Hi everyone, Beta 17 is now available! Restart Steam to get it right away! 60 days. That’s the number of days since the last major update, which is 14 days less than with the Beta 16 release! Beta 17 adds some of the most complicated mechanics ever seen in the game. I’m both excited and nervous to get your feedback on this update as balancing the game has been hard. I wanted the game to increase in difficulty, but at the same time remain friendly to new players. I am really keen to get your feedback on this one so please let me know what you think. As with any big update, it is guaranteed that there will still be a ton of bugs, we just haven’t found them all yet. If you come across any, please let me know in the Bugs forum (https://steamcommunity.com/app/606800/discussions/1/). I’m going to release hotfixes on a daily basis until everything is stable.

The Big Marketing Update

The marketing functionality has been completely rewritten. You will no longer have to constantly restart campaigns. Instead, I was inspired by the real world, where your campaign’s success will be based on your ability to correctly target the relevant audience. Campaigns can run for much longer and the amount of hired marketers is much lower than before.

Product Satisfaction

Beta 17 also introduces a new variable to your products: Satisfaction. You’ll now have to improve features based on user feedback. The total satisfaction is based on the average of all features. Satisfaction will directly impact your conversion rate when running marketing campaigns. Running a product with just a landing page won’t be very interesting anymore.

New revenue-based features

This change is huge! Features are no longer just for increasing your “potential users”. They are now also for creating new revenue channels. You’ll be able to choose between Text Ads, Banner Ads, Video Ads and Subscriptions. Each one will take up one feature slot of your product. Until you create a revenue source, your product’s will generate $0 by default.

Revenue from subscriptions

If you choose to add a “Subscriptions” feature to your product, you can offer specific features as a “premium” offering to your users. This means that your users will have to pay a monthly subscription in order to access the feature. The higher the monthly fee and the more features affected, the less happy your users will be. However, it will also increase your revenue. Balancing this out is hard. You generally need a very good product to get away with subscriptions.

Revenue from selling ads

Another way of generating revenue is adding banner/ad spaces to your product. Adding a feature will take up one “feature slot”. Once added, your Sales Executives will be able to search for clients interested in running ads on your product.
Once a deal is accepted, you’ll have to schedule when the ad should be run. All “ad space deals” have a specific pay per 1000 impressions.

Other changes

• Contract Work has been removed from the game.
• New marketing components added: AB Testing, Analytics Research, Behavior Observation, Phone Interview, Survey and User Feedback.
• New base features: Item Listing, Live Streaming and Offline Content.
• Mods and “contract work” related Steam achievements have been removed.
• New achievements added: “Sell Out”, “Addicted”, “Fireworks”, “The Zuck” and “The Overclocker”.
• Organic growth activated again.
• Balanced loss rate of product progression (caused by new satisfaction variable).
• Various changes to feature’s level upgrade requirements.
• New research point requirements for both features and frameworks.
• DevOps renamed to SysAdmin.
• “Delete All” and “Mark All As Read” buttons added to the inbox.
• Fixed bug that allowed players to exceed the maximum number of virtual servers.
• 28 other minor changes that didn’t make this list :-)

Quality of Chinese localization

Due to issues with my Chinese translator I have been forced to use Google Translate for this update. This is obviously unacceptable, so I'll work through the weekend to ensure a high quality translation will be provided as fast as possible. So that’s Beta 17. To be honest, it has been one of the tougher releases and has required lots of complicated code to be written. I expect the next two weeks to be all about hotfixing Beta 17, which is why there won’t be any devlogs until September 14. Once Beta 17 is stable, I’m moving straight on to Beta 18, which will introduce the new “event system” that I know a lot of you have been looking forward to. This will introduce random events to the game, that you’ll have to deal with in order to protect your beloved company :-) Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoy Beta 17. All the best, Jonas

Beta 17.1 (hotfix)

• Changed the way product satisfaction is calculated by using positive percentage instead of negative (Text Ads is now 30% instead of -30% for example). This greatly increases product satisfaction.
• Temporary disabled userloss for existing savegames to make transition for Beta 16 players easier.
• Updated Chinese translations to professional version.
• Fix bug where Sales Executive would get stuck with "Awaiting instructions" message.
• Show product name in negotiation view.
• Fixed bug where negotiation view would throw error when auto-repeat wasn't enabled.
• Fixed bug causing wrong reach to be calculated (NaN value) for marketing campaigns.
• Added Downgrade button for features for easier balancing of features.
• Added error stack to error dialog for easier recognizing of mods failing.
• Increased number of decimals for CPM price in ad space deals view.
• Fixed bug causing Linux version to fail loading the Sales Executive view.

Beta 17.2 (hotfix)

• Fixed bug causing Sales Executive view to fail

Beta 17.3(hotfix)

• Fixed bug causing revenue feature satisfaction decrease to work the opposite way.
• Reduced revenue feature satisfaction decrease
• Fixed error being thrown when booting up the game under specific scenarios.
• Fixed bug causing that you sometimes couldn't upgrade framework when coming from Beta 16.
• Changed "happy satisfaction" to start from 70% instead of 85%.
• Fixed error being thrown shortly after renting the first hosting building.
• Changed how satisfaction was calculated for subscriptions.

Beta 17.4 (hotfix)

• Fixed bug causing product satisfaction to be incorrect (very low) in some savegames.
• Updated Chinese translations.

Beta 17.5 (hotfix)

• Re-active user loss for old savegames if product satisfaction is above 50% for more than 8 days.
• Added marketing expenses to finance view.
• Fixed bug causing feature downgrade button to return too many ressources.
• Fixed issue where "tall rack" wasn't tall enough.
• Fixed bug where Beta 15 savegames couldn't upgrade feature levels.
• Updated hosting throughput "max level" color from white to green.
• Fixed bug where subscription satisfaction wasn't shown correctly when added.
• Fixed bug where "requred CU per user" on features view would show slightly wrong value.
• Fixed bug causing overall satisfaction to be too low for ads based features.

[ 2018-08-24 20:34:13 CET ] [ Original post ]