Hi everyone!
Today we have some exciting news to share, which is that we can finally announce that One Lonely Outpost will be published by Freedom Games (https://freedom.gg). We’ve been working with the Freedom team for a number of months behind the scenes, but are now ready to officially announce our partnership. Teaming up with a publisher is what will help us deliver the best possible game to the most players.
For those of you who may not know, a game publisher not only can provide additional investment and funding for developing the game, but also takes care of a lot of the business and marketing side of releasing a game. That includes setting up and managing our store pages and the console release process, marketing and advertising the game, helping showcase the game at both digital and live events, PR, and other similar functions. Really it lets us totally focus on working to make the game the best it can be, and provides us with the resources to do so.
Which brings us to another announcement we have to share about our release timeline. Originally we had been aiming to have our Steam Early Access release around October of this year. That timeline was based on our plans and resources at the time, and with changes on both of those fronts (ultimately for the better), we’ve decided that we are going to push our Early Access release into the first few months of 2022.
The decision to push back Early Access was not an easy one, as we know you’re all crazy excited about this. We know it may be tough to hear that it’s going to be even longer before many of you are able to play OLO, but this adjusted timeline will let us deliver a significantly better game to you all, one that really lives up to the vision we have that you’ve all supported. We’ll be able to add Multiplayer and detailed, game-wide pixel art, along with just... MORE. More NPCs, more cutscenes, more mini games, more all-around, and all of that will be of greater quality too. There’s even yet again more things being developed that we can’t talk about yet because we’re still validating that they’re possible!
With that said, we will be starting our Beta (“Earlier Access,” as we’ve called it previously) further in advance of the Early Access than originally planned. Before it was going to be about 3 months before that release, but now it will come in October, more like 5-6 months before normal Early Access. We are also NOT pushing out the full release of the game at this time - we are still on track to fully release OLO out of Early Access in late 2022. We’ll see how that date holds up in the long run, but for now it’s still good!
You may also be concerned about horror stories of publishers ruining the vision of a game or forcing arbitrary restrictions on the dev team. For Freedom, that can’t be further from the reality we have experienced with them. Freedom has been an amazing partner to us, only enhancing and supporting our vision. We were very careful when considering which publishers offer to accept, and selected Freedom because they are committed to our vision of the game, and only want to see it reach its full potential as we see it. We maintain complete creative and development freedom, and Freedom (heh) wouldn’t have it any other way! As if that wasn’t enough, the Freedom Co-Founder owns a 60 acre farm! How cool is that?
As always, we thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your support and encouragement! We can’t wait to share One Lonely Outpost’s truest vision with you all.
(PS: If you are a Kickstarter backer, don’t forget to complete your BackerKit survey if you haven’t yet done so!)