Hello, Seekers.
Happily, we can begin with an exciting announcement. We have secured a booth at PAX Prime, being held in Seattle, WA from August 29th through September 1st. If you are coming to PAX, definitely swing by our booth for a chance to meet the team and play a new demo with some exclusive content! Oh, and score some cool swag too. You will be able to find us in the Indie MEGABOOTH (Look for the blue booth; you may have noticed our obsession with the colour blue!) at Stall 23! Do me a favour... when you see Greg (our C.E.O. and Dark Lord of all that is light), ask him something about the nature of the universe or, well, anything at all and see what happens!
Now to the big, burning question: Where are we at with Consortium 2? It has been six months since our rather disastrous launch back in January (see: HERE ) and while we are still reeling over said launch both emotionally and financially, we have nonetheless come to grips with the reality of things and are able to speak openly about our plans for the future.
Our original plan was simple: Make Game One with an incredibly low budget and overhead costs so that we would only need to sell a small number of copies in order to self-fund Game Two and continue on from there. Unfortunately it has not quite worked out so simply.
So far, CONSORTIUM has sold well enough to keep certain key members on the payroll in order to release the Master Edition and other patches since launch (including creating and sending out the physical rewards for our Kickstarter campaign and working on the port for Mac and Spanish localization). These efforts have allowed us to fix and improve the game in addition to making strides to reach a wider audience. The Mac port is 90% done, and the Spanish localization is pretty much finished – we are just working out a few bugs with it. Getting the game localized into Spanish was a FAR more difficult task than we anticipated.
However, we have not yet sold enough copies to self-fund Game Two as originally planned. While due to several factors, the number one reason the game has not reached the audience we hoped it would – and why we are not all working full-speed ahead on producing the sequel – is due to our completely flubbed launch. We have unfortunately been faced with the issue of convincing the world of the current reality of CONSORTIUM (very close to bug free!) when compared to the perceived reality we have been marred with since launch (incredibly buggy!). It all then leads back to our decision not to launch as Early Access back in January, which would have extended our beta testing period and prevented reviews from being based on buggy builds. That was a massive, game changing mistake and we have been paying for it ever since. Our Metacritic score, for example, is based on too many reviews speaking about bugs and problems which no longer exist.
We could go on and on with excuses and such... but we will not do that. We have nobody to blame but ourselves. This does not mean, however, that we are beaten as a company. Not by a long shot. We are dedicated to making Game Two because one game is simply not enough to tell the story we want to tell. Scratch that, the story we need to tell.
Game Two of the iDGi-1 Trilogy is officially in pre-production. The overall story is completely fleshed out and the core environment of the game has hundreds of man hours of design work put into it.
In conclusion: Our plan is to keep our heads down, finish the Spanish localization and Mac port in addition to pushing hard in all the ways we can to get the first CONSORTIUM game into the hands of all the gamers it is intended for. As part of our pre-production effort for the CONSORTIUM sequel we are working on a second Kickstarter campaign to help us raise the funds to build the follow-up game we’re envisioning. Kickstarter was extremely good to us the first time around and we believe it remains a far better option than attempting the publisher route “just to get it done”, and risk losing creative control. We have some extremely exciting ideas planned for Game Two and are pumped about showcasing them in another campaign.
If you are interested in reading updates on our progress towards the launching of this campaign and of the CONSORTIUM sequel in general, simply shoot an email to [email protected] and include [mailing list] in the subject line. We will not share your email with ANYONE and will only send you emails when we have important announcements to share.
Oh, and check out this new video we released, showcasing what some of you have been writing about our game: http://youtu.be/rkU6IHZqq1Y We would like to extend A HUGE thank-you to all of you who are represented in this video, your words of praise and excitement for our game is what fuels us forward. :-)
That’s all for now. We hope to see you at PAX, but if not then we invite you to keep an eye on our company blog for updates in the future!
Sincerely,
-The iDGi Team