Greetings, Tinkerers & Tycoons!
Looking back on Good Company's first year of Early Access, a cornerstone of the development has always been our community. Honest, involved, friendly... and most importantly: very helpful. We are really happy to have such a supportive player base!
That's why we'd like to dedicate today's post to you all and introduce a few people who were especially invested, in one way or another. Consider them representatives of the awesome Good Company family!
Early encounters of the playful kind
When we were showcasing Good Company at gamescom 2018 for the very first time, we not only won a neat award for our booth. More importantly, we met a bunch of very enthusiastic and nice people who then joined our first regular Twitch streams and were amongst the first to populate our Discord server.
Those supportive folks were the foundation of our community that has not stopped growing since then. Yes, SweetGwendoline, SeppahBaws, GV-97, pumpCurry, iLavVex, don_joe, and LaVolpina, we're talking about you. Thank you for being on board right from the start!
!found [company]
Our official Discord server was a great place to talk about the game before it was available to play. As the community grew, we've had an increasingly productive exchange, sharing news about Good Company and discussing ideas.
But we wanted to offer a special way of engagement for the community, so we created a Discord version of Good Company. Using a bot and specific commands, people would found or join companies in order to set up production and compete with each other. The mechanics within this purely texted setting are very basic but still reflect the core principle of the original game. It was great to see teams competing for a season's top rank and having a lot of fun.
However, the biggest step for us and for the community was the day Good Company entered Early Access. People could finally experience the game hands-on, share their opinions with us, and enter an inspiring dialog to help us develop the game further.
"I can make wooden calculators! Recommended."
Reviews like this one made us smile, as any positive feedback has until the present day. But the negative ones are even more important – or as Bill Gates puts it: "Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning". However, Steam is so much more than a review hub to us!
It's an important place of exchange about Good Company, be it with news, feedback, or bug reports. But what's really essential: We are so happy to have a player base that communicates in such a friendly and supportive way! That's never to be taken for granted, you know? We try to honor this by keeping in touch, listening, responding - and, of course, by incorporating valuable suggestions or ideas, even if that means we need to change our original vision for Good Company.
Banana for scale
We have always hoped for a diverse range of players for Good Company, so we wanted to offer as many distinct lines of communication early on. Reddit is one of them and it's a place that hosts particularly innovative Tycoons.
Even though some of the contributions may not apply to the most recent version of Good Company, they are awesome: u/karmacopper's machine mod, for instance, the Good Calculator made by u/x1fr or u/tashiwwww's Good Company Map Viewer and Good Company Tinker Tools. Players helping out players is a special way of engagement developers can never appreciate enough. We are looking forward to more content like this for the months to come!
Let's play (it out)
Speaking of player-generated content, another great medium of community creation is Let's Plays, obviously. Did you happen to watch Jackmas' or Blarla's fantastic Good Company sessions? We were enjoying the first few episodes a lot, but when we noticed the two were going to record a full-blown series about their business adventures, we were super impressed!
These are just two examples of many, which provided deep insights for our team, while also helping other players get an overview of what's possible in Good Company and how its complex systems work. Albeit from a different angle, this also goes for this hilarious pearl, which demonstrates how to treat your employees, well, quite badly and how much fun it can be to break the game.
What about a wiki?
After all this talk about community efforts, you might ask yourself such a question. Well, maybe you missed it, but we do have an official wiki! There's already some helpful content, thanks to some initial work of some community members. And as the wiki will evolve as Good Company does, we always eager for your support in this department. If that sounds interesting, don't hesitate and check out how to participate!
Com-you-nity
We hope what we have shared here gave you a good impression of how awesome and important it is for us to have you all participating in Good Company's way through Early Access. And with 'you' we mean each and everyone out there who has joined the journey.
No matter if you are in constant contact with us or just post a screenshot of a company you have built and that you are proud of. Actually, there is no 'just'. Any constructive and honest engagement is helping us to ultimately shape Good Company into a game that as many fans of the genre as possible can enjoy. So, however you would like to stick by, contribute and continue to support us: Thank you so much, Tycoons! It means a lot!
All the best,
Your Chasing Carrots
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