In week 25, I pretty much picked up where I left off last week, namely wrapping up the 6.10.4 release with some more more work on internal admin pages. Many of those still required a team member to have a “local account” in a game world to take out certain actions, which in the age of 6-week, auto-resetting, free game worlds isn’t really all that practical anymore 
The Steam release from the previous week also kept me busy, of course. As you’d expect with a game like AS, the release didn’t make headlines, but it went fairly well by our standards. So far, we’ve received almost 40 reviews, 91% if which are positive (if you haven’t done so yet, please go ahead and help drive up that number 
). But one key piece of feedback that showed up in many of the reviews and forum posts was that our payment model is (best case) intransparent or (worst case) outright evil! So I went ahead and rewrote the section on our payment model in the handbook. I tried to bring across what models are out there and why we picked the one we have (and have had for almost 2 decades now). Feel free to have a look and let me know whether you think something important is still missing.
Some people also inquired about cold, hard numbers concerning the Steam release. At this point I can tell you that we’ve had roughly 1000 sign-ups through Steam. That might not sound like much (relativ to other games out there), but for AirlineSim, this is about the amount of native sign-ups we’d get in around 9 weeks. Here’s what that looks like:
This includes the “release spike”, of course, but the daily amounts of sign-ups are flattening out now and if I am being optimistic, it seems like Steam continues to bring in roughly 2 to 3 times as many players as our own website. This sounds fantastic, but as said last week, we don’t really know how many of these will actually convert to paying players (and when they’ll do it). So far, the numbers imply that our overall conversion rate has dropped from a really good (by industry standards) 10% to roughly 2 to 4%. But as said…those numbers need some time to stabilise. I’ll keep you posted.
Besides a whole bunch of admin towards the end of the week, I also took some time to think about next steps. For that, I looked at the current votes on the feature roadmap and realised that it’s going to be really tricky to make a decision 
Basically, I landed on three main options:
- Auto-Ops / Aircraft Pools has the highest votes for a single stand-alone item, but it’s an end-game feature for advanced players and the gameplay/simulation features that rely on it aren’t really specced out yet (Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) being the only concrete item on the list at the moment).
- The Distribution System is the second on the list, but has quite a few dependencies on other individual items. Adding the votes of those other features, the DS would be at the top of the list.
- Originally, I was planning to tackle Dynamic Maps fairly soon, because it’s a visual and interactive feature that might help with converting interested visitors and players just trying out the game. But even when adding the votes from Live Flight View, it only comes in at a distant third place.
There are also technical considerations: There are a few parts of AirlineSim that are very much outdated in technological terms. And there’s typically a correlation with the game design quality of these features (in a negative sense). So those would also be a good place to invest some development time. But at the same time, those features typically haven’t been touched in so long because they aren’t as crucial as others. The list includes things like the stock market, service profiles, maintenance, interlining (the contract/frontend bits), aircraft manufacturers/orders and staff management. None of these (except for maintenance) have an entry on the feature roadmap yet, mostly because they require an idea for how to replace and/or improve them first and I won’t just be rewriting an existing feature for the sake of modernising it from a technological point of view. If you’ve got good ideas…please let me know
Naturally, I am inclined to go with the DS, because so much work has gone into this by means of the ASTD and it promises to improve the foundation of AirlineSim so much that any other feature can build on and benefit from it going forward. So I guess as a first step, I need to figure out this week what a “path to implementation” could look like, especially taking into account backwards compatibility with all the long-term game worlds that need be kept on the same codebase but shouldn’t be (too) affected by the changes.