[The next DLC will remain expensive]
The price of all DLC after the next two will be $1/ “worthless paid item" will appear instead
*There was a character limit on the Steam article, so I've put it here, but I think it's really hard to read.
If you're on a PC, please narrow the width of your browser. Sorry it's hard to read.
To cut to the chase, the following is the situation.
◆DLC for Chapters 9, 10 and EX-1 will be sold for $1
(Chapter 8 itself will be sold for $25 due to various circumstances, such as not being able to check the terms and conditions in time and the difficulty of lowering the price due to the “compensation for making the main package free”).
◆Instead, “paid content” such as the soundtrack and “completely meaningless skins (skins that players are unlikely to want)” will be sold at a high price.
(This is implemented with the intention of “If you find the DLC interesting, please buy it to support us.”)
The intention of the paid content is to realize a system where “only satisfied players (at their own discretion) pay for the game after it has been played”, and there is absolutely no way that content that affects the game will be sold.
Content related to QoL (game quality of life) and the type of skin content that players want will be implemented in the main package and other content.
To give an example, a dedicated BGM player will appear for the soundtrack, but at the point of sale for the soundtrack, the BGM ogg or mp3 file will be included in the main package.
In other words, “if you want to listen to the BGM, you can get the file for free”, and we have no intention of specifically prohibiting the extraction of BGM, aside from secondary use in the game).
◆The intention of this change is mainly for English-speaking users and heavy users of Discord, and is not intended to benefit or advertise to new players.
◆In short, there is nothing in particular that players will lose from this change.
(There may be some people who find it annoying that the store page is full of lists of irrelevant paid items)
I'm not sure if it's a good idea to release this announcement when the next DLC is still at its regular price, but for now, I'll post it anyway since we've confirmed that it's going to be possible to do it.
(The following is a long post, but I'd like to point out that most of it is a reprint of the Discord logs, and there's nothing particularly new in the main points other than the conclusion I wrote above.
The main point of this article is covered in the previous sentence.)
An attractive dance that attracts attention to let you know that this is just a digression from the main topic
----
Now, let's write about the circumstances that led to this change.
Chapter 8-3 will be implemented soon. The DLC for Chapter 8 is expected to be sold for $25.
Although it is a while away, the price of the DLC for Chapter 9 and beyond is expected to be quite expensive according to the current schedule.
The total price of DLC for Chapters 3 to 8 is about $140, and considering the price of a typical Steam game, it seems that one of the reasons for the pricing structure, “only people who are strongly interested will buy the game”, has been established to a certain extent.
However, in the past few years, we have come to realize that the business model we really wanted to use was the “pay-later (shareware)” system.
We also felt that it would be strange to retract something we had previously announced, and there is also an aspect to the current pricing that is hoping that “(developers who are opposed to our sales methods and want to make better products) will appear”.
For that reason, the pricing policy will not change, but we are considering a system for future DLC that will allow you to play the game without having to pay unnecessary amounts of money.
Generally speaking, it will be a messy system with many inconsistencies and failures, but well, most things that you work hard on usually fail in the process, and success is something that is built up from a series of failures.
In Japan, the phenomenon of trying to immerse yourself in something you like as a child, or trying to get involved with someone you like, only to spin your wheels and end up humiliated, is sometimes referred to as “black history”.
Most people want to hide their own black history, and it would also be cruel to try to expose someone else's failures.
However, the driving force behind trying to act in a way that results in failure or great embarrassment is that if you don't give up or run away, and you just keep going, even if you don't necessarily succeed, you can often end up with a result that is at least reasonably satisfying.
We don't say we like everything, but we don't mind showing our past failures in a tangible form, like “Look at this, haha”, so we'll just leave the messy sales methods and pricing as a monument to our past failures.
----
In the five years since we started selling TacticalNexus, we've learned a lot.
We develop games as an “indie (doujin)”. This is not always the case, but essentially we are looking for something that is “empathic”.
In Japan, the thing that expresses empathy and value to others is “currency”.
In a sense, money in Japan is something that is used for a type of “expression (performance)”, and for example, systems such as the super chat on Youtube are often used favorably in Japan.
In this Japanese way of thinking, we wanted to make TacticalNexus a high-priced game not “to make a profit” but to show that “this game has this kind of magic”.
Therefore, from our point of view, it is only natural that future DLC will be expensive, and even from the point of view of players who have played this far, there is no doubt that it is worth it.
However, over the past five years, we have come to realize that there are cultural differences between Japan and other countries.
The Japanese tend to be positive about “active learning”, and libraries are open to the public free of charge.
And at least there is not as much disparity between the rich and the poor as there is in other countries, and there are no “slums” like there are overseas. If you work multiple part-time jobs at the minimum wage level, anyone under 30 can earn more than the median annual income.
(Of course, most people who are that motivated don't just immerse themselves in part-time work, but go on to further education or build up a track record and then go on to get a full-time job at a company.
So it's a relatively rare case, but there are sometimes people who hold down lots of part-time jobs as a hobby when they're young. Many people try it as a challenge to “test their abilities” rather than for the money.
Although it wasn't part-time work, I myself also worked around 330 to 360 hours a month in my early 20s, and I remember working until I was sick with fatigue and stress, recording things like “what kind of physical changes occur before you vomit”, and turning the data into a safe line for overwork.
Japan has a well-developed system of medical expense deductions, and if you understand the system in that area, in a sense there was an aspect to it where you could break your body with peace of mind.
In the case of TacticalNexus, the implementation work for the extended screen made good use of the knowledge I had at the time. (I try not to impose on anyone except the game designers who have been demanding a lot of scraps, but the experience and skills of “safe impossibility” are perfect for making sense recede.)
Because of this, we who were in that kind of culture did not think deeply about the business methods up to that point.
However, five years have passed since we started selling TacticalNexus, and we have come to know about the differences in culture.
(Just like we came up with a number of ideas for improving the quality of life of the game system), we came up with a number of ideas for improving the quality of life of the business model.
----
There were more differences between us and overseas players than we had thought. On the other hand, there were also more similarities than we had thought.
I think that the majority of people who have all the DLC at this point probably already have a firm conviction, but I think that the most enjoyable system in this game is the system after MysticGate.
And I think that the players who know this fact have played the game for more than 1000 hours.
At this point, I think that the majority of players who have played that much think “I want all the DLC from now on”.
As I've mentioned a few times, the majority of players will buy the next DLC, even if it costs $200 or $300.
On the other hand, they will play through the game even if it's free.
We're not looking for financial gain, but for players who will play for thousands or tens of thousands of hours.
It's fair to say that Team-Nexus is looking for just such players.
And as there are often players who have already spent a lot of time playing, we have also found that there is a certain number of players who share the common understanding that “this system is interesting”.
When we think about that, we have come to think that it is nonsense to continue to insist on ideas that we and everyone else have found to be “not common”.
It makes us very happy when people who have the same concept of “money” as us pay for the game after being satisfied with it.
However, it is something that “people who have the same concept and can afford it should do voluntarily”. There is no need to constantly impose it on players who have already played for thousands of hours or who will play.
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However, there are quite a few problems with changing the policy that much for the same work.
People see things the way they want to see them. When there are two elements that are almost completely opposite, people will often interpret things in the way that they want to interpret them.
The tendency to “see things the way you want to see them” is not necessarily a bad thing.
Motivation” is also essentially something that is created by ‘subjective standards of value’. There are many things in the world that cannot move without being biased.
When you think about it, it's safer and easier to communicate with things and directions that are unified.
For that reason, I thought that it would be better to sell the game in this way, and that TacticalNexus would be better off if we did so from the next game or when we started another project.
However, I've come to think that there may be a better way than that.
Generally speaking, it is an extremely miraculous thing that this game has had a community with a good environment for several years.
It is not certain that this will continue forever, and it is not certain that it will continue until the game is completed.
However, the fact that TacticalNexus' English-speaking Discord has already been maintained for nearly 5 years already exists.
What is happening now and what will happen in the future can change suddenly. However, what has happened in the past will continue to remain as fact, and its form will not change.
We thought that it would be absolutely impossible to maintain this level of atmosphere in a free community for more than two years.
This “absolutely” is a correct absolute, and we thought that it would never be overturned.
However, that was not the case.
At this point, we are considering continuing this development for a few more years, even if it is a direction that is not profitable.
----
Through TacticalNexus, we have been able to learn about a type of energy that we had not been able to perceive.
The leader of Team-Nexus is the programmer who is writing this text.
Team-Nexus has a somewhat intentionally autocratic structure, with the exception of the programmer and game designer, who maintain an environment where staff can leave at any time.
(We don't know what will happen in the future, but at the moment we have not incorporated, having accepted that we will have to pay more tax.
If we were to incorporate, we would be able to do a lot more, but at the moment, we are developing in an environment where we would probably lose if we were sued, so we think that's a different direction).
Looking at historical events, we believe that the greatest danger of dictatorship lies in its exclusionary nature and expansionist tendencies.
And we have clearly constructed a system that focuses on “negative exclusion” rather than “positive production”.
If a dictator expands the scope of his rule while retaining his exclusionary nature, he will begin to exclude on an even larger scale.
If the scale of exclusion widens, the scale of opposition will naturally widen too. Unless the dictator has the power to control everything, the only thing that lies at the end of the path of expanding exclusion is destruction.
We maintain an environment where “the scope never widens” for our own survival strategy.
However, apart from that one point, I clearly maintain a system as a dictator.
The family background and career of programmers is extremely unique, with a very high ratio of doctors and politicians, for example, there are people such as the former Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications in the generation two generations above me.
My grandfather was a member of the prefectural assembly who was in the top tier at Tokyo University, and in my grandfather's bloodline, all of the male relatives of my generation, excluding myself, are presidents of companies with annual sales of several million dollars at the age of 30.
This is not very convincing in the case of the bug-ridden TacticalNexus, but at the age of 25 I was considered to be a programmer with an annual income in the multi-million dollar range, and in my early 20s I was mainly developing programs for educational institutions.
(At the time, there was no technology for abstraction, and because I basically grasped the structure and concepts through rote memorization rather than abstraction, there were many things I couldn't do.)
Being “technically skilled” or “competent” can be a source of pride at first, and it can contribute to boosting your self-esteem and motivation.
However, once you cross a certain line, unless you are in a very special environment, you will lose that feeling.
This is because most people can tell the difference between “one in ten” and “one in a thousand”, but not between “one in a thousand” and “one in a million”.
In psychophysics, it is known that human senses are logarithmic, like magnitudes, according to Weber-Fechner's law.
The magnitude value increases by 1 every time the energy increases by 31.62 times.
The difference in energy between magnitudes 5 and 7 is 1000 times, but the difference in numerical values is only 2.
Human senses are also structured in this way. Even if there is a large difference in ratio in reality, there is no difference in the way we perceive it.
It is precisely because our senses are logarithmic that we are able to perform such a wide range of tasks, from the fine manipulation of a needle to the heavy lifting of a load.
We believe that this is true not only of our “senses” but also of our “sensibilities”.
There is a famous meme in Japan that says “I want 5000 trillion yen”, and we think this is the best example of “sensibilities being logarithmic”.
The average lifetime income of a Japanese person is about 300 million yen, so 500 million yen is a reasonable amount of money to “live off for the rest of your life”.
However, the meme is not about “500 million yen” or even “5 billion yen”, which is ten times that amount, but rather “5000 trillion yen”, which is a million times that amount.
What is important is that it is “easy to say” and “just plain huge”. There is no need for “realistic awesomeness or comparison”.
Once you exceed a certain level, the only criteria for human evaluation is whether something is “amazing” or not.
When this happens, your identity gradually moves away from “being evaluated by others”.
This is because the people who used to evaluate your superiority and growth move away from you.
----
Being superior in terms of technology or ability will gradually move away from people's sense of values over time.
Even if you or your group are doing the right thing in a narrow field or environment, people from outside will often behave in a way that is different from that.
If you leave such people alone, thinking “this is the right thing to do, and someone will understand or stop them eventually”, you will often find yourself in a situation that is fatal for you.
Even if you know that something is “amazing” once you have crossed a certain line or level, you can only compare it to the experts.
The main reason for this is that there are three stages to understanding things.
First, there is the stage of “tackling the issue and getting an idea of the general flow”.
Next, there is the stage of “being able to identify the presence or absence of elements in the issue you are tackling”.
Finally, there is the stage of “optimization”, where you grasp the priority of the elements that exist and reduce the lower priority ones.
Generally speaking, a person is considered a professional when they are at the stage of being able to identify whether or not an element is present.
This sensitivity is undoubtedly superior to that of other people.
However, this is not the end of the process, and if you continue to progress, you will often be able to progress to the stage of being able to identify priorities.
The next major reason is that the more you progress, the more the distinction between “one in ten” and “one in a thousand” becomes blurred.
This is because you can tell the difference between 1 gram and 10 grams, but it gradually becomes more difficult to tell the difference between 1000 grams and 1010 grams.
Because we always try to make large or large-scale things, we are more conscious of “overall consistency” than of compensating for individual elements.
Naturally, the things that are made in this way are things that are easy to handle for those who are used to them, but for those who are not, they are things that “have many things that are lacking”.
As with TacticalNexus, we always prioritize “implementation of elements that should be optimized” and put off the resolution of “whether or not an element is present” until later.
For people who can tell whether something has a certain element or not, the fact that something that “should normally be there/should be there” is not there gives a very negative impression. This is a place where you should not cut corners and put in the effort.
However, we want to create something that is in our field of vision, or in other words, something that has been optimized.
If the goal is “economic success” or “making lots of people happy”, then we should prioritize the appearance and “having what should be there” over practical priorities and egos.
If it sells and makes money, then that is justice. If lots of people are happy and there is a lot of happiness, then that is wonderful.
However, when it comes to work, we inevitably also seek ideals.
As a result, “the form of business is extremely difficult to establish as a canvas for expressing what you think is right or your ideals in your own way,” was the decision we made around 6 to 10 years ago.
----
At least in terms of the scale of the company, we will not be able to establish ourselves and will become an existence that should be eliminated.
Unless we maintain an introverted form, we will not be able to create a structure that aims to be excellent.
In order to pursue ideals like ours, we need to “eliminate things of low priority”.
And the more we expand, the more we will be seen as autocratic, and we ourselves will also become the target of exclusion from the outside.
If the reasons for exclusion are no longer understood by those around us, at that point we will change from being “an object to be imitated” to “an object to be avoided”.
Rather than aiming for the “happiness of the masses” or “the good of the world”, we wanted to aim for “improving technology” and “creating an environment where people who can understand it can enjoy it”.
We wanted to spread interesting and excellent things to the world, but we realized that it would be difficult to do so in the form of a company, at least structurally.
On the other hand, if we ignore the fact that “many people can use it”, we have the ability to develop technology and structure as much as we want if we want to research it.
Then, we thought that we would not leave anything in the world, and would just continue to refine our technology in a remote area.
Even if the canvas is bigger, the amount of paint you can use doesn't increase.
We came to the conclusion that we would rather “draw a vivid picture that has been optimized for a small canvas and have people who can appreciate the detail look at it up close” than “draw a rough, thin picture that lacks optimization for a large canvas and have lots of people look at it from far away”.
----
Given that experience in the business, we didn't expect the free-to-play community to last long.
As we had planned, this game became a game that could be played for thousands of hours.
On the other hand, it is abnormal for a single player to spend thousands of hours on a single game.
By “abnormal”, we mean “abnormal for that person's life experience”.
When players spend a long time with a single piece of content, they each develop their own “obsession”.
In Japan at least, there are not many people who can grasp how to balance or come to terms with the things they are passionate about.
Unless they have had the experience of “devoting thousands of hours or more” to something, when people with obsessions get together, there are often clashes between those with different obsessions.
Even if the intensity of the “obsession” is the same, if the form of the “obsession” is different, the direction that should be taken will change.
If this happens, opinions and conflicts will arise between players who have played for a long time. We have often seen such scenes in Japan.
In such a community, having a developer who “has the ability to solve problems” often leads to problems.
This is because players will have a strong desire for the developer to “solve the problem”.
For example, let's say there is a request from a player to the development team in a community.
If the development team does not respond to this request, another player will join the conversation, and the content of the conversation will often stray in a direction that the development team cannot respond to, and it will not lead to a productive direction that cannot be solved in reality.
When you have a clear idea of what your opinion is, it is difficult to “take the other person's opinion into account and come up with a compromise” both emotionally and technically.
If it were possible to resolve conflicts of opinion so easily, it would be much easier to start a business.
For these reasons, we basically do not give serious answers to “beginners” who are not playing for thousands of hours.
If we approach beginners with a sense of distance that says “we will always solve it”, what awaits us is probably a collapse due to “the imposition of obsessions”.
Of course, we always try to respond to critical bugs, but we clearly give “official” answers to game balance and system-related content.
This is a discriminatory notion based on a clearly elitist mindset. No matter how you express it, our exclusionary ideology is not a “clean” thing.
We don't want to forcefully show this kind of nature to the public, but we also don't want to forcefully hide it.
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However, contrary to our expectations, TacticalNexus' Discord continued to survive.
On TacticalNexus' Discord in the English-speaking world, people with “different obsessions” began to coexist, or to cooperate by bringing out their individual strengths.
This is something that rarely happens in Japan, and it was a sight that was hard for us to believe.
It may be against etiquette for the developer to reprint the Discord logs, which are essentially private, and turn them into an article like this, but please let me reprint these screenshots.
(In Japan, the player's name is hidden in cases like this)
Currently, on the Discord server for high-level players of TacticalNexus, players are working together to develop strategies.
Players are talking to each other about things like “I'm going to explore this stage using this strategy today” and “I'll try using that strategy to conquer this area”.
In this game, which is designed for single-player, the element of “multiplayer” is being born.
The goal is to “achieve the score you want to achieve”, and essentially a situation has been created that could be called a raid battle.
This is one of the forms we had dreamed of in our business.
Furthermore, as time passed, players clearly understood the game design of TacticalNexus, and the level of the feedback channel for this game became an “optimized” space over time.
This was also an incredible sight for us.
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Some people might think, “Well, that's what happens when you get a bunch of gamers together.” But from our perspective, this is impossible.
These are players who have played the game for thousands of hours with a great deal of motivation.
Generally speaking, people who have spent thousands of hours in a single field are at the level of a profession.
In other words, at this point, they are at the level of a “professional” in this game.
What's more, since they are sharing information with other people, their rate of improvement and understanding of concepts is overwhelmingly efficient.
In business, “developing a completely new genre to a high standard” is an overwhelmingly difficult thing to do.
In order to reproduce this, you have to prepare an environment and human resources of this level in the form of a company.
In that case, you need to invest time in becoming a professional in the “new field”, and you also need to invest money in training your staff to that level.
Furthermore, just as there were many players who quit playing this game straight away, while there will be staff who adapt and improve, there will also be those who don't.
In order to continue the business, support is needed not only for the staff who have adapted, but also for those who have not.
It will be extremely difficult for companies that are unable to do this to survive for more than a few years.
The number of people who go out of their way to find work in a place where they might be fired straight away is gradually decreasing.
In order to start a company and gather players of this caliber, you would need to hire several hundred to several thousand staff members,
and you would also have to force these players to work around 2000 to 3000 hours a year.
At this point, a huge amount of money and time is required.
Furthermore, to secure human resources like these players, it is absolutely necessary to spend tens of millions of yen per person per year.
Moreover, in terms of the environment in which multiple professionals of this level can work actively, it is necessary for the company to have an environment that is at the top of the market.
And currently, the Discord of TacticalNexus is being developed by dozens of such professionals.
From my perspective as a Japanese person, an environment on par with companies with annual sales of tens to hundreds of billions of yen is being developed here.
What's more, this space has been going for several years already.
In business, people who can adapt and produce excellent results often shun those who can't adapt and produce results.
This is because they think, “Our salaries are being taken away by those who can't adapt.”
People are influenced by other people. If there are many people who are “unmotivated”, the motivation that was there at the beginning often evaporates.
“Deliberately creating an environment where active motivation is born” is such a difficult thing that the funds required for it are enormous.
Furthermore, even if you pay for it like that, as long as the other person's motivation is ‘money’, it doesn't necessarily mean that it will be directed towards the quality of the game itself.
----
Furthermore, from our perspective, the players' gaming skills were clearly increasing.
At TacticalNexus, the game balance is created based on the formulas and data thought up by the game designers, who are not as good at verbalizing things as I am.
Since this information is only half-formed, the basic development process is that I translate the information from the game designers' content into text and share the game design intentions with the staff.
In Japan, by the time I was 15, I had discovered most of the content that would be written in a textbook on “how to write a thesis” at Tokyo University, and had systematized it.
Specifically, it is a technique that separates and considers “information” as objective facts that will not change no matter who sees them, and “considerations” as subjective facts whose answers will change depending on the person.
I don't have any knowledge or skills related to “translation between languages”. When I write English, I leave everything to translation software.
However, I do have skills related to “translation of technology and thought”.
Thanks to advances in computer and programming technology, in this day and age it is possible for machines to measure approximate deviation values and abilities from written sentences.
My writing was often evaluated as having a deviation of 70-80 after writing for a few tens of minutes, and sometimes a piece of writing that took several hours to write was evaluated as having a deviation of 85 or more.
A deviation of 85 is the top 0.023%, or the level of about one in 4000 people.
Normally, when scoring by machine, it is difficult to get data such as “extremely high” or “extremely low”, but even so, sometimes you get a score like this.
On the other hand, even if you have the technology to translate difficult concepts and information into words, it is extremely difficult to turn them into sentences that anyone can understand.
For example, “written calculation”, which is one of the methods of calculation in arithmetic, can be used to solve any number of digits as long as there are no mistakes.
However, if you actually try to do a multiplication of several dozen digits using written calculation, the amount of writing on the paper will be huge.
If you want to, it is possible to translate complex things down to a level that most people can understand.
However, if you do this, it requires the reader to have “the determination to read through a huge amount of information” and “the memory to be able to remember what they have read”.
The “complex things” often involve huge amounts of data themselves.
For example, it is possible to do multiplication by hand with 100 or 200 digits.
However, in order to check whether the result of the calculation is correct, you need to look at tens of thousands of additions.
Both “the determination to spend a huge amount of time” and “the memory to remember the content” are in the realm of talent when you get to that level.
No matter how much you can understand difficult concepts in detail and have the skills to put them into words, in the end, only people who have reached a certain level will be able to receive that skill.
People with a logarithmic sensitivity are unable to accurately identify objects that are far away.
And even if you were to translate difficult concepts and techniques into a form that is “decipherable”, in the end, only people with a certain level of talent would be able to read them.
Until now, even if I tried to explain in words how much we think internally, only a handful of people would be able to understand.
It was on the level of gathering a hundred people and only being able to find one person.
However, the number of people who can understand the level of content we think about and the level of what I talk about has increased year by year on this community.
I'm not saying that the comprehension of these people has “grown/developed through this community”. I think they were just good at it to begin with.
Also, I'm not saying that “all the players who have played for thousands of hours can understand our ideas and communicate with us”.
However, when you get to the point where you have a group of people who can communicate at that level, it's an extraordinary thing.
A business is like a generator that converts money into motivation.
When you convert energy from one thing to another, there are often excess energy and secondary effects, like car exhaust or heat generated by charging.
What exists in the TacticalNexus community is a natural energy that does not require such “power generators” or “converters”.
We had no idea that the natural energy created by the “player” position, rather than the “staff” position, would bring such overwhelming efficiency.
----
What is particularly noteworthy about this community is that “conversations can be understood” and “communication is possible even through translation software”.
In Japan, we have experienced many times where “explaining something” did not get across at all.
Now, we are able to explain the reasons for the structure to the extent that we can be understood.
About 10 years ago, I wanted to be honest, but now I sometimes lie or deceive.
Even if I say the right thing, it often does not get across, so I no longer think that being “right” is as important as it used to be.
However, I can't stand it when people just keep ignoring things that don't make sense to them.
I've been working on improving my translation skills in order to solve my problems and overcome my lack of skill.
At the very least, if the other person has taken a huge amount of time or is looking at you with strong emotions, then at the very least we should be honest mentally.
As you all know, TacticalNexus is a game that tends to be quite lacking in explanations.
This is because we try not to give the impression that there are developers behind the game, and we try to make the game feel like an “independent world”.
(This is very much the intention of the game designers.)
However, that being said, I myself tend to be quite nagging.
If the other person has a strong feeling towards me that is bigger than a “momentary emotion”, I try to respond to it.
Even if the emotions of a beginner's questions are strong, they will dissipate or be resolved as they progress in their understanding.
On the other hand, the questions of an expert are things that are only suppressed by “patience” and continue to remain.
It is not uncommon for someone who is not an expert in one field to be an expert in another.
Therefore, I try not to ignore people who I feel have strong emotions and a strong sense of responsibility.
So far, through TacticalNexus, we have experienced three online flare-ups due to cultural differences, as far as we can remember.
The flames may have been weak, but there was one occasion when the chat box was filled with abusive language to the extent that it felt like 85% of the space was taken up.
We have experienced many times how things that have been built up over several months or years can suddenly collapse one day.
We think we have built up a lot of things, but we have also had many experiences of things collapsing.
As an experience, problems caused by emotional backlash are not resolved.
However, as it was, the firepower was so strong that we wanted to know why we were being so strongly opposed.
It was a long time ago, so my memory is a bit hazy, but I remember that we did text chat for up to 12 hours straight at a time.
In our line of work, it's normal to work for 30 to 40 hours straight, so we didn't mind, but what surprised me was that the players were able to maintain this level of enthusiasm.
It may be that the players felt a sense of responsibility to keep going, but even so, this is still extraordinary.
In Japan, after an hour on average, people will often throw in the towel, saying “Why do I have to keep talking to this person?”, and they'll only talk about what they want to say, and they won't be able to read our intentions.
However, this was almost never the case in the Discord chat.
Now, we've become used to continuing. However, whether it's an emotion or a matter, “continuing” is something that requires a lot of mental strength.
Even being able to text chat for a few hours is an unusual environment in itself, but here, “the players” do it as if it were natural.
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If conversations can be carried on to this extent, even with negative or emotional content, then for us, communicating with players for the purpose of game development is easy.
The momentum of emotion, even if it is positive, can sometimes be dangerous.
For example, in Japan, the line “Idols don't go to the toilet” is sometimes used (often as a joke).
This is based on the idolization that “clean beings do not act uncleanly”.
Similarly, it is often seen that excellent people and successful people do not make mistakes.
In reality, idols go to the toilet. Successful people fail.
To begin with, “people who only succeed” are “people who have accumulated so many failures that they can only succeed”.
The more you aim for cleanliness, the more your memory is filled with the dirt you couldn't get rid of.
The more you act, the more your head is filled with your past failures.
Basically, fans are sometimes afraid to say things that might damage the feelings of the object of their affection.
Similarly, the more “enthusiastic and knowledgeable” a fan of a game is, the more they will be reluctant to talk about the problems they are aware of.
On the other hand, when it comes to deciding on the quality and direction of a game, it is extremely useful to have input from “professionals” who have played the game for thousands of hours and have had long chats about it.
One way to solve this is for the developers to clearly state the problems and failures, saying things like “(We) made this kind of mistake with this system”.
If the developers are themselves pointing out the problems with the game, it makes it easier for players to join in and point out the problems too.
These were methods that were only used with staff or people very close to them, as they had the potential to invite negative opinions from beginners or outsiders.
However, we felt that we could do this on this community, so we tried it out, and it actually worked in a very positive direction.
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The TacticalNexus Discord community has been working on building environments that we deemed “approximately impossible” for nearly 5 years.
We have continued to participate in specific fields every few years as a hobby, quietly achieving results that only one in ten million people can achieve.
Before it was free, TacticalNexus' average play time was 248 hours, “even though the majority of players quit the game immediately”.
This was probably a world record for an indie game, or at least close to it.
However, from the outside, there are probably very few people who would understand that this game is of that caliber.
We have no attachment to anything other than “optimization”, and this game is one that is lacking in explanation.
And we also have no intention of promoting its value.
On the other hand, our ability to identify “things that are too far removed” is based on a logarithmic sensitivity.
It is impossible to accurately gauge the reality of “amazing things” that you are not yet capable of doing.
There have been times when something that I thought would take five years to achieve was realized in a matter of months, and there have been times when work that I thought would take a year to complete continued for several years.
I am unable to discern whether the amount of work required is 1,000, 1,000,000, or something far greater than that.
There are often times when the time in your life is not enough to do what you think you can do.
Pioneering work is the work of summoning something that does not exist in reality into reality.
When undertaking such work, the information that definitively raises the reality line is the fact that “there are predecessors in similar matters”.
Even if it is considered a great achievement that is far away, if even one person has achieved it, we know that it is “possible” for the time being.
On the other hand, if no one has achieved it, we will never know whether it is possible or not unless we reach a successful example.
The fact that there is a precedent is that important.
As mentioned above, if the only information you can identify is whether or not something exists, then there is the problem that you cannot identify the degree of existence.
However, even so, the fact that there is a precedent alone can dramatically increase the feasibility of achieving something.
At the point where you can tell whether something exists or not, it is still within the realm of expertise.
The fact that there is natural energy that does not need to be converted, and that communities can achieve performance that is equal to or better than that of companies when there is an environment in which that energy can be used, was knowledge that was very useful to us.
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Just because there is a “form like that” does not mean that a bright future is guaranteed.
The energy of us and the players born here will not bring about any major changes in reality.
This game is not a very profitable business, and even if the players become “TacticalNexus experts”, they will not be able to change the world or gain wealth by making full use of it.
The community that exists now will disappear in 10 years, and by then, better games than this one will have spread and be enjoyed in the world.
By then, Team-Nexus will have officially disbanded and returned to being a “group that makes games for its own amusement”.
There have been many times when things that we thought would “definitely work out” have failed, and there have been many times when things that we thought would “definitely be understood” have not been understood.
Essentially, we do not believe in things that have not become reality.
We don't know what the future holds. We've written a lot about the community, but there's always the possibility that something big will happen and ruin everything we've built up to this point.
Or, the game balance of the next stage might be too specialized, and the players who have been here up until now might leave.
We don't want to “support all motivated people”. We don't want to expand the current cutting-edge scene either.
As long as the essence is autocracy, something like “for all the people in the world” often leads to the possibility of autocracy expanding.
Also, there is a thing called the Dunbar number, which states that “the cognitive limit of the number of people with whom a person can maintain stable social relationships is approximately 150 people (100 to 250 people)”.
I don't think it's good if you become famous and spread out and the number of people increases.
On the other hand, what has already happened and passed will not change.
The reality that an environment that we thought was roughly impossible was born without even the involvement of money, and that it continued for several years, will not change.
The fact that something that we had given up on because we thought “it would cost more than 10 billion yen a year just to maintain it” continued for nearly 5 years will not change.
Also, two years after the completion of all stages, the price of the DLC for this game will be reduced by 20% (80% off).
We believe that the results of our technology should be left as a trace in the form of a “game”, so after the game is completed and the community dies down, we think it would be good if later people were inspired by it and created something new.
What is being built on the community is probably more like a current or a wind than a substance.
However, I think it is certain that such a wind is blowing in the TacticalNexus Discord up until now.
At a certain point, when the fact that an environment that we had thought was unrealistic was being summoned into reality, we saw the development of TacticalNexus as a success, and we were relatively satisfied.
If it continues, I would like to make it an environment where heavy users can continue to run.
With that in mind, in order to ensure that players who have bought the game and played it for thousands of hours can enjoy the remaining few thousand hours of gameplay, we will be selling all remaining DLC for $1.
By setting the price of DLC at $1, we think that the time lag between purchases and other players will be reduced.
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On top of that, from now on, TacticalNexus will be introducing paid content other than stages.
However, as I have just written, the reason for the price reduction is that these paid contents are a system “for those with money to make optional, post-payment”.
There will be no system that will give you an advantage in the game by paying for it.
We want to make it so that things like “Nexus Medal Simulator”, which is just a way to look at Nexus Medals, or anything that anyone can look at and say “this is worthless scrap content” can be identified as such.
Please don't buy paid content in the hope of getting something back.
If there is demand for paid content that we have sold, if you write about it on a bulletin board or something, there is a very high chance that it will be included in a free package.
We believe that money in the world of indie (doujin) is “originally” for the purpose of expressing emotions.
(By “originally”, we are just assuming that this is the case, and we are not complaining about commercial strategies that are not like this.
However, the word “doujin” (indie) had this nuance in the decades and years before, and we are just calling it “originally” because we like that old concept.
Just because we like the old way of thinking, it doesn't mean we want to criticize the current culture and commercial strategies as being fake.)
Essentially, for us, profit is like a medal or a decoration of some kind.
It would be sad if we didn't have any at all, but on the other hand, we're not looking for a huge amount of money or banknotes.
Well, it's been a long story, but that's how it is.