Blog Announcement

[kusto]

Friday, March 22, 2013

Announcement


On september 2011, DP and I stopped working on our respective jobs to be able to devote full time to Kaya.gs

In less than 3 months we published an alpha version with the most raw of all features. In the following 6 months we expanded the server with features relentlessly and after that more gradually, as we had to also take care of project maturity, scalability and reliability.

Today, Kaya.gs is a very stable project, with only a few nuisances to improve and then only features to pump and improve.

However, although funding has let us spend a huge amount of time into the project, is it s not enough to support our lifehood. Because of that, it became necessary for me to look for a job, and I got it.

I am currently working for a web company (Scribd.com) which means I wont be able to devote my usual development time to the project.

This does not mean Kaya wont be advancing, but the strategy has to change and we are devising a plan for that.

We will stop doing the weekly releases as of now, and we will work towards building a very stable and nice-looking site. Adding features it not our immediate priority: Kaya already has a huge bundle of features that most registered users haven't explored or seen, and adding more will have limited value.

We might include features that are already server supported, but haven't gotten to the client (there are several big ones for that actually) but our priority right now is to finish the site's visual look&feel.

We will be also playing and providing technical support. See you on Kaya.

Regards, Gabriel.

Am i the only one disappointed in hearing this?

All of the hype and false promises?

I expected more, a lot more in fact.

You guys asked for donations from the public to help fund YOUR BUSINESS.

409 Contributors bringing in a total of US$ 17,478 thus far. That is a communities worth of generosity, love and support that i feel has been under appreciated.

Your rate of progression was embarrassing as time went on and as most programmers would likely agree, the change log was heavily padded out with a few simple things from week to week. That was up until a couple of months ago when traces of development disappeared.

You promised full time development and yet didn't apply yourselves completely.

People donated money, code, translation services and more. All sold on a dream.

If you were to say that it was too much work for such a small team of two, i would feel this was inaccurate. I can't help but think the money would have been better off given to wms to update KGS.

I for one hope that the source code will be made public for others to use and contribute to the community as suggested in the comments below the post.

I am sure some people will disagree with my above view, but i felt i should share it none the less.

[skydyr]

Am i the only one disappointed in hearing this?

All of the hype and false promises?

I expected more, a lot more in fact.

You guys asked for donations from the public to help fund YOUR BUSINESS.

409 Contributors bringing in a total of US$ 17,478 thus far. That is a communities worth of generosity, love and support that i feel has been under appreciated.

Your rate of progression was embarrassing as time went on and as most programmers would likely agree, the change log was heavily padded out with a few simple things from week to week. That was up until a couple of months ago when traces of development disappeared.

You promised full time development and yet didn't apply yourselves completely.

Leaving aside the other portions of this comment, I think it's surprisingly arrogant to think that $17.5k is enough to fund two people to work on a project full time for two years in the US, let alone a few months. Not everyone is a college student with loans or parents to live off of and time to spare, and when the question becomes 'do I make the mortgage and put food on the table for my family, or do I work on this project that I can't live off of?' the answer is a no-brainer.

Something that seems to be missed with kickstarter and the like is that most small businesses fail within their first few years. You are not buying something in return for your money. You are giving a gift, and hoping that it will lead to something you see as valuable. You can look at it as an investment too, but investments carry risk. That this project came as far as it has, and that many of these sorts of community funded projects end in success is a testament to the effort of the people being funded.

[duckweed]

Leaving aside the other portions of this comment, I think it's surprisingly arrogant to think that $17.5k is enough to fund two people to work on a project full time for two years in the US, let alone a few months. Not everyone is a college student with loans or parents to live off of and time to spare, and when the question becomes 'do I make the mortgage and put food on the table for my family, or do I work on this project that I can't live off of?' the answer is a no-brainer.

Something that seems to be missed with kickstarter and the like is that most small businesses fail within their first few years. You are not buying something in return for your money. You are giving a gift, and hoping that it will lead to something you see as valuable. You can look at it as an investment too, but investments carry risk. That this project came as far as it has, and that many of these sorts of community funded projects end in success is a testament to the effort of the people being funded.

I guess you are right, skydyr. This is what happens when you 'invest' in people with no business plan and no track record of running a business.

[kusto]

Leaving aside the other portions of this comment, I think it's surprisingly arrogant to think that $17.5k is enough to fund two people to work on a project full time for two years in the US, let alone a few months.

True, but it was not supposed to take 2 years and it has not even been two years. Why you bring up that number is beyond me. Also they do not live in the USA which is still beside the point.

Not everyone is a college student with loans or parents to live off of and time to spare, and when the question becomes 'do I make the mortgage and put food on the table for my family, or do I work on this project that I can't live off of?' the answer is a no-brainer.

With time to spare? That is what the donations were for, to help offset that burden.

Something that seems to be missed with kickstarter and the like is that most small businesses fail within their first few years. You are not buying something in return for your money. You are giving a gift, and hoping that it will lead to something you see as valuable. You can look at it as an investment too, but investments carry risk. That this project came as far as it has, and that many of these sorts of community funded projects end in success is a testament to the effort of the people being funded.

Not true, we were paying in advance for a go server that promised to go above and beyond. That was the pitch. Instead what was delivered was below sub par without even a set of basic review tools.

When businesses need funds most of them get a loan to start their venture and you can be sure the bank would collect if it failed. I think the least i can want is to express my disappointment.

[Kirby]

I guess my take on this is that I am a little disappointed that the project is changing gears, but I also agree with skydyr that, sometimes projects fail.

Personally, I like kaya, and I think that they did a pretty good job with what's there so far. The biggest problem, in my opinion, is just that there aren't enough users.

If everyone on KGS or IGS, for example, played regularly on Kaya, I would be there all of the time.

It's too bad things didn't turn out this way, because I think the web interface is great.

[Bonobo]

I don’t feel that bad about it, I rather congratulate Gabriel to his new job.

The blog post says they are devising a plan, and hey, Kaya is not that bad, is it? Anyway, I don’t see that post to announce an abandonement of kaya.gs, just that it will progress somewhat slower. I think it’s great what they have built so far (and yes, I also paid, $30, IIRC).

Greetings, Tom

p.s.: be sure to go to that blog post and read the comments.

[gogameguru]

Fair go mate!

They did their best and as far as I can see Gabriel hasn't said anything about giving up on the project. He's just said that he needs a job on the side to pay the bills, which is entirely reasonable. What else do you expect him to do?

Anyway, the server they've made seems pretty good to me. It's just hard to get enough people to play there.

The reality is that it's incredibly hard to run a Go related business without also doing some sort of other work to support you and your family. Until there are many more Go players in the West, that's not going to change, no matter how much you rail against it.

Nearly everyone I know in this business either has a second job or is retired. And they all do it primarily for the love of the game.

Nobody's getting rich here...

[Kaya.gs]

Fair go mate!

They did their best and as far as I can see Gabriel hasn't said anything about giving up on the project. He's just said that he needs a job on the side to pay the bills, which is entirely reasonable. What else do you expect him to do?

Anyway, the server they've made seems pretty good to me. It's just hard to get enough people to play there.

The reality is that it's incredibly hard to run a Go related business without also doing some sort of other work to support you and your family. Until there are many more Go players in the West, that's not going to change, no matter how much you rail against it.

Nearly everyone I know in this business either has a second job or is retired. And they all do it primarily for the love of the game.

Nobody's getting rich here...

.

Kaya has a bundle of features everywhere and its made to remain flexible to outside changes. However we noted that most users arent familiar or know a lot of the features already presented actually exist, like variation sharing, malkovich, broadcasts (had some really nice broadcasts by JeanSebl). When we noted this, we reduced the efforts on features and increased it to stability.
What kaya needs the most is an influx of players to make it easier to play a game, which is the fundamental service of a Go Server.

I do have a plan for that, but i dont have the personal finances to wear that out until it "may happen". On the other hand, because of this i will have way more resources and can patron the server in another way.

As many already know, OpenKaya is always open for contributions, and some developers have gained access to the private repositories of Kaya. There are many things to contribute to from a developer perspective, and I will make sure to check, verify, guide , write tests and more for such contributions, as I have already done on many side projects.

[palapiku]

From this thread:

About the business plan. We do have one, a well written one, with statistics, estimates, development schedule, pronostications, details of the team, techonologies, market, reference businesses, competitors, etc etc.
Its just not public. We ARE talking to investors. We have moved our business plan in angel rings and VC's, contests and gaming companies. That's actually how we found our will-be iPad publisher.
[...]
We have a few strategies in the planning regarding the Asian community, but there is no rush to them. The Bar to compare to Asian clients is higher than to compare to KGS. In the line of production, we believe we will provide more than KGS sooner that providing more than those servers.
That said we have a few ideas (impossible to reproduce by Asian Servers) that have the potential to attract professional players. We think that if we get them, the asian community will follow. This very OCtober i want to stay there for a couple of weeks to make some quick-dirty demos to show some high level pros and get some feedback, and use as research.

So it is safe to assume that all of that fell through?

From the same post, a year and a half ago:

And if after a year of developing, we dont find a business model or can't make it profitable in time, then the most likely scenario is that we open-source the whole server. So as we see it, even the worst case scenario is a gain for the community.

Is this the plan now?

[dfunkt]

Kaya has a bundle of features everywhere and its made to remain flexible to outside changes. However we noted that most users arent familiar or know a lot of the features already presented actually exist, like variation sharing, malkovich, broadcasts (had some really nice broadcasts by JeanSebl). When we noted this, we reduced the efforts on features and increased it to stability.
What kaya needs the most is an influx of players to make it easier to play a game, which is the fundamental service of a Go Server.

I am glad you are so proud of broadcasts. I am not so thrilled with them. It is just a bandwidth hog that offers nothing more than a view of a couple players shifting uncomfortably in their chairs while they play a game. Without review tools a server is useless and that has been ignored in favour of broadcasts. The UI is full of bugs and clutter. Games still have bugs with unplayable points. There is no support for browser accessibility features. And there is a host of other "small nuisances" which turned many people away.

The verdict... nice try but it's a fail. See you all on Nova.gs. Those two guys with full-time jobs have accomplished more in 3 months than Kaya did in over a year with our donations.

[kusto]

Fair go mate!

They did their best and as far as I can see Gabriel hasn't said anything about giving up on the project. He's just said that he needs a job on the side to pay the bills, which is entirely reasonable. What else do you expect him to do?

Anyway, the server they've made seems pretty good to me. It's just hard to get enough people to play there.

The reality is that it's incredibly hard to run a Go related business without also doing some sort of other work to support you and your family. Until there are many more Go players in the West, that's not going to change, no matter how much you rail against it.

Nearly everyone I know in this business either has a second job or is retired. And they all do it primarily for the love of the game.

Nobody's getting rich here...

Would it be too much of me to think that you are biased by our previous disagreement in the Baduk TV thread?

You say they did their best, i say they didn't. Otherwise a lot more work would have been done within that time. Remembering that most of their structure work for the server was completed before opening to others. Then adding that most additions to the server from that point were others providing various sections.

He might not has said directly that they were giving up, but you watch. It's the same old letting people down softly routine. Which is what has been playing out for a long time now. Until the user base drops so badly that they say "Oh there is no point now". It's going to happen.

Saying there isn't enough user base for it is utterly ridiculous if it was meeting peoples NEEDS then there wouldn't be a problem. Most go players have an account that they use on multiple servers skipping between them at will. It's when a community starts to shrink from inactivity and see a lack of progression, compounded by incomplete projects losing traction that they lose faith and habitually stop accessing it.

I understand that it is hard to run a go based business. But for a project that was funding their venture allowing them to get off the ground without having to worry about holding a job for that time means that side of the equation shouldn't have been a concern. At a time that they should have been pumping out updates daily. Not 4-5 weak updates weekly. Conveniently not dating them to see just how poor an effort it really was.

They were complaining about how hard it was to work on the server while maintaining a job before they took it upon themselves to "work full time" on kaya. Being the main factor for why the donations were being requested in the first place.

As you would expect there to be some transition period, a sacrifice if you will to facilitate the process until the business becomes self sufficient. This was where the money was to be taken into account. So i don't share the same sympathy you seem to be mustering up. I am like i said earlier, disappointed. I can't help it.

.

Kaya has a bundle of features everywhere and its made to remain flexible to outside changes. However we noted that most users aren't familiar or know a lot of the features already presented actually exist, like variation sharing, malkovich, broadcasts (had some really nice broadcasts by JeanSebl). When we noted this, we reduced the efforts on features and increased it to stability.
What kaya needs the most is an influx of players to make it easier to play a game, which is the fundamental service of a Go Server.

I do have a plan for that, but i don't have the personal finances to wear that out until it "may happen". On the other hand, because of this i will have way more resources and can patron the server in another way.

As many already know, OpenKaya is always open for contributions, and some developers have gained access to the private repositories of Kaya. There are many things to contribute to from a developer perspective, and I will make sure to check, verify, guide , write tests and more for such contributions, as I have already done on many side projects.

A new air-conditioning unit doesn't excuse the fact that the car doesn't have any windows. You can say "oh we have x,y,z features that are really cool" but lack fundamentals. Without the basic features that are expected from a product no-one is going to find it terribly useful and its not like its recent that they were promised as being high priority either.

Broadcasts, consisting of an embedded stream slapped to the side of a pre-developed board is hardly a time consuming feature. Considering it is far from a recent addition. Variation sharing, another feature from almost the start, barely changing along the way. Malkovich, another simple feature to implement.
And when you say "When we noted this, we reduced the efforts on features and increased it to stability." Why does it have to be one or the other, and from what we have seen it has not really helped that much along the way.

Kaya's fan-base was increasing, and rightly so when it was something to look forward to something new claiming to be better than the rest. Mocking on occasion the many other servers openly. So when you say that what Kaya needs the most is an influx of players to make it easier to play a game. I disagree as do a lot of people i have spoken with. Kaya lacks basic ingredients but tries to pass it off as a complete alternative. Like the old saying goes, build it and they will come. But you know that is where the problem of this equation lies.

Open Kaya is your answer to a public request of becoming open source? The reason people barely are contributing code anymore is because they don't want to work on things that you will profit from it later, and rightly so.

If the project was completely open source i have no doubt contributions would increase drastically. But keep it to yourself, let it become old and outdated while Kaya continues to wither.

You know my thoughts and that's all i can say. If you are honestly proud of how you used your time and the small amount of fruits it bore than that is all we could honestly ask.

[Xa17u]

I am glad you are so proud of broadcasts. I am not so thrilled with them. It is just a bandwidth hog that offers nothing more than a view of a couple players shifting uncomfortably in their chairs while they play a game. Without review tools a server is useless and that has been ignored in favour of broadcasts. The UI is full of bugs and clutter. Games still have bugs with unplayable points. There is no support for browser accessibility features. And there is a host of other "small nuisances" which turned many people away.

The verdict... nice try but it's a fail. See you all on Nova.gs. Those two guys with full-time jobs have accomplished more in 3 months than Kaya did in over a year with our donations.

[Kaya.gs]

From this thread:

About the business plan. We do have one, a well written one, with statistics, estimates, development schedule, pronostications, details of the team, techonologies, market, reference businesses, competitors, etc etc.
Its just not public. We ARE talking to investors. We have moved our business plan in angel rings and VC's, contests and gaming companies. That's actually how we found our will-be iPad publisher.
[...]
We have a few strategies in the planning regarding the Asian community, but there is no rush to them. The Bar to compare to Asian clients is higher than to compare to KGS. In the line of production, we believe we will provide more than KGS sooner that providing more than those servers.
That said we have a few ideas (impossible to reproduce by Asian Servers) that have the potential to attract professional players. We think that if we get them, the asian community will follow. This very OCtober i want to stay there for a couple of weeks to make some quick-dirty demos to show some high level pros and get some feedback, and use as research.

So it is safe to assume that all of that fell through?

From the same post, a year and a half ago:

And if after a year of developing, we dont find a business model or can't make it profitable in time, then the most likely scenario is that we open-source the whole server. So as we see it, even the worst case scenario is a gain for the community.

Is this the plan now?

As i wrote on the blog, open sourcing the server is a possibility. Let me remind you that over 50% of the server's code has been made accessible to collaborators(client code and such). Open sourcing is not a silverbullet.

[balistic]

As i wrote on the blog, open sourcing the server is a possibility. Let me remind you that over 50% of the server's code has been made accessible to collaborators(client code and such). Open sourcing is not a silverbullet.

Isnt there only like less than 20 collaborators, most of who dont code lol?

Ill start by saying i used to recommend kaya to everyone, but i havent been able to lately because people are never happy with its level of completion. And if i stop and think i can now see the passion was disapearing a while back with you guys. I dont blame you or anything because you are only human and we all get distracted/run out of time/fail to meet expectations.I do think though in hind sight it would have been nice for you to communicate with us throughout the past few months when updates stopped happening so at least we knew officially the direction the site was headed and i also vote +1 for open source, hopefully others will learn something from it and possibly are able to keep contributing new stuff to the existing site which just needs a lot of time and love. I think releasing it open source would be a great gift back to the community and can only improve it.

[Mef]

I think as kutso and palpiku have touched on, much of the disappointment stems from how this server was announced and presented, and perhaps some of the underlying assumptions made by the supporting community. It was intended to be a partially crowdfunded, partially sponsor-supported server that would have two full-time programmers and a viable business model. The assumptions were that with full time programmers there would be quick progress and rapid development, and with the sponsors and business model the server would become self-sustaining.

The lack of progress is disheartening because after over a year with two full time programmers one might expect quite a bit more (as dfunkt mentioned, there is a relatively polished, hybrid turn-based/real time server in nova.gs that was made as a hobby by two people working part-time on it over a shorter period). This blog announcement was also disheartening because it suggests that the business end of the server has also fallen short.

Given that two of their fundamental assumptions were apparently not borne out, I can understand why some of the initial supporters might feel disenfranchised.