Great news, everyone! Our game has been successfully greenlit! Thank you to everyone who voted and helped make this happen for us. Valve reached out to us by email and said that they're also going to send us a free HTC Vive Pre. Wow. Wow, wow wow. Our friends Ryan and Vic went to the VR Vision Summit earlier this month and got two Vives. Yesterday they decided to donate their old one to us, and I've been spending the afternoon trying to get it up and running. After we got the good news, we invited our fellow devs from upstairs to come down and celebrate with us with cupcakes and champagne!
I suppose that since I'm making announcements right now, we also had a really big development last week. Nothing has been finalized, but we're going to have a partnership with Leap Motion. They love our game and want to try it out asap, and they're looking to put together an indie game bundle which has high quality titles featuring their hardware -- and they want to put our game into that bundle! Again, nothing has been finalized on either side, but this is also a big deal for us. Once we sign contracts for partnership and make things formal, I'll make a much more formal announcement and send out a press release.
This is a moment for us to celebrate, but there's going to be a lot of hard work coming in the next month. There's going to be a lot of late nights in the office to get this done on time and to a high degree of quality and polish. People are going to expect this game to be great, so we can't let anyone down!
Greenlight Stats:
Our greenlight campaign began about a week ago on Friday afternoon and was in greenlight status for about 10 days. Within those ten days, we had 6,352 unique visitors to our greenlight page, 2,712 "yes" votes (59%), 1,594 "no" votes (35%), and were ranked #31 out of 2,150 games in greenlight. Our game also received 109 comments, (about 5 were mine). A huge majority of the comments were positive, but there were also some negative ones, and some with constructive criticism. Overall, we did very well! A huge majority of the credit goes to the hard work Dan, Peter, Cody and Ruben put in. I'm very happy with our outcome, but am still wary about our future prospects. What's really going to matter is our sales figures after release, which will be dependent on our marketing efforts, discoverability, and quality & replayability of our game. The plan is to use any money we get to pay our bills, grow our staff (very slowly), and let us continue making great VR games.
Screwing with software pirates?
I also had an interesting idea in the shower this morning in regards to piracy. I know there are some people who are going to pirate our game. That's inevitable. Some other game devs have actually released builds to the pirate community which seem playable but have a severe draw back which you only discover later in the game. Game Dev Tycoon had an interesting approach, where the games the player releases don't make any money because people pirate your game instead. I love the irony. I was thinking that along those same lines, we'd have a "pirate build", where we put a black eye patch over the characters head and black out one of the eye lenses in the VR headset. On top of that, we'd play "pirate music" and a chorus of "arrrr matey!" and "shiver me timbers!" every time the player does something, and we'd introduce some game breaking bugs (you're not throwing fireballs, you're throwing rum barrels!). If a player complains about this in the forums, we'd just point them to the store purchase page and tell them to buy the actual game. Then, we just release a bunch of bullshit broken variations of the game on the pirate channels to saturate search results, so when people do a search for our game on bittorrent, they don't know if they're downloading a legit version or a bullshit version, and we just keep saturating the pirate channels with our bullshit so that pirates don't know which versions to trust.
Congratulations on greenlight. Whilst the piracy idea might sound fun, my personal recommendation is don't even bother doing it except as a paid DLC. Also releasing game breaking bugs into pirate downloads is a good way to potentially generate a disrespect for your organisation's ability to release a bug-free game, this would spill out into the larger gaming community i.e. not a good source of PR for potential paying clients.
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