Howdy Ranchers 👋
Firstly, a HUGE thank you to everyone for being the best game community EVER. It’s been a while since we posted our survey and I wanted to share the results of that survey and provide a small update on where we’re at with Paleo Pines.
When we initially put out the survey asking for input on the entire idea of doing crowdfunding for an expansion to Paleo Pines, we had hopes that perhaps a couple of hundred players would respond. Unbelievably, we had over 2,100 participate! Your feedback is absolute gold to us.
Here’s what you told us:
1. Overwhelmingly, you like the idea of us crowdfunding for an expansion pack that would then be offered as a free update to the existing game. Nearly 80% of you would support this with 90% of those happy for the pack to be free. The main limitation in supporting a campaign was personal financial situations, which is completely understandable.
2. The main content that appealed to everyone was a new swamp region and dinos. This echoes the feedback you’ve given us over the past year.
3. The quality of life improvements you requested had several clear categories:
- Cosmetic improvements such as player customisation and saddle decorations.
- Ranch improvements such as poop management, ranch size, decor crops, and customisable fence boundaries.
- Dino improvements including spawn timings, more dino interactions, UR indicators, dino storage and journal tracking.
- A wide range of wishlist items such as fishing, fast travel and photo mode.
It was so lovely to get such an expansive amount of ideas and even better for these to echo our team’s top priorities for Paleo Pines.
So where do we go from here? Since you last heard from us, we have been trying very hard to find a new home for Paleo Pines 2 that would allow us to have some longer term financial security to bring our team back together. Unfortunately, the current game investment environment is continuing to make this impossible and we now feel as though it is unlikely that this will move forward using the traditional publisher/developer model.
Your input into this survey has shown us that the future for Paleo Pines truly does lie with the players. We’ve always had an extremely close relationship with our community and it does feel right to us to move forward hand in hand with you in this way. So our hope is that we will be able to bring a pleasing crowdfunding option to you in mid-spring that will allow us to begin to work on an expansion pack and, depending on your enthusiasm, a host of QOL features and beyond. Before the holidays, we will be gathering more feedback from you on what specifically you would like to see as the stretch goals and the reward tiers - if we’re going to do this, we are going to need to look at this as a project we’re doing TOGETHER.
It also means that to make this happen, we all need to continue to be patient. We have a patch coming out next week with the long-awaited unsaddling update and a few other fixes that we were able to implement before we needed to put our team on hiatus. We are actively gathering and continuing to report any bugs that are found during this hiatus for the team to include in their work when we are able to regroup. We appreciate your kindness and patience whilst we are in this interim period.
Approaching the holiday period, we greatly appreciate any support you can give our plushie and merch sales. The income from this will be going directly towards paying team salaries and overhead, ensuring that our tiny team can continue to work to pull together what will be needed for the crowdfunding campaign that will allow us to bring back the others!
Collaborations with Makeship are particularly incredible because these require no upfront costs from ourselves. Without your support, we would not be in a position to do the crowdfunding campaign at all, so thank you for this!
Our upcoming plushie is a community favourite that we specifically chose for you so we hope you like Scramble! Also, we will be reaching out soon with exclusive community offers as our way of saying thank you.
As always, please continue to reach out to us with your thoughts and know that we are listening closely. Be on the lookout next week for further updates and requests for input.
Thank you for being amazing.
Lots of love,
The Paleo Pines Team