What changed
0 fixes0 additions1 change0 removals
changedWhere to begin? This has been a long time coming indeed. As one of the very first Early Access titles, AirMech probably holds some records on Steam for that. This series of posts is about much more than exiting Early Access however. I wanted to lay everything out for the players to understand the road we took to get here, what we have been working on the past half year, and where we are going next. I plan to make a few posts here to cover the different areas since there is a lot to talk about. It will probably go like this: Part 1: Backstory - general history of AirMech and Carbon Part 2: The Split - overview of how AirMech is expanding on Steam Part 3: AirMech Strike - more detail on the PvP focused AirMech Part 4: AirMech Wastelands - more detail on the RPG/PvE AirMech Carbon Games is almost 6 years old now. We started the company with the goal to create AirMech, a spiritual successor of sorts to a game I loved in my youth, Herzog Zwei. There was some magic to that game that I wanted to bring to a larger number of gamers who probably never even knew about it. Looking back now, I can't believe we started our own company--I'm not sure I would do it again! We survived through a combination of luck and skill, probably more luck than anything. And by luck I mean spotting smart opportunities to let us continue to move AirMech forward while keeping control of the core game. We started AirMech when F2P was in its infancy. To me, it wasn't actually F2P at the time, it was built around Microsoft's Xbox Live original model where all games were required to have demos, and at the end of the demo you had the option to buy the game and keep your progress. We also wanted to make the game free while we were in beta, as that's what I always thought a beta was--you're asking players to test your game, so charging them to play it before release seemed crazy to me. Steam didn't have a way to do this however--but Early Access appeared just as we wanted to release our first test versions, so it seemed like a perfect fit. Fast forward to now, and both Free to Play and Early Access have become something different than what we believed in. Since we are F2P, we don't require payment to try the game out, and I really like being able to offer that. It means that someone who paid probably has a lot of hours invested and is very likely to be a satisfied customer--more than an average EA game I hope. The Elephant in the Room: why no updates to AirMech since last September? After more than 200 updates to AirMech (sometimes multiple times a week) we stopped. We didn't want to, but we had some other things taking our attention: the VR version of AirMech, named AirMech Command. Released both on SteamVR and Oculus, this was a huge technical and design challenge that we enjoyed very much. It took all of our time to focus on it. We were surprised by two things: one was how small the VR market is, the other was that the VR games generated more revenue than the F2P AirMech. We again wondered if we were handicapping AirMech by labeling it as F2P, since we are not a typical F2P game. So the idea we have been bouncing around
AirMech changes
changedWhere to begin? This has been a long time coming indeed. As one of the very first Early Access titles, AirMech probably holds some records on Steam for that. This series of posts is about much more than exiting Early Access however. I wanted to lay everything out for the players to understand the road we took to get here, what we have been working on the past half year, and where we are going next. I plan to make a few posts here to cover the different areas since there is a lot to talk about. It will probably go like this: Part 1: Backstory - general history of AirMech and Carbon Part 2: The Split - overview of how AirMech is expanding on Steam Part 3: AirMech Strike - more detail on the PvP focused AirMech Part 4: AirMech Wastelands - more detail on the RPG/PvE AirMech Carbon Games is almost 6 years old now. We started the company with the goal to create AirMech, a spiritual successor of sorts to a game I loved in my youth, Herzog Zwei. There was some magic to that game that I wanted to bring to a larger number of gamers who probably never even knew about it. Looking back now, I can't believe we started our own company--I'm not sure I would do it again! We survived through a combination of luck and skill, probably more luck than anything. And by luck I mean spotting smart opportunities to let us continue to move AirMech forward while keeping control of the core game. We started AirMech when F2P was in its infancy. To me, it wasn't actually F2P at the time, it was built around Microsoft's Xbox Live original model where all games were required to have demos, and at the end of the demo you had the option to buy the game and keep your progress. We also wanted to make the game free while we were in beta, as that's what I always thought a beta was--you're asking players to test your game, so charging them to play it before release seemed crazy to me. Steam didn't have a way to do this however--but Early Access appeared just as we wanted to release our first test versions, so it seemed like a perfect fit. Fast forward to now, and both Free to Play and Early Access have become something different than what we believed in. Since we are F2P, we don't require payment to try the game out, and I really like being able to offer that. It means that someone who paid probably has a lot of hours invested and is very likely to be a satisfied customer--more than an average EA game I hope. The Elephant in the Room: why no updates to AirMech since last September? After more than 200 updates to AirMech (sometimes multiple times a week) we stopped. We didn't want to, but we had some other things taking our attention: the VR version of AirMech, named AirMech Command. Released both on SteamVR and Oculus, this was a huge technical and design challenge that we enjoyed very much. It took all of our time to focus on it. We were surprised by two things: one was how small the VR market is, the other was that the VR games generated more revenue than the F2P AirMech. We again wondered if we were handicapping AirMech by labeling it as F2P, since we are not a typical F2P game. So the idea we have been bouncing around
Where to begin? This has been a long time coming indeed. As one of the very first Early Access titles, AirMech probably holds some records on Steam for that. This series of posts is about much more than exiting Early Access however. I wanted to lay everything out for the players to understand the road we took to get here, what we have been working on the past half year, and where we are going next. I plan to make a few posts here to cover the different areas since there is a lot to talk about.
It will probably go like this
Part 1: Backstory - general history of AirMech and Carbon Part 2: The Split - overview of how AirMech is expanding on Steam Part 3: AirMech Strike - more detail on the PvP focused AirMech Part 4: AirMech Wastelands - more detail on the RPG/PvE AirMech Carbon Games is almost 6 years old now. We started the company with the goal to create AirMech, a spiritual successor of sorts to a game I loved in my youth, Herzog Zwei. There was some magic to that game that I wanted to bring to a larger number of gamers who probably never even knew about it. Looking back now, I can't believe we started our own company--I'm not sure I would do it again! We survived through a combination of luck and skill, probably more luck than anything. And by luck I mean spotting smart opportunities to let us continue to move AirMech forward while keeping control of the core game. We started AirMech when F2P was in its infancy. To me, it wasn't actually F2P at the time, it was built around Microsoft's Xbox Live original model where all games were required to have demos, and at the end of the demo you had the option to buy the game and keep your progress. We also wanted to make the game free while we were in beta, as that's what I always thought a beta was--you're asking players to test your game, so charging them to play it before release seemed crazy to me. Steam didn't have a way to do this however--but Early Access appeared just as we wanted to release our first test versions, so it seemed like a perfect fit. Fast forward to now, and both Free to Play and Early Access have become something different than what we believed in. Since we are F2P, we don't require payment to try the game out, and I really like being able to offer that. It means that someone who paid probably has a lot of hours invested and is very likely to be a satisfied customer--more than an average EA game I hope.
The Elephant in the Room
why no updates to AirMech since last September? After more than 200 updates to AirMech (sometimes multiple times a week) we stopped. We didn't want to, but we had some other things taking our attention: the VR version of AirMech, named AirMech Command. Released both on SteamVR and Oculus, this was a huge technical and design challenge that we enjoyed very much. It took all of our time to focus on it.
We were surprised by two things
one was how small the VR market is, the other was that the VR games generated more revenue than the F2P AirMech. We again wondered if we were handicapping AirMech by labeling it as F2P, since we are not a typical F2P game. So the idea we have been bouncing around
