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AppGameKit Classic Chat / Teach Yourself Game Programming Online Video Course?

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Daniel TGC
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Posted: 1st Sep 2013 16:15
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Hi guys,

I've been looking into various video delivery systems over the last year, trying to find a low cost solution that will pay for itself, while keeping prices as low as I can get them.

For those of you who remember my DarkPRINCIPLES DVD's released in 2007, the price for the whole set was about £49.99 once you received all three volumes. The cost for this course, would at very minimum be the same. If I was to go into HD bluray video printing it would shoot up into the £100's.

The problem with DVD's, and Blurays is that once you buy the media, you're stuck with what you got. There are various video delivery platforms, but their associated costs and regional restrictions means that someone somewhere will be missing out.

So I'm investigating building my own server solution, and delivering the content myself along with additional features such as quizes, an optional final exam, project and media downloads. The video will be in HD.

The drawback of hosting my own server solution is ongoing cost, naturally servers don't come for free. This means while with the DVD solution you'd pay once and own it forever, with the server solution you'd pay ever 3 - 6 months if you want to continue using the product. The price would be about half of the DVD cost and you can access the content as much as you like in that period.

The advantage of a server solution is that I can update the content if someone spots an error, or AppGameKit itself changes something in future updated. Once AppGameKit 2.0 comes out I could even upgrade the course to support that.

Please note that anyone who contributed to the books previous fund raising will be given 3 or 6 months free. If I end up going with a DVD I'll provide an ISO file you can download and burn yourself for a short time.

So the question I am posing here, is which format would the community prefer? DVD's or an online version that will be updated but you'll need to pay for every 3 - 6 months?
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Impetus73
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Posted: 1st Sep 2013 22:49
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Anything that does not involve transporting physical media What about downloadable videos? Most people nowadays have fast lines, or access to one.

----------------
AGK programmer
Did Amiga / AMOS programming in the 90's.
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Digital Awakening
AGK Developer
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Posted: 1st Sep 2013 23:11
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Daniel:
Digital distribution sounds like a good idea. Not sure everyone got the bandwidth for HD resolution. I think you should consider an initial higher fee and then a much lower subscription fee. Basically my thought is that the fee is paying for the content and the subscription is to cover server costs. It does not seem logical to me to pay the same amount every 3-6 months just to have access to something I've already seen once. And I think if you go with my idea 6 or 12 months is probably a better option. Maybe 3 months unlimited access at first and then subscription with some kind of monthly bandwidth cap?

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Daniel TGC
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Posted: 2nd Sep 2013 02:34
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HD will be optional, basically the video will be encoded at 3G, SD and HD. 3G will sacrifice quality and resolution for size reduction, SD will be around 854x480 resolution but have a higher data rate while HD will be at 1280x720 with a higher bitrate.

downloadable packages are too easy to pirate and drm solutions drive people away and are expensive to impliment. A html5 solution consisting of many smaller videos divided into navigatable chapters and topics wouldn't completely stop this problem but it would make ripping more challenging and I can prevent web crawlers ripping content automatically. ultimately I will have to balance user rights with content protection.
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xCept
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Posted: 2nd Sep 2013 03:21
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Speaking from my own personal experience, I simply don't have the time to make reoccurring payments worth it. For instance, I have been subscribed to a number of technical resources (Lynda, Safari Books, 3DBuzz) for most of this year, costing over $100 per month, yet have rarely had the opportunity to use any of them. Slowly I will be canceling them. More often than not, I am after a specific reference, so at those moments it is helpful to have these premium materials available but the cost to keep such resources greatly overwhelms their value.

I remember when Freedom Engine was announced, many stated that they may go a month or longer without every having the chance to program, at which point paying for the monthly subscription would be worthless. I like the idea of dynamic and updatable content, but perhaps there's a better way to sell it so those who purchase it need not pay more money if they don't get around to reviewing it for half a year. Maybe track which videos the user has purchased and allow them to always view those particular videos online, while offering new videos for additional fees. Good luck!
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Phaelax
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Posted: 2nd Sep 2013 08:58
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Quote: " If I was to go into HD bluray video printing it would shoot up into the £100's."

Why? Bluray discs are only about $1 each.

Quote: "HD will be optional, basically the video will be encoded at 3G, SD and HD"

Not sure what 3G is in terms of video quality, but if plan on making video tutorials that are going to show code for users to copy, quality is top priority. Nothing more irritating than trying to copy code from a video screen that's too blurry from compression. Defeats the whole purpose. Which is why (as I've mentioned in the past) I hate video tutorials. A written document is much easier to read, reference, and move along at my own pace.


What you could do, is offer all your content online for a low price. This basic package grants the user the ability to view the online material but not download it. A premium package would grant users the ability to download the material (videos) and store it locally or burn it. To guarantee the videos won't be snatched by users with basic access, I'd suggest not using a Flash-based player.

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Daniel TGC
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Posted: 2nd Sep 2013 19:24
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@xCept

I'm talking 3 or 6 months at a go. I'm leaning towards six months. That's plenty of time for anyone to learn coding, if they don't have enough time to learn it in that period I suspect they don't have the time to code at all anyway.

@Phaelax

The best quote I've had requires a 100 Bluray disk run at £2.87 a disk, judging from the video encoding experiments I've done I can expect about 2 hours 30 per disk. DarkPRINCIPLES was 7.5 hours long, and this book is longer than that original source material. I am guessing it's going to be a 14 hour course. That's 5.6 discs which of course has to become 6 disks. That's £17.22 per set, and an initial outlay of £1722. That's why I've not chosen bluray.

In addition to this transport costs, storage at an Amazon warehouse, both here and in the US soon drives this up to £2000 about.

So I need to sell half my stock before I recover that money which will basically cripple me right now. There's also bound to be various transport issues, and I doubt it would be accessible world wide. Only in the UK and US.

This is the primary reason I'm looking into a server based solution. I can halve the cost of the set for the user, and the initial outlay by myself is mostly time rather than actual cash I'm struggling to bring in.
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Digital Awakening
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Posted: 2nd Sep 2013 19:53
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You may want to offer the course in parts as well as a lower fee for everything.

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Kenjar
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Posted: 2nd Sep 2013 20:13 Edited at: 2nd Sep 2013 20:15
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I think we need to keep things simple.

I have two systems in mind, physical delivery with a one off charge, or a half price lease model where you pay for 6 months access at a time. The physical model allows you to review material as often as you like, and the lease model assumes that once you've learned the material you won't necessarily need it any more.

Please state which of the two systems users here would be willing to pay for and I'll take it into account.
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JimHawkins
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Posted: 2nd Sep 2013 20:58
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I would avoid expensive up-front physical delivery if possible. If you hire a virtual server from Daily.co.uk it's going to cost about £360 per year with unlimited download bandwidth, or about £800 for a dedicated server.

If you produce 720p MP4 videos, they average out at about 50 Mb per minute or less (probably less with a lot of static screen stuff) in my experience. You could get many many hours of mp4s onto a standard DVD, let alone a dual layer. So I would suggest the Web option, but also the ability to ask you for a DVD - in which case you write it yourself. You can get pretty blanks printed very cheaply. If the volume increases past the sanity point you either go to production DVD printing or offer some hourly-paid employment to a needy student to do the copying runs.

Our Language Lab software is cheap in terms of global prices for that kind of software, but astronomically expensive in AppGameKit games terms. But we do not have production installer CDs. If asked, we will make one, but generally people now prefer downloadable software.

My company produced two award-winning board games (check out Fagin's Gang and Ice Flow on Boardgamegeek.com). We over-printed the numbers because the price-breaks look really good when you get up to (say) 5,000. But then there's warehousing, and distributors rip you off. Hint - do not produce board games.

Good luck!

-- Jim - When is there going to be a release?
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Daniel TGC
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Posted: 6th Sep 2013 13:17 Edited at: 6th Sep 2013 13:18
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It doesn't seem that interest in this is massively high so I'll de-prioritize this project. It will still be produced, but over a period of months instead of weeks. Expect it sometime 2014. In the mean time I am going to focus most of my attention on projects that will hopefully bring new members into this community from the outside.
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