With our small wave of releases ahead of us, we figured it to be a good opportunity to give you some background information what is happening here at DRAGO entertainment and how those things impact Gas Station Simulator and its future.
Let’s start with a bit of background. DRAGO entertainment is developing games since 1998. Most of the time we were creating games for others, but a few years back we decided to not do that anymore and switch to creating only our own games.
The initial plan for this new strategy was to reach its next major milestone after the release of Gas Station Simulator and Food Truck Simulator as well as having Winter Survival entered Early Access. We assumed all 3 games will be successful and earn the company a decent income. Thanks to all of you who bought Gas Station Simulator and made it that big of a success for us, we reached that milestone with the first game already. We did expect the game to be successful, but not that successful.
That lead to massive changes in the studio. Things that we planned to start to happen around halfway through 2023 suddenly had to happen in mid-2022. Don’t us wrong, it is absolutely amazing that it happened, but it also caught us quite a bit off-guard and made us face some unexpected challenges.
We take great effort to remain a rather small, independent development studio and try to avoid the “bloat” that often comes with achieving a success earlier than expected, because in our experience that rarely ends well in the long run. This in turn makes us face various challenges. Most of them we handle really well, but we are still struggling a bit whenever we approach the release of projects.
And this year we still have the launch of Food Truck Simulator on September, 14th, Winter Survival’s Early Access on October, 27th and before that a small DLC for Gas Station Simulator followed by another DLC at the end of the year. Yes, we will post more about those, soon.
Anyway, that is a lot of things for a rather small team like us. To be able to make it happen, we have a portion of our developers switch from project to project whenever the pre-release phase is reached. This in turn slows down the work on their initial project, which clearly is a bit of a downside.
On the other hand, there is a massive upside to that approach: most of the developers here have deep knowledge of all the project which in turn allows us to use something from one game in another. Grab some nice feature, adapt it to the new environment and release it within a reasonable time. Something that would not be otherwise possible.
The way we work is also the reason, why on occasion we are a bit late with stuff. We have the best intentions and what to release things as soon as possible, but sometimes there are multiple members of the team of one game temporary working on another (like right now is the case with Gas Station Simulator and Food Truck Simulator) and there is just no way to avoid a delay here and there. Then again, once Food Truck Simulator and Winter Survival are released, some of the developers on those will help to speed things up on Gas Station Simulator so we should be able to provide a lot more content for the game next year.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1160920/Food_Truck_Simulator/
With Food Truck Simulator being tested and retested, some of the devs are back to Gas Station Simulator and ready to speed some things up, where the now smaller food truck team prepares to deal with any post-release issues and plans out further content for the game. This also means that for gas station our next step is the release of the next major update and will definitely happen within weeks, possibly even earlier with a few more folks now working on it. The two DLCs mentioned earlier are already being worked on for a while and we hope to speed the work on one of them considerably.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1394960/Winter_Survival/
While Winter Survival's Early Access on 27.10.2022 is also pretty close, the situation here is a bit different. We initially planned to release a lot earlier, but there were some marketing bottlenecks and we decided to rather postpone. So for once we don't have the neck-breaking pre-release madness to deal with (or at least not nowhere to the extend we had with gas station or now with food truck) and won't be moving more developers from Gas Station Simulator there. They will continue to work on new improvements and content for the gas station so we really should be able to pick up the pace going forward :)