Over the course of a loooong time, me and Nicholas Lovell from gamesbrief, argued about whether or not free to play games are the bright new future of gaming. I am traditionally against the current implementation of F2P gaming (although I’ve softened on this a bit). Nicholas is traditionally very pro. See who you found most persuasive in our little debate…

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Nicholas,

FreeToPlay is not the future of games, or at least I hope it isn’t. The entire business model is built upon cynicism, mainly the idea that players will think they can play game A for free, as opposed to game B which costs $30. We both know that someone, somewhere has to pay for the game’s development, and for that idea to work out, you either need to hook some ‘whales’ who pay out a fortune and subsidise everyone else, or you have to constantly nag all of the players to pay for in-game items.

Either way, the business model will lead to design compromises that do not exist in any other artistic medium. A writer or movie director can compose a piece of entertainment safe in the knowledge that the customer has bought into the idea of the entire work. Imagine the impact if the audience were asked every chapter or scene to pay a few pennies to access the next part of the story.

We wouldn’t tolerate free-plus-microtransactions in other media, why should we tolerate it in gaming? Free to play is nothing more than the new version of a very old idea, the free demo. The difference is that with a free demo, the understanding is you then make an honest pitch for the player to purchase the game at the end of the demo. The F2P model seems to rely on interrupting the player mid-game to constantly pester them for a few pennies.

How is this a better business model?

Cliff Harris, Positech Games

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Cliff,

You start by making the mistake of thinking that all users love your work equally.

The idea that all users should pay the same price for a piece of entertainment, however little or much they enjoy it, is a bizarre concept born out of the limitations of physical media. In the old days, when there were no bits and distribution was exclusively by atoms, content creators had
no choice but to fix the price. It was the only way to sell an entertainment product via retail stores. The consequence was that a superfan who loved that game would get hours of incredibly cheap value. A user who found after a few hours of play that it wasn’t for them was, in effect, subsidising the heavy players.

Free to play changes all of that. It lowers barriers to entry, which means people can play and enjoy the game while they work out if they want to spend money on it. It enables people to play the game for ever, for free. As long as the player is playing, the creator has the chance to say “hey, you’re
enjoying my game. Here are ways that you could enjoy it for more, by spending some money with me.”

It’s more honest (because it allows players spend according to their level of engagement with the game), it is cheaper (because you build a title for continued play, you don’t have to spend all of the development and marketing budget prior to launch) and it is more profitable (because you let those who don’t want to pay play for free, while allowing those who love the title to spend much more than the initial price).

What’s not to like?

PRESS SPACE TO TAKE YOUR TURN

Nicholas Lovell, www.gamesbrief.com

* * *

Nicholas,
I accept people are prepared to pay different prices for games, but this is why we have collectors editions and DLC. I don’t accept that we are just being shackled by the physical properties of the medium, because that also applies to books and movies. They capture the whole audience by having
hardback or signed copies, and DVD specials with extras.

This is all fine. I have no problem with extra content being made available after a product is complete. The difference is that you are advocating designing the game around such a business model from the start, which I think makes for an inferior product. Books may come as hardback/paperback, but you don’t have to pay extra to get all the characters, that would be mad, yet it’s how F2P games are being designed.

The other problem is that the game is no longer a shared experience or level playing field. I can now be shot by someone with a gun I didn’t buy, or outrun by a car with engines I haven’t bought. Games are about fantasy and adventure and getting away from the rat-race and treadmill of real life. Is
it not bad enough that MMOs feel like a second job, without importing all the envy and unfair competition from the real world too? Real world games would never allow this. Football teams don’t get more players if their team has more money, we accept that when it comes to games, it should be about skill, not bank balances. And as for barriers to entry, there are already none when the game has a free demo

Cliff Harris, Positech Games.

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Dear Cliff

I think that we are coming at this issue from two different directions. I care about players, but I also care about the businesses that make games. After all, if it is hard or impossible to make a living from making games, fewer talented people will make fewer great games.

So I start from the premise that if the market is being changed by digital distribution and the immutable economic law that if the costs of making another copy of something trends towards zero, so does the amount that people will pay for that copy. In that environment, I think it will be very hard to keep the price that an end user will pay for a gamer at anything above very low (meaning iOS style prices). It is very hard to make a living at a price point of £0.69 for all but the very lucky. Even Rovio, often shown as the posterchild of iOS development, needed commitment and luck: Angry Birds was their 52nd game.

You’ve argued that you need to gross £100,000 (I think) to make a living. That means selling 145,000 copies of the game if the price is £0.69. You would need to sell 20,000 copies at £4.99.

There is another way. What if you can find a business model that allows people who love your game to spend more? If you design the game to allow those people who love what you do to spend a day’s wages over the course of a year of playing? In the UK, a day’s wages is £100. That would mean you
would only need to have 1,000 players who loved what you do to make enough money to live on.

Isn’t that easier and more attractive than trying to appeal to everyone in the same way.

How would that business model work? You make the game entirely available for free, so that people can play, explore and experiment in your world. You offer a way for people to spend £1. They may be able to buy aesthetic changes like personalised outfits, new skins or new buildings that don’t
affect gameplay. They may be able to level up faster, unlock items earlier than someone who plays the standard mode. They may even buy additional content (although in my mind, it is better to sell personalisation than content).

Then you need to make it *possible* to spend £100 per month. Not because people will (although some might), but because you want your biggest fans to have choice – about the personalisation, the status, the progress, whatever it is that excites them – and if they are *able* to spend £100 a month,
maybe they’ll spend £10.

A thousand true fans, out of perhaps 100,000 playing your free game, and you have an exciting business that is all about making cool new stuff that your biggest fans will love – and want to pay for.

That seems to me to be the best of all possible worlds.

Love

Nicholas Lovell, www.gamesbrief.com

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Cliff says:

“Ah but here is the fundamental contradiction. You suggest that because stuff can be copied, it’s natural price is zero, but then you also talk extensively about ways to get money from people for games by other means.

Ultimately, it’s just a shuffling of payment from all gamers equally to a few wealthy ones, but the same amount of money is being generated. The ‘free to play’ games are clearly nothing of the sort, they are more like ‘patronage’ games, where some wealthy people who suffer from gaming addiction subsidise everyone else’s leisure time. An interesting way to do it, but not something that is being done in the interests of making games better. If your business strategy relies on milking a core group of hardcore wealthy addicts, then it means games get designed effectively for a small hardcore subset.

Besides, the popular ‘thousand true fans’ model doesn’t require micro-transactions and free-to-play, they are unrelated. You can have your thousand true fans who buy the game, without requiring them to be a subset of 100,000 casual players who value their playing time at zero.

 I could just about get by with a thousand true fans by selling them $30 games, and many people do exactly this, like spiderweb software and the guys making hex-based WW2 strategy games. There are many people out there happy to pay $20-40 for a game that they really like. It’s a myth that gamers will only pay $0.99 for a game, it’s just that those gamers are a very loud, shouty minority.

You can have your thousand true fans who buy the game, without requiring them to be a subset of 100,000 casual players who value their playing time at zero.”

Cliff Harris, Positech Games

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Dear Cliff,

Of course you can get by with 1,000 true fans paying $30 for your games. The difficulty is in finding them.

Free-to-play games suffer from this discoverability problem too: they need to spend to acquire customers in the same way that traditional games companies have to market their games. The difference is that, because their games are free, they can get many more people into the game to discover if they enjoy it. They can play the game for longer – often forever – before the paywall comes slamming down. They can get their friends playing without having to persuade them to shell out $30. And when they find a true fan, they can make a lot more than $30, while offering things that the true fan values.

There will still be companies making money from games that are single upfront payments for quite some time. Most of them will have established reputations, while new businesses are more likely to start by assuming the free is the optimum price point for consumers AND for the company.

The important thing is that a wider variety of good games will have a chance to get developed than ever got developed before. I think that is something that we can both agree is a very good thing.

Nicholas Lovell, www.gamesbrief.com

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So who won? TELL US NOW!!!

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I hurt my back chopping wood, how tragic. This means I am a) in agony and b) not able to talk about gamecamp in London, because I couldn’t go

Instead, I shall waffle on about advertising!

I’m one of the few indie devs that actually believes in advertising. Everyone else seems to think it does not work on a small scale, as in <$500,000. It does. Even spending $1 on ads will make a difference, the problem is, that it’s a difference too tiny to measure. Measuring ad results is a minefield I’ve blogged about a lot in the past.

One thing I like about ads is that it’s truly remote and spontaneous spreading of news about your game. Most indies don’t get spontaneous website coverage unless they actively find a reviewer, send him a copy and pester him/her for a review. By definition, that narrows the circle of publicity about your game. Who knows how many Ukrainian gaming blogs have readers who are oblivious to Gratuitous Tank Battles, because I don’t know those blogs exist?

I rely heavily on hard evidence and stats to pick the best advert designs, but here are some GTB ads. Let me know what is good / bad about them, or if you have any cool ideas for them. I tend to use static, not animated ads, as I find animated ones have little real difference to CTR, and frankly, I don’t like being associated with cheesy flashing things.

I’m planning on using these on google adwords, but maybe project wonderful and game-advertising online. I like the way google lets me target certain countries and restrict it to PC’s rather than macs/phones, but I hate the complexity and approval delays for their campaigns. I wish many more gaming sites would investigate using project wonderful instead. They are really good.

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Ok, so after hurriedly yanking a slightly buggy version of GSB from the apple app-store, the IPAD version of GSB is back on sale and you can all go rush out and throw money at it right now. Hurrah! Here it is:

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/gratuitous-space-battles/id517457294?mt=8

(The expansion packs in the PC version will end up being added at some stage. The campaign add-on won’t make it to ipad, it’s just insanely big and complex and involved and not pad-friendly)

Here are a few lessons learned from the ipad experience thus far:

1) The ipad has hardly any memory. Developing on PC, then squeezing it onto ipad is seriously hard!

2) A game where you zoom in and out and drag stuff around is really cool to play on the ipad. It feels very l33t.

3) There seems to be basically no way to get any attention on the app store unless apple chooses you. Admit it, you all only found GSB by searching.  Even the category search function seems broken on my ipad 2. It’s a trainwreck, compared to other portals.

4) Everyone who insists that nobody buys ipad games > $0.99 is just wrong. They do.

If you are a high-powered famous and influential mac-blog-owner or reviewer with a bazillion readers, and you have NOT got a press-review copy of GSB on ipad, just email me, and I will see what I can do.

In other news…. very close to setting the GTB release date now. It will also be on GamersGate, Impulse and Steam. Yay!

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So why haven’t I patched the game lately? when is the release date? Here goes…

The release date is basically any day now. The final build of the game is done, tested, built and ready for distribution. That doesn’t mean it’s the ‘lat’ build. I intend to update the game later with a number of improvements, not least to enable easy mod-support for the game, and a bunch of graphical improvements, speedups and GUI tweaks etc…

But at some point you declare the game officially launched so people who would not preview it, get to review it.

Also, that’s the point at which third parties like steam etc get to sell the game…

And that’s currently the slight delay. Setting things up with third party portals is taking a little while. I have some minor tech issues with setting it up for one portal, another is frankly not getting the final build until I see last months royalties actually arrive in my bank account (god I hate this hassle…), and a few more I shall contact today and see if they want to stock the game.

while we wait..here is a tank made from balloons…

Previously I’ve launched on my site first, and the portals later, but I was hoping for a simultaneous release this time.

The good news is that I’ve written a web-based front-end for people who have bought the game direct, which tells them what their steam-key is, for when the game launches on steam. They will get an email from me on launch day.

So don’t think I’ve stopped working on GTB, far from it, it would just complicate stuff a LOT if I released a new patch now, and then portals started selling a version slightly older. Hopefully the first post-release patch will be bigger than normal and have more fixes as a result (or more important ones).

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One thing that a lot of companies don’t get is the importance of frictionless feedback.
All companies perpetuate the myth that they want to hear from customers. They pretend to value their feedback, and want to hear from them, regardless whether or not the feedback is good or bad. In very few cases is this really true. I’m not referring to actually abusive or threatening feedback, which obviously just gets binned.

Negative, but non-abusive feedback is good stuff to have, and so is positive feedback obviously. Any developer who has sat down and watched a ‘lets-play’ video of their game, or better still, observed strangers playing their game for the first time in real-life, can tell you that NO amount of brainstorming, agonizing or debating over design features is as good as watching people play…

Sometimes, people think that the only feedback worth having is the long and analytical email or forum post dissecting the games design and deliberating it’s strengths and weakeness, alongside constructuive suggestions as to how to improve things. Obviously this feedback is awesome, and much appreciated but it is not the only form worth having, because it’s delivery method implies some self-selection on the part of the player.

In other words, only a certain subset of hardcore, analytical thoughtful and time-rich gamers will ever commit their thoughts to keyboard in such an effective and clear manner.
What you really need to capture is the gamers who can’t be bothered to spend more than 10 seconds giving you feedback on your game, but nevertheless are buyers/potential buyers and have a viewpoint. they are gamings 99%
To do this, you need to reduce any ‘friction’ involved in that process. Is it easy to get feedback from your customers. Here is how I try to make it easy.

1) you can email me at cliff@positech.co.uk, and I will read it. I acknowledge almost all feedback, and I read all of it. Even if it’s a one-line email “The mechs are overpowered”, it still gets filed away and noted.
2) You can post on my forums at www.positech.co.uk. This is probably my best source of feedback.
3) You can comment on blog posts here
4) You can direct-message or just quote @cliffski on twitter. I read all that too.
5) You can comment on the facebook page for the game.

Ideally, I’d make it even easier, but true anonymous frictionless feedback is just open to spam. I experimented with anonymous guest posting on forums, but it’s a spam headache unfortunately. I guess the best thing to do is just make it really clear that feedback is welcome, good or bad and you can email me your thoughts on the game, and they will get read. Indies are lucky because people actually believe us when we say you can email the lead designer, rather than a customer service person.

I always wish when I read a comment on my games on some foum, that the person typing it knew that they could just copy and paste that opinion and throw it at me by email, and it would have 100x the effect on getting the game changed and refined than a post on a foumr (although such posts are to be encouraged too, anything that gets people discussing your game is clearly a good thing)
Any game developer hiding their email address behind a captcha or sign-up account is just throwing away a free source of honest feedback. Don’t do it. get better spam filters. It can be done, how else can I constantly type cliff@positech.co.uk on my blog and get away with it?

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PR and marketing for indies is not easy. I would suggest there are a number of factors determining how tricky they find it:

• Your age (young hip trendy kids know a lot of people through school./college etc, probably wider game-playing circle).
• Your time in the industry (I know a lot of people who I’ve met voer the years at conferences, meetups etc).
• Your personality (shyness sucks here. outgoing people make more contacts).
• Your attitdue to PR (If you hate self-promotion, that will count against you a bit).
• Your numbers. (4 people teams have 4 times the time, the friends and the contacts).

Of course, this can all be adjusted and overcome, but it’s worth realising not everyone starts from the same position. I guess I win on time in industry and attitude, and outgoigness, but suck on numbers and age.

Given that it’s not an equal game, there is also the issue of where to concentrate your limited PR/Marketing firepower. Here are a number of alternate strategies.

1. Make the game so awesome everyone just HAS to tell everyone about it. Forget about PR. (this *can* work. ever seen dwarf fortress get promoted?).
2. Blog like crazy, Build up a huge blog following who will buy and promote the game for you.
3. Social network! run a popular facebook page or twitter feed you promote everywhere. Hope the virality works for you.
4. Advertise! Actually spend money on banner ads. (This works, everyone says it doesn’t but they don’t stick with it. I *know* it works.)
5. Reviews! Be and grovel for coverage from every journalist in the universe. Hope reviews drive traffic to your site.
6. Sales channels! Make your game available from everywhere, and hope people see it enough, and check it out.
7. Press-the-flesh! Go to conferences and shows like E3, PAX and so on, and actually talk to real-life gamers about your game!
8. Forums – Talk about your game on any indie-friendly forums you can find, try to encourage discussion of your game on all the big name web forums, and sites like reddit etc.
9. PR-firm. Hire someone professional to do all this for you.
10. Youtube. Try to get those influential lets-play style video-bloggers to talk about your game.
11. Cross-promote. Work with other indies to do guest blog posts or stuff like showmethegames

All these methods have advantages and disadvantages. I’ve tried them all (except hiring), to a greater or lesser extent. I wish I could tell you I knew which ones really work the best, and it depends on your personality in some ways. I am paranoid about being called a shill if I mention my own game on a forum. I live in the Uk and am an eco-geek so don’t fly to E3, Pax etc. The semi-autistic bit of me enjoys the number crunching of running ad campaigns. Your mileage will vary.

In general I think it makes sense to focus your PC on a specific area, otherwise you are going to just ‘bounce off’ and get no measurable results, like most indies do with advertising. I am time-limited, and work on code-heavy games, so my time is super-limited. Plus it’s just me. As a result, I’m thinking the time-intensive (social networking/conferences) stuff may not work for me. One of the main sources of PR for my stuff is actually this blog. If you scan the archives you’ll know I’ve blogged a LONG time, and this blog is surprisingly popular. of course, the blog predates the social-networking and youtube-videos explosion, so that’s not to say those aren’t better channels. I have facebook pages for gratuitous space battles gratuitous tank battles and redshirt, but I don’t have the time to really promote them as much as I should (feel free to like em!). I’m always re-assessing my priorities, but the answer keeps changing.

What do you use (if you are a dev) and as a gamer, where do you first hear about new games?

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I just read a blog post that I won’t link to, because it will only give the accused exactly what he wants, but the upshot of it is that anyone who isn’t loving their games being pirated and anyone who actually charges money for games is making shitty games and doesn’t live in the real world.

Hmmmm. Just because someone works full time at games, and makes a living from it hardly automatically makes their games rubbish, or makes them a money grabbing satan. Is John Carmack a money-grubbing son of a bitch who hates games because his games made him a millionaire and bought him a string of ferraris? I doubt it, and I doubt his games are shitty either. In fact, the reverse is often the case. It often follows that people who are really good at what they do, tend to sell a lot of games, and thus end up well paid. That’s how capitalism works. Other government systems are available, of course. They are not reknown for outpourings of high quality digital entertainment though.

My point for this post isn’t about that though, it’s a more general call out to both indie game developers and the media that covers the indie gaming ‘scene’ (god I hate that word, do people think we all hang out in indie bars with our own indie slang?)

Please treat indie games like games, not like some desperate call for attention, or some trendy underdog story or political manifesto, and don’t think that knowing the game is ‘indie’ means you can assume anything at all. (GSB is more like Sins of a solar empire than it is like world of goo, for example).

To look at recent press and hype about indies in the gaming press (both online and in print), I wonder if I am a ‘proper’ indie at all. Lets look at the evidence:

• I am 42.
• I am not a radical EFF cheerleading cyberactivist with ‘I hate SOPA’ tattooed anywhere on my body.
• I live in the UK
• I charge more than $9.99 for my games, sometimes much more.
• I don’t make platform games, and haven’t actually played one since sonic the hedgehog.
• I am not a radical left wing campaigner that hates money, and is equally happy to just know people are enjoying my games if they pirated them. (I actually rely on income from games as…. well… my income)
• I don’t begrudge big successful games developers that have made serious money from gaming or think they must be evil. Brad Wardell (stardock) gets a lot of aggro on this front, which is ironic because he seems such a nice guy. Good luck to him.

I am sure I’m not the only one, in fact I know I’m not, due to many drunken chats in various places with other indies in the UK. I wish the media would realise that indie != notch and indie != starving student and indie != any specific political or activist viewpoint. It’s a lazy stereotype that is long past it’s sell-by date.

Ironically, as someone who has a pet interest in marketing and psychology, I am well aware how easy it would be to embrace the stereotype for my own gain. I’m pretty sure a big ‘STOP SOPA’ banner on my website, and some long angry tirades in favour of linux, ranting at ubisoft for being evil etc, would probably get some press attention, and some PR, and some excitable headlines. It’s very easy to know what the more vocal section of online gamers want to hear developers say. If I was really savvy, I’d hire someone with a cooler name than mine, who looked more like an indie, and get him to do a lot of controversial and activist stunts.

It’s much harder to actually be honest, and say what you really think, something that gets me a ton of grief, to put it mildly.

But regardless of that, I would like people to stop writing about indie developers (as opposed to indie games), and for indie developers to stop acting like they are running for president, and to do something really radical which is this:

Talk about your games.

If I wanted to court controversy obviously add…

Finish the fucking game first, ok?

For what it’s worth here are some of my games, I hope they speak for themselves.

Gratuitous Tank Battles

Gratuitous Space Battles

Democracy 2

To clarify: I’m not saying indies aren’t allowed to have political view, everyone does, or to have strong opinions on controversial subjects, It’s when any discussion about your game is automatically steered to some sort of activist rant to get page-hits that it bugs me. I don’t care if you are Che Guevara or Hitler, I just want to know if that game you are working on would appeal to me.

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Something has changed for me in the last six months or so. A year ago, if a new game came out that piqued my interest, I would probably check out some screenshots, then read a review, (probably several), perhaps read gamers comments on forums, and maybe, if one was available, I’d try a demo of the game, before purchasing.

Now things have changed, youtube is my #1 source for evaluating the possibility of me liking a game.

I probably *hear* about the game at Rock Paper Shotgun or some other gaming site. I might hear about it first on a forum, but now I tend to not bother reading reviews until I’ve checked out a gameplay video. (reviews are good for getting a big-picture description of the entire game)

I *like* this development in the industry, because there is nowhere for the cynical marketing crap to hide…

Demos are sometimes just one slice (the best!) of a game, come out long after release, and are a huge pain to download these days, if you live in the country with a usage cap.
Screenshots are invariably bullshit. They are touched up by artists. They have zero relationship to the game you will buy. (They are called ‘target renders’ in the industry). (All my games screenshots are 100% honest simple screen dumps. This is actually rare.)

Reviews, which contrary to belief are generally not ‘bought’ or corrupt, are nevertheless seen through the prism of that reviewers opinions and experiences. A reviewer always brings their own genre tastes and personal pet peeves with them, they can’t avoid it. if I reviewed games, I’#d mark down everything with unskippable cut scenes, macho protagonists or elves with enormous breasts, but that is probably just me..

Youtube gameplay videos are wonderful. The most handy are not official trailers, or posted by big name sites. The best ones are just some random dude who played the game with fraps running and clicked on upload. That is the sort of experience I as a gamer will get, and that is exactly what I want to see. I probably know if I want to read a review within 10 seconds of video these days.

Am I alone in this?

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I am not sure what the right price for gratuitous tank battles should be, even this close to release, so I’m going to dump my brain here, to help me think.

Gratuitous Space Battles was $22.95 on release, and as I recall a bit cheaper in beta/pre-order ($19.95 I think).

There is a lot of downward pressure on games pricing. people expect to get indie games for less than the price of a large coffee, which is silly, and frankly, a bit of an insult.

It’s a few years since GSB. There has been inflation since, about 5% in the UK. My bills sure keep going up.

GTB is a MUCH more fully-featured game than GSB was at launch, or even is now. GTB has achievements, a built-in editor, multiple game modes, better visuals, and more content. It is also more polished in every respect.

Nobody knew what to make of GSB, so it was a bit of a risk for many buyers. People know roughly what to expect from a positech strategy game now, so maybe they are less scared of parting with ‘large pizza + some beer’ music for one of my games.

None of this brings me to any specific conclusion, but I can say without any doubt that anyone who thinks it will be *less* than $19.95 is being optimistic GTB is a HUGE game. It’s taken quite a few people a hell of a long time to make. I guess I better decide soon…

One thing is certain: even if the game is $0.01 people will shout at me for being worse than hitler and call me stupid for getting the price *wrong*. Bah.

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For quite a while, I’ve had a little side-project that I’ve never talked about. The reason for that is basically that we were waiting until we had any final artwork at all, before revealing it. The side-project is a new life-sim game called ‘Redshirt’. It’s a bit of a departure for me, because I am not the coder or designer (although I do chip in the odd idea). The game is being developed by fellow UK indie -> Tiniest Shark.

Positech Games is  effectively the publisher of the game, although I hate that term because it implies evil bean-counting and not caring about the game. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Anyway, I’m sure I’ll get over it.

So what is redshirt????

Check the website, and also check facebook.

Well you know in all those sci-fi series there is always some crewmember in the background, with no dialogue, who nobody knows his/her name, who always gets shot in the first 15 minutes, and tends to wear a red shirt…. Well that’s YOU. It’s a game where you are not Luke Skywalker, you are the guy who fixes the drinks machine in Luke’s quarters on hoth. You are the guy who fixes the sliding doors on the enterprise when they get stuck. You are the girl who offers Kirk a notepad for him to scribble on. You are basically the bottom of the hero career ladder…

And here is the thing. It maybe AD 2652 (or whatever) but people manning space stations are just as shallow, self-obsessed, dorky, and fixated with social-media as they are now. none of this ‘enlightened future’ crap that you see in star trek! The interface for the game is loosely based around modern social media apps, so it’s a nit of a humorous dig at sci-fi conventions and social media obsession.

If you played my life sim game ‘Kudos’ you will have an idea of how these things work. Only this one has cooler outfits, and space! and aliens!

There will be lots more information on the game in the course of time, I’m just basically waving ym hands and saying “We are making this game, what do you think?” right now .

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