Just imagine if Skyward didn't do particularly well. We'd have an AI War expansion every month!
I would be just as happy with this. Although, best wishes and all that.
I certainly wouldn't mind if it would actually work out. Let me take a moment to explain why, in the full analysis, it really wouldn't.
And there's some degree of a prima-facie case for it, as Arcen recouped its VotM-related costs in the first 24 hours of the Indie Royale sale (just counting the part of the net revenue we consider AIW by %), and recouped its AS-related costs in the opening week-long steam promotion it had last October.
But TZR, CoN, and LotS took longer to be profitable because a lot more man-hours went into them.
When it's just me putting in some hours spread over several months for exploratory work (like how I added the human "role" thing to test the waters for the champ role, or how I actually did the plumbing for the dual-type-AI thing a few weeks before VotM work really started), then putting in 1.5 to 2 months of nearly-100% work-time actually doing the bulk of the expansion work... well, that's not very expensive. Actually from Arcen's perspective it's technically "free" since I have no fixed costs for it, only royalties. Then there's just Pablo's time and (in VotM's case) Blue's time to handle the art, and Erik's time and money on the PR side (including Kevin's trailer work, etc), and some time from Chris working with installers and distributors, and so on.
But for Arcen as a whole to go "just AIW expansions" those expansions would need to bring in a _lot_ more money to pay all the fixed costs for Pablo, Chris, Josh, Blue, and Erik.
In other words: the expansions are nicely profitable, and a lot of fun for me and you guys, but they can't bear the weight of the whole house.
But even if the numbers added up, we have to be careful about "community fatigue". I've seen numerous times people just getting burned out on constant high-rate change. And that tends to feed back into player input getting a bit more acidic (not in a mean way, just in an honest-dissatisfaction way), which I'm quite willing to deal with as part of doing business, but ultimately it wears me down too. So some degree of lull is necessary. And if we're in a situation is telling us "please stop changing AIW so fast!" and we have to respond "we can't, it's the only thing keeping the lights on!" ... well, that's not really in the customer's best interest. A very odd path to bad customer service, but I think that's what it'd be.
That said, we are still planning on the next AIW expansion being this October, so there won't be a very long lull this time
I've got a few ideas planned for that I think you'll like (maybe even a genuine planet-cracker! Still working out the details there, though, it could be un-feasible).
I don't see any upcoming titles that can possibly compete with it. It's so complex, large, and full of content. Everything else looks smaller compared to it. Valley without wind was probably the most ambitious since then. I'm a little worried that all of these short release schedules- while good for business in the short term- are not going to bring those quality titles that we might expect when we play AI War. As such, the lifespan of those titles won't last very long.
It's a fair concern. We actually prefer the shorter cycle for many reasons, but frankly we wouldn't be targeting
this short a cycle unless we felt financial necessity. So obviously that's going to have an impact. But a few points:
1) With all the engine work we've done from AIW through Valley2, it's
way easier and faster to get straight to actually making the new gameplay, etc. So frankly even if money were no object we don't
need 14 month dev cycles like went into AVWW1, unless we were doing some kind of radically different thing.
2) We're focusing a lot more on turn-based stuff nowadays, which actually saves us a lot of dev time in not having to deal with weird MP issues, physics weirdness, performance problems, etc. I'm not sure if you prefer real-time stuff to turn-based, but my personal preference has always been for the latter. I'd much rather lose because I mis-thought than because I mis-clicked. AIW is pretty good at this due to the pause functionality, but Tidalis/AVWW1/Valley2/SH would generally not be the sorts of game I could really get into on a personal level except as an occasional diversion (Tidalis does pretty well as that, though).
3) While we are doing shorter initial dev cycles, that definitely does not mean we're unwilling to put more time after that into the products that show viability. Valley2 sold kind of middling-low, so we might get back to it, but no really obvious awesome-and-feasible expansion ideas are popping out at us there. Shattered Haven went over like a brick financially, so that's done unless something pretty major changes. With Exodus we saw the writing on the wall before even getting to player testing, though there are alternate paths we can probably take to come back to that from a better angle. But Skyward hit it out of the park (relatively speaking) financially, so Chris is going full-bore on a Skyward expansion, and if it stays financially feasible we'll probably keep developing that out in the years to come. Remember, AIW took a long time after official release to get to where it is. Though it sounds like Skyward isn't your cup of tea, but maybe this group of 100 monkeys will hit the right combination eventually
4) Since Skyward is taking some of the financial pressure off, we're relaxing the short-cycle plans a bit and already adding a bit of time to upcoming projects, etc. Obviously we're not out of the woods yet, but it's helping.
5) While I'm never very good at predicting what you'll enjoy, I think the project I'm working on after VotM may be up your alley, and it's one of those that's well suited to continued refinement if it pans out financially. We'll see.
