Soldiers,
I thought I would give you an update now that we have started a new year.
We have achieved a lot in the past months, and I wanted to refresh your memory a bit.
We released the ‘Planes & Ladders’, ‘Battle Flow’ and ‘Colmar Hamlet’ updates adding new planes, leaderboards, helmet paints and covers, level design tweaks (based on player feedback) and a new map to the game. In addition we made a number of fixes and tweaks.
Thousands of players have logged on to the prototype servers getting a sneak peak of some the content before it was released.
Attending Gamescom in Cologne was a great success. We had interviews with dozens of journalists, but more importantly, we got to meet a large number of players when we handed out the exclusive Gamescom 4×4 voucher.
Operation Glasnost is taking hold. We have dedicated a lot of resources towards talking with you, the players, on all channels. We are doing weekly devstreams on Twitch. We had a successful first Insider Summit.
We also just made the weapon and ammunition configuration values public. And we are not done at all with all these efforts.
We launched the new RETO MOTO company website and visual identity.
And finally, Nordisk Film Games invested USD 5 million for a minority ownership share in RETO MOTO.
We are putting this investment to work by recruiting new talents – more open positions will be posted soon.
We are gradually upgrading our tools and pipelines to be more efficient. We have finalized planning our backend and toolchain work that I have mentioned before (we call those ‘Mission Critical’ projects).
These Mission Critical projects are complicated, and they will require time to get done. They are however necessary, because they are the foundation for us to provide you with a better service.
To give you a few examples:.
- Our various graphics and assets pipelines needs an upgrade in order to deliver new content (including maps) more efficiently.
- Upgrades to our sound- and physics-technology are needed to move forward.
- Migration of some of our services to the cloud is required to increase efficiency and scalability.
- Compliance with the The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which is intending to strengthen and unify data protection for all individuals within the European Union, is necessary.
As you can see this is already a lot of work for a small team like us. We are growing and I have no doubt we will get it done, but we will still be at a deficit in terms of resources for the next few months which means we will be slower and more careful when releasing new content and features during that period of time – for the next couple of months we will only release minor updates. Think of it as upgrading one of the engines of a plane while flying it.
While we are working on this, we will significantly increase transparency in the form of a Development Overview where you can see what we are currently working on.
Besides the Mission Critical projects, I can already tell you that we are working on the new set of Soviet maps, new tank destroyers, recon vehicles and planes. And of course the vehicle update – which in itself is a very large project that will have a positive gameplay impact for all soldier types.
While I am sure you were expecting more good news and especially more updates, I am hopeful you will appreciate the full transparency and the honesty.
We are all very passionate about what we do, we are aggressively pushing in the right direction, we will hit this in due time and we hope you are with us on this one!
We have decided to dedicate an entire Q&A & Why devstream next week to elaborate on the topics in this letter, as well as to answer the related questions gathered from you.
So please join us on Twitch Wednesday the 31st of January at 15:00 CET
See you in game!
Best
Reto.JM