our app, but we'll have a webapp for gamers soon, too.

bjerha · 5 days

Yep, you'll only get a pop up once if you have a good connection, and you're on a device that hasn't been connected to an FTW account in some capacity.

We're already working on a stealth mode with timed switches or on a per game basis so if you don't want anything to show up in your feed while at work or you just don't ever want a game to show up in your feed if your kid plays My Little Pony: Fun Time Adventure. We're thinking this will be in the Pro feature bucket.

mburstiner

TROPHY CASE

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