Hawthorn at June Next Fest

Big News: Hawthorn will be in Steam's June Next Fest! This means that the Hawthorn Proof-of-Concept Demo is available to the public on Hawthorn's Steam page for you and all your friends and family to play together for free. It will remain live throughout Steam Next Fest which starts June 15th-22nd! You are invited to download the demo as of right now from the Hawthorn Steam page and to jump in and try it out anytime between now and the 22nd.

Note: Even if you have already downloaded a game build of Hawthorn from previous playtests, please do not use that build, please separately download this build directly from the main Hawthorn page as it's the build that is tied to Next Fest and will give us the most visibility on Steam during the event.

This demo is the earliest playable version of the game from over a year ago that first captured the attention and hearts of millions of people all around the world. This is a pre-production demo built to test ideas and then later to portray the vibe of Hawthorn as the starting point and to the spark imagination of what Hawthorn can become both for the community and for publishers. So there will be bugs and jank but we think it does it's job of inviting players into the world we want to expand over the long term.

While this demo represents an earlier chapter in development, we’ve been working on a separate branch of the game for the last year since the Kickstarter. Our current game build is much further along than this version, and in the months ahead we’ll invite all our Village Council (aka backers) to play, share feedback, ask questions, and help shape the road ahead.

This demo is intentionally a look back at where Hawthorn began and an invitation to join our bootstrapping journey to help bring this world to life with a passionate team and community. Shortly after Next Fest, Hawthorn Village Council supporters will get to see how far the current game has come with the latest build. They'll get hands on and help shape the world of Hawthorn throughout development. Our community has already changed the course of this project, and we are excited to have you to help shape what comes next.

So jump in! Play all the different animals. Swap multiplayer co-op codes with the community in Discord and make some new friends. Play around, goof off, and have fun. Share screenshots, send the Steam page to your friends, family, and your favorite online communities. We are relying solely on word of mouth because we do not have much money for paid marketing (funding has to go towards development). However we have something better, we have this amazing community who is here for this adventure! We are ringing the town bell to summon all of you, our fellow villagers. Let's ride!

Here's our Next Fest Trailer showing off a bunch of the footage from creators within our community who were some of the first people to playtest one of the very first versions of the Proof-of-Concept demo last year. We are grateful to the creators who playtested and who let us use this footage. This has been a massive group effort to bring Hawthorn to the world!

Please Like, Comment and Share this Hawthorn Next Fest Extended Trailer:

We appreciate your willingness to spread the word about the Hawthorn demo as this is our biggest opportunity on the Steam storefront to push awareness about the game before Early Access. We are also using this opportunity to bring new backers into our Village Council to help us stay independent.

As many of you know, we have previously been in conversations with publishers for quite awhile and we were fortunate enough to receive a few offers. However, those offers were either: not enough money to substantially add to the game experience when contrasted with the amount of revenue share we would have to give up (and other concessions we would have to make) OR the terms and/or companies didn’t align with our values and vision, so we turned them down.

We are choosing again to trust in the community to help us get to the next big milestone with the hope that we can raise enough money through crowdfunding and/or gaining more leverage through wishlists and demo engagement to stand up for the things we think are fair in publishing negotiations. Who knows maybe we can even end publishing conversations all together and just go heads down on building the game and building a better connection with our community. This is a big risk that we are taking but we have to try to stay independent for as long as we can to build the version of this game we all collectively want on our own terms.

We are running a small crowdfunding campaign from our own website to try and catch people who missed the Kickstarter and who want to support our vision. There is one unique bundle we put up for sale through this new campaign and that's our Endangered Species Collection. If you want to collect all the playable critters in the game this is a pretty special one. Not only will you be helping Hawthorn's development, but also a portion of the proceeds raised from this item will go to The Nature Conservancy to support their forest conservation and restoration efforts in the real world.

As always, we are grateful for everyone in our Village Council who has supported us, this game wouldn't exist if it weren't for you! You can read more about our goal with Next Fest:

https://playhawthorn.com/hawthorn-demo-will-be-at-steam-next-fest-on-june-15th/

We are incredibly thankful for this community and our backers for the opportunity you provide us with so that we can work on this dream game every single day. We don’t take any of this for granted and we appreciate that you have stuck with us through this journey.

Thank you for believing in us, thank you for your patience and for taking this risk with us. We believe Hawthorn has so much potential and we are excited to keep building and sharing this wonderful world with you! More than anything, this is about building Hawthorn together. We are called NEARstudios for a reason!

With all of you in our village community and especially our cherished Village Council, you are helping to prove that ambitious worlds don’t need massive studios to exist. With a strong community, a small independent team, and a big collective dream, we can build something truly special! See you all in Windermere Village!

About Hawthorn:

Developed by a small independent team of former Bethesda and BioWare developers. Hawthorn is built around immersive cooperative roleplaying, dynamic life and colony simulation systems described by creators and journalists as “ Skyrim Meets Stardew Valley ” with a richly handcrafted fantasy world with woodland animals inspired by timeless fairytales, adventure stories, and folklore.

Designed for both solo and cooperative play, Hawthorn aims to unite diverse playstyles within a single immersive world. Players can pursue their own interests whether that be adventuring and exploration to crafting, farming, trading, and community building, all while contributing toward shared goals, progression, and the growth of the world around them.