hmm, that's a shame, really.
One reason I stick to indie games mostly, is because they tend to NOT get hung up on graphics, as opposed to 300% of the crap that gets released at retail these days. .....stupidly, as a result, many indie titles end up looking MUCH better than those ever do, but that's a whole other rant.
That's something I prefer, too, and yet we've been roasted by half of the Internet for that philosophy. At this point we've not remotely made back the money from making the game in the first place, and every month that we just focus on free updates to the base game is a month where we lose more money. Over ten thousand dollars of money. So that's obviously not a viable business practice for us.
The one big thing that people keep mentioning as holding them back from buying the game is the art. Over and over and over we hear this. So that's what we have to address. Similarly, in a Steam sale or similar people rarely play a game; they look at screenshots and videos and the blurb about the game, and then buy based on that when the discounts are good enough. If our screenshots are underwhelming to people, then we fail to reach the sales that we need in order to recoup the costs of such an ambitious (for us) game.
From the start we always promised that we'd be updating this game as long as there was player support, or three months for sure at worst, and it's now been three months and the player support is not there in enough volume to sustain the kinds of updates we've been doing. Aka, I have to lay off Josh and Erik if we keep down this path, and then the other three of us get majorly financially squeezed as well. The company isn't in jeopardy, as I said, but we've done everything we could on the gameplay side to address all of the major deficits that people complained about. At this point we've hit a point of diminishing returns there I think, and additionally they have garnered us almost no additional word of mouth or news coverage. So that's not working. Given how often the art is cited as the reason that people don't want to play the game or even try it in some cases, it seems the only rational course is to see if those people are just full of hot air or really are telling the truth. If the latter, then we see a renaissance of the game and we move back into heavier updates and do an expansion early next year, yadda yadda yadda.
I have to wonder though, how much of the low-ish sales really has to do with the art? I mean, a couple of things I can think of..... firstly, Diablo 3 happened. ......I dont even need to say anymore about THAT one. Secondly...... I find that alot of people honestly havent the foggiest idea what this game is. I might mention the name to someone I know, be it locally or online on AIM or a forum or whatever, and NOT EVEN ONCE have I had someone respond with something other than "What? What's that game? I've never heard of it." Granted, that one seems to happen alot with indie titles. I imagine it's not at all easy trying to advertise the things! I would never have known about this game myself if I hadnt been checking IndieGameBlog every day as I do. I dont think I've ever seen it mentioned anywhere else (besides Steam, that is). Dont get me wrong, I understand the art is still a factor (all those bloody stupid "everything is brown" games seem to be still popular, after all, for reasons I'm very happy NOT to understand), but I cant imagine it's the only factor.
The art seems to have other factors, such as reviewer opinions (people really do have their opinions tainted by art they consider bad, and won't give the game as much of a chance because of it; on metacritic many of the bad reviews mention the art. Actually, I think
all of them do). Then there's the matter that news and word of mouth really is secondary to the all-important Steam sale. And that's where people just buy what is put in front of them on sale, if the price is right and the description/video is cool, and the screenshots look interesting. Plus some other factors. This is where, so far, the game has failed since Diablo 3 came around.
Some of that might still be the influence of Diablo 3 rather than anything to do with our art, but if that's the case then we simply need to move away from this game anyhow and into something that isn't competing head-to-head with Blizzard. I tend to take a more positive view that we can salvage this with a revamped art style that will hopefully catch the media's attention in a way that our painstaking work and long hours for the last three months has not. Tom Chick aside.
In short: I don't get to make the rules of the marketplace, but I do have to survive in them. I don't view AVWW as dead or even dying, but I think that it is in need of a major jolt in the form of the art rework in order to hit that next level.
So, what does this mean as far as updates go? Are you guys gonna be holding off on these for now, or something like that?
We'll be doing updates every week at least, but they will be smaller and less frequent for sure. Once the final art style is selected, that will start being integrated immediately, for one thing. On the other end of the spectrum, I'll be doing a new spell or some other piece of content ideally every week (or two at the outside). We'll continue to do balance updates and think about how to make things run more smoothly and shave off the grind. And of course bugfixes.
In terms of the things we had planned for 1.3, those are on hold, though: stuff like yet more features for citybuilding; events that randomly happen to you; etc. Those sorts of things are the things I'm just itching to do, to be honest, but for now they have to wait. We have to be able to pay the bills, and we're going to hit a point where we can't without layoffs unless we take different actions.
It was high time for another AI War expansion anyhow, we had originally said that would be out something like 9 months ago; so Keith is working on that. And barring an enormous infusion of cash from kickstarter, that might have some stretch goals related to having 1.3 content coming sooner than later, I'll be working on another project that is currently TBA in September.
This isn't a Terraria situation: we aren't divided on how to proceed, we aren't out of ideas or bored with the game, we aren't halting all development on it and stopping all updates. If you think about it, in a lot of respects the art overhaul itself is going to be one of the largest updates the game has ever seen, so we're really trying to rejuvenate things. But in the meantime while we're trying that, we also have to have other ways to actually make some money; Erik and Josh have been proving indispensable, and I'm loathe to lose them just because I wanted to bang my head on a brick wall, so to speak.
Hope that makes sense!
