In the open Sunday thread there was an interesting discussion about hardcore games, starting with Chris asking: "Do you think we are coming to the end of the era where game development studios are comprised of actual gaming enthusiasts, instead of "artists on a payroll"? I cant help but wonder if we're not close to seeing the death of the "hardcore" game developer who puts out games that are fun to play, and requires actual intellectual abilities beyond the mere "mouse-click fests" that we're seeing nowadays as repetition and questionable revenue generation schemes increasingly derive the bottom line."
First of all that question is rather polemic, because it assumes that an "enthusiast" would automatically produce a better and more fun game than somebody "on a payroll". That simply isn't true. In fact, in most cases of production of something the "enthusiasts" are called "amateurs", and the people "on payroll" are called "professionals". Take cars for example, a hundred years back there were certainly people saying exactly the thing Chris says about cars, complaining how mass production of Henry Ford's cars was killing the "hardcore" car building "enthusiasts". I would really wish many game developers would be more professional instead of just enthusiastic, because then maybe they wouldn't release so many buggy and unfinished crap games.
But where are sentiments like the one Chris is expressing coming from? The basic reason of the problem is the normal distribution of skill and preferences. If you plot how many people have what skill in general video gaming, you get a bell curve. You get the same bell curve if you'd plot how many people prefer how hardcore a game. The average player has average skills, and prefers games that are playable with average skill. The hardcore player has leet skills and prefers games that require such leet skills. And by definition the hardcore elite is small in number compared to the huge army of average people. And there is also the other tail end of the curve, of people for who even Farmville is too complicated.
Now some people claim that game companies make games for the lowest common denominator. That not only isn't true at all, it also would be extremely stupid if they did. Sorry, Tic Tac Toe Online isn't going to earn you millions, because it would be too easy for the average player. If you want to attract the largest number of players, you need to make a game requiring average skill. But what is true is that if you are at the extreme hardcore end of the bell curve, an average game will already look rather simple to you. While the same game will look already rather complicated to somebody at the extreme casual end of the scale. I *do* know people who can't play World of Warcraft because it is far too hard for them.
Now if you want to optimize profits, you not only need to look how many people would think your game is at just their perfect level of skill requirement. You also need to add data on how much these people would be willing to pay to play. Zynga might have ten times more players than Blizzard, but the gross revenue of Zynga in 2009 was 4 times less, at $250 million, compared with $1.1 billion for Blizzard in 2007. Not only is the average player more likely to be willing to spend money for a more complex game, he will also play it longer. People have been playing World of Warcraft for over 5 years now, I doubt that there will be many people still playing Farmville in 2014. So the most profitable game is somewhat more complex than the game which would be most popular if all games were free.
Another factor which works against continued simplification of games is that video game skills are to a large extent acquired, you aren't born with a particular high score. If only hardcore games exist, only hardcore players get to play. If there are simpler games, a lot more people start playing, and some of them will acquire more skills while they play, and then move on to more complex games. Of course even then very few people will end up being extreme hardcore, which is why it is called "extreme". But I'm pretty certain that Farmville is already on the "slightly too simple" part of the bell curve, even if you just look at the population of Facebook game players. Which is why we are seeing somewhat more complex Facebook games now.
As other commenters remarked, game companies making simple games for average players have been around for ages, this isn't new or caused by Facebook. The best-selling PC game for three months in a row end of 1998 was Deer Hunter II. But what happened since is that the total number of games released each year went up by a lot, and so did media coverage of games. Mainstream media mostly talk about mainstream games, which creates the illusion that there is nothing else. And of course mainstream games, being more profitable, attract higher investment, and thus are often more shiny.
What Chris either doesn't know or pretends he doesn't know is that the number of hardcore games programmed by enthusiasts has gone up as well, not down. Without changing the shape of the bell curve, the simple fact that there are now so many more overall players of video games than before also means that there are now more hardcore gamers, and where there is a demand, somebody will supply. Thus extreme hardcore MMORPGs like Mortal Online are still getting released, and there are thriving hardcore strategy games series like Europa Universalis or Hearts of Iron. These games might not get the most attention in the media, or make the most profit (which results in them often being somewhat less shiny), but hardcore game developers are still surviving very well, even better than before.
Hardcore players are understandably jealous how Facebook games have dominated the discussion in the media, and even the Games Developer Conference 2010. So that is where all the howling and wailing on how we are all doomed to mouse-click fest games in the future are coming from. But I think the best comment on that latest gaming craze has been done by Ravious from Kill Ten Rats, where he reminds us that if you applied the same reasoning to the gaming craze of 1996, you would have concluded that "it is clear that the future of handheld gaming is Tamagotchi". I think it is rather obvious that there will not be a future in which all game developers only produce Farmville clones.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Monday, April 5, 2010
The Settlers 7 and the Ubisoft copy protection
So I've been playing The Settlers 7 for a while, and that was the first game I bought from Ubisoft since they introduced their new "need to be online to play" copy protection scheme. Copy protection is a difficult subject, because a lot of people nowadays have an overly developed sense of entitlement, and no clue whatsoever what it means to "buy a license"; so whenever publisher introduce means to prevent pirating, various forums and gaming sites explode in outrage how a publisher *dares* to prevent them from doing things that are actually forbidden in the end user license agreement. So instead of joining that discussion, that never leads anywhere, I decided to simply test both the game and the copyright protection scheme.
The Settlers 7 as a game is very nice, and has been sped up significantly from earlier incarnations. Instead of a game about building up an economy and watching your settlers go about their business, The Settlers 7 now delivers a gameplay which is a lot more competitive. This will not necessarily be to the liking of every veteran Settlers fan, but was probably a good move to make this game a bit more mainstream. While building up your economy is still the core of the game, gameplay now reminds me a bit of RTS games in speed the need to frequently watch what the opposition is doing. If you act too slow, the computer opponents will continue gathering victory points until it is game over for you.
The interesting part of the victory point system is that you have three different choices on how to win: military, trade, or religion. Thus you can win the same map by either sending out lots of soldiers, or with no soldiers at all, buying sectors with coin or sending out priests to convert them. As the different strategies rely on different resources, choosing the right one based on the available resources is helpful, but usually various strategies or mixes work. But whatever you choose, the main skill required in any case is to build up a working network of production sites, with short roads and frequent storage houses to optimize logistics. Even if you choose the military option, there isn't much you can do to influence battles except sending more soldiers. The economic system is quite complex, and The Settlers 7 is not an easy game, with the added speed making it still more difficult. I really would have liked an option to start a map without any competition to just play around and watch my settlers, but the best the game offers in that direction is the option to continue playing after you won a map.
The Settlers 7 has a campaign with 12 missions, but that is considered an extended tutorial. The "main" game is then played in battles on various maps, against computer opponents or other players. There are 8 maps that come with the game, but there is also a map editor, and additional maps that can be unlocked with "coins". No, not real money, but coins you earn from winning games. The same coins also unlock additional AI opponents, and various building blocks for your castle. How your castle looks has no influence on gameplay, but in principle you can start with a simple castle, and then decorate it further as you progress in the game. Your castle as your avatar, so to say.
I started The Settlers 7 during my holidays, and thus installed it on my laptop. Which brings us to the Ubisoft Cloud Copy Protection, which unlike other copy protection schemes at least has some small advantages: You can install the game on as many computers as you like, and your save games are synchronized. Thus when I came home and installed the game on my main computer, I could continue the campaign where I had left it without having to copy any saved games. Unfortunately that, and a half-baked achievement system, are the only advantages from being forced to be always online. Well, that and not needing the DVD to play, but that is more the absence of a disadvantage from other copy protection schemes.
The disadvantages of the copy protection scheme are more serious: You can't play without internet connection. If you lose internet connection during play, your game stops working. Fortunately it does that in a rather controlled way, so when you get internet back and restart the game, you'll be at the last autosave point, which seem to have a rather short interval, thus you never have to replay a lot. Another problem is that even if *your* internet connection is fine, sometimes Ubisoft's servers are not. Not all of that is their fault, some copyright protection haters amused themselves by bringing the Ubisoft servers down with denial of service attacks. There is quite a war waging there, with hackers saying they cracked Ubisoft's copy protection scheme, and Ubisoft claiming that the hacked versions are incomplete. The DoS attacks tell me that Ubisoft must have hurt the hackers somewhat, otherwise they wouldn't have found it necessary to prevent regular players from playing the game just to spite Ubisoft. I didn't download a pirated version just to find out whether it was working and complete.
Now if you only ever played single-player games, the Ubisoft copy protection scheme can seem quite severe. MMORPG veterans and other players who play a lot of online games however will quickly realize that these Ubisoft games have exactly the same set of disadvantages as most online games. Whether it is World of Warcraft, Farmville, or The Settlers 7, you can't play if either your internet connection or the game companies servers are down. That is most certainly annoying, but as that happens to us every day for the last decade, we kind of got used to that particular obstacle. It is simply something that you need to keep in mind when making the decision of whether to buy Ubisoft games. Just like you wouldn't buy World of Warcraft for a computer without internet connection, you shouldn't buy new Ubisoft games for such a computer either. Oh, and unless you sell your whole Ubisoft account with it, you can't resell The Settlers 7, which is also something you should consider when looking at the price. Legally you aren't buying the game, you just acquire a license to play it. It's a bit like renting a car, Hertz *would* object if you tried to resell the car you rented from them.
While I'm not a fan of copy protection schemes, I didn't find this particular Ubisoft system all that bad. I dislike for example games which force you to keep the disc always in the drive to play much more annoying, or games which install a rootkit on my PC. No copy protection scheme whatsoever would be nice, and so would be peace on earth and goodwill to all men, but neither is realistic due to the existence of bad people. Game companies and pirates are equally to blame, its a vicious cycle. The grown-up thing to do is to consider how much that copy protection system really hurts you, based on your experience with internet outages with other games, and to factor that into your buying decision. But first you might want to download the demo, because how much you like the game is probably more important than how it is protected.
The Settlers 7 as a game is very nice, and has been sped up significantly from earlier incarnations. Instead of a game about building up an economy and watching your settlers go about their business, The Settlers 7 now delivers a gameplay which is a lot more competitive. This will not necessarily be to the liking of every veteran Settlers fan, but was probably a good move to make this game a bit more mainstream. While building up your economy is still the core of the game, gameplay now reminds me a bit of RTS games in speed the need to frequently watch what the opposition is doing. If you act too slow, the computer opponents will continue gathering victory points until it is game over for you.
The interesting part of the victory point system is that you have three different choices on how to win: military, trade, or religion. Thus you can win the same map by either sending out lots of soldiers, or with no soldiers at all, buying sectors with coin or sending out priests to convert them. As the different strategies rely on different resources, choosing the right one based on the available resources is helpful, but usually various strategies or mixes work. But whatever you choose, the main skill required in any case is to build up a working network of production sites, with short roads and frequent storage houses to optimize logistics. Even if you choose the military option, there isn't much you can do to influence battles except sending more soldiers. The economic system is quite complex, and The Settlers 7 is not an easy game, with the added speed making it still more difficult. I really would have liked an option to start a map without any competition to just play around and watch my settlers, but the best the game offers in that direction is the option to continue playing after you won a map.
The Settlers 7 has a campaign with 12 missions, but that is considered an extended tutorial. The "main" game is then played in battles on various maps, against computer opponents or other players. There are 8 maps that come with the game, but there is also a map editor, and additional maps that can be unlocked with "coins". No, not real money, but coins you earn from winning games. The same coins also unlock additional AI opponents, and various building blocks for your castle. How your castle looks has no influence on gameplay, but in principle you can start with a simple castle, and then decorate it further as you progress in the game. Your castle as your avatar, so to say.
I started The Settlers 7 during my holidays, and thus installed it on my laptop. Which brings us to the Ubisoft Cloud Copy Protection, which unlike other copy protection schemes at least has some small advantages: You can install the game on as many computers as you like, and your save games are synchronized. Thus when I came home and installed the game on my main computer, I could continue the campaign where I had left it without having to copy any saved games. Unfortunately that, and a half-baked achievement system, are the only advantages from being forced to be always online. Well, that and not needing the DVD to play, but that is more the absence of a disadvantage from other copy protection schemes.
The disadvantages of the copy protection scheme are more serious: You can't play without internet connection. If you lose internet connection during play, your game stops working. Fortunately it does that in a rather controlled way, so when you get internet back and restart the game, you'll be at the last autosave point, which seem to have a rather short interval, thus you never have to replay a lot. Another problem is that even if *your* internet connection is fine, sometimes Ubisoft's servers are not. Not all of that is their fault, some copyright protection haters amused themselves by bringing the Ubisoft servers down with denial of service attacks. There is quite a war waging there, with hackers saying they cracked Ubisoft's copy protection scheme, and Ubisoft claiming that the hacked versions are incomplete. The DoS attacks tell me that Ubisoft must have hurt the hackers somewhat, otherwise they wouldn't have found it necessary to prevent regular players from playing the game just to spite Ubisoft. I didn't download a pirated version just to find out whether it was working and complete.
Now if you only ever played single-player games, the Ubisoft copy protection scheme can seem quite severe. MMORPG veterans and other players who play a lot of online games however will quickly realize that these Ubisoft games have exactly the same set of disadvantages as most online games. Whether it is World of Warcraft, Farmville, or The Settlers 7, you can't play if either your internet connection or the game companies servers are down. That is most certainly annoying, but as that happens to us every day for the last decade, we kind of got used to that particular obstacle. It is simply something that you need to keep in mind when making the decision of whether to buy Ubisoft games. Just like you wouldn't buy World of Warcraft for a computer without internet connection, you shouldn't buy new Ubisoft games for such a computer either. Oh, and unless you sell your whole Ubisoft account with it, you can't resell The Settlers 7, which is also something you should consider when looking at the price. Legally you aren't buying the game, you just acquire a license to play it. It's a bit like renting a car, Hertz *would* object if you tried to resell the car you rented from them.
While I'm not a fan of copy protection schemes, I didn't find this particular Ubisoft system all that bad. I dislike for example games which force you to keep the disc always in the drive to play much more annoying, or games which install a rootkit on my PC. No copy protection scheme whatsoever would be nice, and so would be peace on earth and goodwill to all men, but neither is realistic due to the existence of bad people. Game companies and pirates are equally to blame, its a vicious cycle. The grown-up thing to do is to consider how much that copy protection system really hurts you, based on your experience with internet outages with other games, and to factor that into your buying decision. But first you might want to download the demo, because how much you like the game is probably more important than how it is protected.
Special characters
Klepsacovic, which by the way is an east European name, hates all Europeans because apparently we are responsible for Blizzard allowing special characters in names. Well, for obvious reasons I kind of like Europe. But I *do* agree with Klepsacovic that it wasn't a good idea for Blizzard to allow special characters in names.
The World of Warcraft user interface is still not completely mouse-driven, so sometimes you need to type character names. Thus it gets rather annoying if the character name you want to type is Çðäòß, and none of these letters even appear on your keyboard. Also annoying is when people use special characters to circumvent rules that forbid certain too well known names, and you end up with elven hunters called Légoläs.
So, European or not, I'd be in favor of Blizzard changing their naming rules and allowing only standard 26 alphabet characters for names, and force everyone who used something else to change their name.
The World of Warcraft user interface is still not completely mouse-driven, so sometimes you need to type character names. Thus it gets rather annoying if the character name you want to type is Çðäòß, and none of these letters even appear on your keyboard. Also annoying is when people use special characters to circumvent rules that forbid certain too well known names, and you end up with elven hunters called Légoläs.
So, European or not, I'd be in favor of Blizzard changing their naming rules and allowing only standard 26 alphabet characters for names, and force everyone who used something else to change their name.
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Discarded ideas for the blog
While I do listen to what readers tell me in the open Sunday thread, or by e-mail, I do not do everything they suggest. Here are some ideas that were suggested to me, which I discarded, plus my reasons for doing so.
Wyrm suggested I install a chat room on this blog. I looked at it, and it seems technically feasible to do so. But then I looked at the numbers, and found the idea not very realistic: My blog on average gets only 1 comment per hour. That is enough to keep a conversation going in the comments section, but not in a chat room. Furthermore I believe that the idea some sites have that they need to offer everything is not necessarily a good one. Better to concentrate on just one thing and do it well than to spread out too much.
Syrien asked me to cover iPhone or iPad or Android games. It isn't as if I had any principal objections against mobile gaming, although in my personal situation I don't really see when and where I would do that. But the main obstacle here is that I simply don't own an iPhone, iPad, or Android phone. I have a rather simple mobile phone without games, and with a prepaid plan without monthly cost, as I'm not using it all that often. An iPhone 3GS with 32 GB costs 679 €, and the cheapest monthly plan costs 30 €, here in Belgium, so for the first year I would basically pay over 1,000 €. I consider that a bit too expensive, given that I don't really need one.
Which brings me to the last idea, where a reader suggested I put up a PayPal donation button, and I was thinking I could neatly combine that with the previous idea and make it a "Buy Tobold an iPhone" button. ;) But with only 1% of visitors even leaving a comment, we can assume that the percentage of people willing to leave money would be even less, and the donations would be small. I'm pretty certain it would take years, if ever, to get the money for an iPhone together. Also accepting money would mean I would have a certain obligation towards the people who pay me, and I value my independance more than that.
Anyway, even if I don't accept all the ideas, you are welcome to make suggestions by e-mail or in the open Sunday thread.
Wyrm suggested I install a chat room on this blog. I looked at it, and it seems technically feasible to do so. But then I looked at the numbers, and found the idea not very realistic: My blog on average gets only 1 comment per hour. That is enough to keep a conversation going in the comments section, but not in a chat room. Furthermore I believe that the idea some sites have that they need to offer everything is not necessarily a good one. Better to concentrate on just one thing and do it well than to spread out too much.
Syrien asked me to cover iPhone or iPad or Android games. It isn't as if I had any principal objections against mobile gaming, although in my personal situation I don't really see when and where I would do that. But the main obstacle here is that I simply don't own an iPhone, iPad, or Android phone. I have a rather simple mobile phone without games, and with a prepaid plan without monthly cost, as I'm not using it all that often. An iPhone 3GS with 32 GB costs 679 €, and the cheapest monthly plan costs 30 €, here in Belgium, so for the first year I would basically pay over 1,000 €. I consider that a bit too expensive, given that I don't really need one.
Which brings me to the last idea, where a reader suggested I put up a PayPal donation button, and I was thinking I could neatly combine that with the previous idea and make it a "Buy Tobold an iPhone" button. ;) But with only 1% of visitors even leaving a comment, we can assume that the percentage of people willing to leave money would be even less, and the donations would be small. I'm pretty certain it would take years, if ever, to get the money for an iPhone together. Also accepting money would mean I would have a certain obligation towards the people who pay me, and I value my independance more than that.
Anyway, even if I don't accept all the ideas, you are welcome to make suggestions by e-mail or in the open Sunday thread.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Open Sunday Thread
Happy Easter! My holidays, and thus my casual Facebook gaming period, comes to an end. What would you like me to write about next week?
Friday, April 2, 2010
Thought for the day: Not a threat
After spending some time testing various Facebook games, I would say that all the hype at the GDC of "Facebook games are the future of gaming" was overblown. Facebook games are not a threat because they severely lack longevity. All Facebook games together have less hours of gameplay in them than World of Warcraft. So they are great for casual gaming a few minutes here or there, but can't compete for people who want to spend many hours each week on gaming.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
NanoStar Siege
It is still Facebook week on Tobold's MMORPG Blog, an opportunity to see what the rest of the world is playing. Today I am going to talk about a very different game, NanoStar Siege from Digital Chocolate.
Now NanoStar Siege presses all the wrong buttons with me: It is still in beta, and has some quite annoying bugs such as cards not working at all, or battles crashing with an error message and you being declared to have lost. After every battle it spams you with a window asking you to spend more money, or to invite more friends. And this is definitively the kind of game in which spending more money significantly increases your chance to win in battles against other players.
Nevertheless NanoStar Siege is incredibly fun and addictive. Unlike all the other Facebook games I tried, NanoStar Siege is a completely active game, with absolutely no artificial downtime or waiting involved. You play when you like, and as much as you like. The devs describe the game as competitive tower defense game, but actually all the action happens in the attack. You attack other player's castles, for which the other players have set up an army and various defenses, and you need to overcome these defenses to win the battle and earn xp to level up. But the beauty of the system is that it is positive sum PvP: Even the loser of a battle is rewarded gold for the enemy units he kills. Thus, even if you log on and find one of your friends has raided your castle a dozen times while you were away, you can click on all those battle lost message icons and collect lots of gold with which to strengthen your defenses for the next time. So while defense is rewarded, I'd rather call the game a tower attack game.
NanoStar Siege has three basic troop types, swordsmen as tanks, slayers as melee dps, and bowmen for ranged dps. You set up a starting army, the bigger, the more expensive to you and begin battle. During battle a regroup meter slowly fills up, which you can use to send fresh troops into battle, choosing in which column they should attack. Or you wait until the regroup meter is full and use it to reshuffle your deck of hero cards, which is very necessary when it runs empty.
Playing heroes is the main activity during battles. You select a "deck" of heroes, with a predefined number of legendary, mighty, and strong heroes, based on your level. There are various types of hero cards: Cards that add troops, cards that transform one of your simple soldiers into some special troops like a healer or master archer, cards that deal damage to enemy troops, buffs, debuffs, and various global effects. Thus there is a lot of fun involved in putting together various strategies: Do you want to kill the enemy troops with direct attacks, or would you rather zerg him with lots of reinforcements? What cards can you use to counter your enemies strategy?
You start the game with a small selection of cards, and the only way to get more of them is to buy random booster packs, like in a trading card game. Because I was having fun, and I do believe in paying game developers that produce fun games, I spent $30 on 215 "DC points", with which I bought 8 boosters of 5 cards, and two boosters of 1 card, for a total of 42 additional heroes. As I can only take 13 heroes into battle each time at my level, that gives me already a rather large number of options to build my deck from. And while that initial investment was certainly a boost to my power, further purchases will have diminishing returns, because I only gain more options in deckbuilding, not more heroes per battle. Interestingly there is another game from the same developers, NanoStar Castles, which uses the same cards, so if you buy boosters in one game, you can use them in both. But basically I consider that I paid $30 for playing NanoStar Siege, which isn't a bad deal in view of how much fun this is to play.
I certainly would recommend checking out NanoStar Siege for free by playing a couple of games with the cards provided. I sure wouldn't recommend going overboard with card purchases, especially in view of the game not being all that stable yet. Whether you can justify a moderate investment in cards depends on your personal finances and how much you end up liking the game.
Now NanoStar Siege presses all the wrong buttons with me: It is still in beta, and has some quite annoying bugs such as cards not working at all, or battles crashing with an error message and you being declared to have lost. After every battle it spams you with a window asking you to spend more money, or to invite more friends. And this is definitively the kind of game in which spending more money significantly increases your chance to win in battles against other players.
Nevertheless NanoStar Siege is incredibly fun and addictive. Unlike all the other Facebook games I tried, NanoStar Siege is a completely active game, with absolutely no artificial downtime or waiting involved. You play when you like, and as much as you like. The devs describe the game as competitive tower defense game, but actually all the action happens in the attack. You attack other player's castles, for which the other players have set up an army and various defenses, and you need to overcome these defenses to win the battle and earn xp to level up. But the beauty of the system is that it is positive sum PvP: Even the loser of a battle is rewarded gold for the enemy units he kills. Thus, even if you log on and find one of your friends has raided your castle a dozen times while you were away, you can click on all those battle lost message icons and collect lots of gold with which to strengthen your defenses for the next time. So while defense is rewarded, I'd rather call the game a tower attack game.
NanoStar Siege has three basic troop types, swordsmen as tanks, slayers as melee dps, and bowmen for ranged dps. You set up a starting army, the bigger, the more expensive to you and begin battle. During battle a regroup meter slowly fills up, which you can use to send fresh troops into battle, choosing in which column they should attack. Or you wait until the regroup meter is full and use it to reshuffle your deck of hero cards, which is very necessary when it runs empty.
Playing heroes is the main activity during battles. You select a "deck" of heroes, with a predefined number of legendary, mighty, and strong heroes, based on your level. There are various types of hero cards: Cards that add troops, cards that transform one of your simple soldiers into some special troops like a healer or master archer, cards that deal damage to enemy troops, buffs, debuffs, and various global effects. Thus there is a lot of fun involved in putting together various strategies: Do you want to kill the enemy troops with direct attacks, or would you rather zerg him with lots of reinforcements? What cards can you use to counter your enemies strategy?
You start the game with a small selection of cards, and the only way to get more of them is to buy random booster packs, like in a trading card game. Because I was having fun, and I do believe in paying game developers that produce fun games, I spent $30 on 215 "DC points", with which I bought 8 boosters of 5 cards, and two boosters of 1 card, for a total of 42 additional heroes. As I can only take 13 heroes into battle each time at my level, that gives me already a rather large number of options to build my deck from. And while that initial investment was certainly a boost to my power, further purchases will have diminishing returns, because I only gain more options in deckbuilding, not more heroes per battle. Interestingly there is another game from the same developers, NanoStar Castles, which uses the same cards, so if you buy boosters in one game, you can use them in both. But basically I consider that I paid $30 for playing NanoStar Siege, which isn't a bad deal in view of how much fun this is to play.
I certainly would recommend checking out NanoStar Siege for free by playing a couple of games with the cards provided. I sure wouldn't recommend going overboard with card purchases, especially in view of the game not being all that stable yet. Whether you can justify a moderate investment in cards depends on your personal finances and how much you end up liking the game.
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