On Hold
This was a tough one to write. On September 11 we received the final asset for Reina & Jericho: a redesign of the 3d mesh for the last boss fight in the game. Less than 24 hours later, on September 12, we received news that Unity, the provider of the engine that Reina is buil
This was a tough one to write.
On September 11 we received the final asset for Reina & Jericho: a redesign of the 3d mesh for the last boss fight in the game. Less than 24 hours later, on September 12, we received news that Unity, the provider of the engine that Reina is built in, was making significant changes to their revenue model. There has been plenty written about the Unity issues online, and Unity has walked back some of their changes, but I’ll focus on the result of it all here.
One of the main challenges has been that the online discourse centered largely around an installation fee, which was a pain, but not the main impediment to smaller developers. I don’t want to get into a long conversation about the specifics, but the ultimate result is that free projects are largely unaffected, but smaller projects designed to be sold (like Reina & Jericho) aren’t super viable over the medium or long term. Now that the dust has settled, we are at a point where we can’t release Reina for business reasons (we will lose more money than we gain in the long term).
From the outside you might think “But the game is practically done, isn’t it?” and the answer would be “Yes.”
You might ask “Why not just release it? I have patiently waited and now I want to play it.” Fair point, but releasing a game is not a small task, and it comes with tremendous risk, responsibility, long-term obligations, and as of the last month or two, potentially long-term financial liability due to changes in the Unity’s licensing system. If you are wondering why games that look great get cancelled this is one of the main reasons why: once the game comes out the developer is on the hook for quite a bit, but if the game isn’t out, then there are no liabilities. This aspect is what makes Unity’s business model change incredibly challenging to work with. Yes, it is less punitive than it originally seemed, but that is an incredibly low bar, and for point of comparison, our fees with Unreal Engine would only go above $0 if we became millionaires.
Where does this leave Reina & Jericho? Well, we have a few things working in our favor and a few cards left to play:
- We still own the IP and everything within the game, and this effectively saves the game. We don’t lose the game to a publisher if we pull back on this deadline. It hurts us, and it hurts the people who wanted to play the game, and it hurts the people who artistically contributed to it, but we still own the game.
- We never had a publisher. Every penny was self-funded. This means we can go get one if we want, and we can get the funding we need. And we will need it, because we don't have enough money to build the game again in a new engine or withstand the long term liabilities within the current engine. We are in a good place for getting a publisher if we want one though. The fact is, we have a pretty good prototype – it’s pretty much an entire game, and that makes for a good demo.
- Our core mechanics and components aren’t dependent on anything. In other words: we have room to pivot, scale up, change engines… whatever. We have a huge amount of freedom while still maintaining everything that made Reina unique.
So… for now, Reina is not cancelled, but it is on hold. We are going to wrap up our other ongoing projects and then we will circle back and work on a scaled-up incarnation – we are sitting on a goldmine of assets that we still own, and that’s a wonderful thing. Porting and expanding Reina is not next on the to-do list, however. We have a larger team we could dedicate to this in the future, higher standards, and more expertise, and so that is what we plan on doing, but we have to wrap up our existing game projects first.
All of this is very “glass half full” and is full of promise for the future, but the truth is ever since the announcement it’s been an unpleasant process trying to figure out what we can do. We’ve had a lot of support from people throughout the development process that we don’t take for granted, and it’s very disappointing to be in this situation. I’d rather take the long road than the one that leads to a bad game, though, so in a way there is only one decision that can be made.
