A brief rant.
I never sat down to try to invent new games, this just came out. I was playing Backgammon with a friend, kind of bored out by the monotony of the rules, and this idea popped out of my mind. It was on Easter Island, September of 1999.
More than 20 years have passed since that moment, and I have invested thousands of hours developing: the rules, the mechanics, the app, the website, the marketing contents, etc.
I do this for free because I believe in my heart that this game is the successor of Backgammon as you know it and if that becomes a reality during my life, the consequences will be more than sufficient as retribution. Because I'm a software engineer I was able to do this all by myself in my spare time, having fun in the process.
When I was developing the WebApp to share my rules with the world, I thought Abak Evolution would be a hit the minute it went online, that Backgammon players would embrace the new rules thinking "oh my, how this didn't occur to me!". Surprise, surprise: they didn't. As I'm writing this, four full years have passed since Abak came online, thousand of dollars in paid marketing campaigns, and yet it has at most a couple of hundreds of regular players.
Abak Evolution faces many entry barriers that have proven to be difficult to overcome:
- Is fairly more challenging than Classic Backgammon and has a steep learning curve.
- Backgammon players are very engaged and love their game, they see Abak as a threat or an intruder.
- Many people like to play backgammon against humans, not computers, and you need a critical mass of players to achieve that.
- I don't have enough resources to scale up communications and content creation.
- The app is not the state of the art in backgammon experience and lacks a lot of tools advanced backgammon players would like.
So, there are the current fronts of my battle. I work on them in my spare time, prioritizing learning contents, as I think that is the heavier barrier of all. I spend too much time in Artificial Intelligence, because I just love it, even though the engine plays fairly well as of now and there is no need for a stronger player.
Thanks for your time.