Would you be willing to pay for special assets and functions if it meant Foundry getting updated?

geoff484

After years of The Foundry practically being neglected, i think it's safe to assume that it's because there's no money in it. Maybe the source I've read is wrong, but from what I've heard is the only time Foundry ever gets any updates is when the Devs do it in their off time. It's understandable that the Foundry doesn't get any upgrades because as a business, how would that be beneficial to Cryptic to put in man hours with no real pay off?

I was thinking, what if they added special assets and features that you could purchase from the Z-store?

You could get ships that are unique to the foundry in bundles to add more customization to ships. Each ship could come with 5 different skins. You could unlock special functions like disable ship or disable ground enemy, you could unlock a new trigger window that changes animation states when an objective or component is complete. You could have other map bundles like "Modern day assets" that would come with 1950s cars, streets, etc. for being able to make time travel missions. I think there's a bunch of stuff cryptic could add doing this.

I'd personally be more than willing to pay for extra stuff if it meant updating the Foundry.

I know a lot of people would be against this idea, but I think adding the Foundry in the first place for free is a pretty generous thing that Cryptic has done. I'd just love to see it move forward and offer more options for Authors to more effectively tell their stories.

What do you guys think?

Unknown

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thay8472

I know I've said this before ... but if they want to make money with the foundry. What about ...

Foundry Rep (Gain your points by doing foundry related stuff)

Foundry Lockbox ('Generic' ships with custom registries ? I.E. A.B.C. , Another weapon flavour, doffs etc)

Emotes (The foundry has a lot of emotes the players cant use. Why not sell some of them via the Dil/C-store ?)

Spotlights (This one won't get them money but maybe a mission spotlight a month might provoke some interest into the foundry)

duncanidaho11

When the devs talk about the Foundry what they don't say is "it's not very good business." IE. that there's no inherent value in upgrading the Foundry because it's not directly monetized (and it definitely shouldn't be, it's a creative platform. Paywalls will not enhance that aspect. Besides, we could probably count the likely customer base. A handful of authors is not a group that you could extract much revenue from [unless Johnny Snowball is a tycoon of some sort.] )

What they say is that there are higher priorities. New systems, new missions, things that apply to a much wider audience. That will always because of the way people behave and the way the game is designed. However much business Cryptic may be getting, putting time into the Foundry will always be difficult because something else could always come up which could better serve their interests. The only way this could be completely different is if STO was built to use Foundry missions as a core feature.

So let's focus on something more achievable: making the foundry a better integrated feature. And that discussion doesn't need to preface itself by saying "how can we make money from this?" Cryptic has a LONG track record of system updates (ex. lighting, mission revamps) and features (ex. Admiralty) that are not directly monetized. STO works through indirect monetization (ie. ships, crew, and gear).

What we should probably focus on then (in making suggestions for developments) is simply "how do we make the game substantially better through a Foundry update?" A search UI update has to be the thing that ranks highest there.

paxfederatica

Besides, in practice any monetization scheme involving the Foundry is unlikely to remain dedicated to Foundry development, again because Foundry's so low on the totem pole as it is. PWE would probably treat it as just another revenue stream (however tiny) going into STO's "general fund", to be spent on whatever their other priorities are for the game.