Dec 30, 2014
Legends of Eisenwald - Shagrost
Remember, we said a year ago: “This next year (2014) will be very important for us because that’s the year when Legends of Eisenwald will be released”. Unfortunately, we were wrong once again with our estimations and we decided at about the middle of this year to not give any more exact dates or plans when we will release.
Having said all that, we have no other choice other than to release Legends of Eisenwald pretty soon. This time things look much better – the game is content ready, all eight chapters of the campaign are playable and there are currently over 20 people who finished the main story at least once in our closed beta (which is ongoing into Russian). Average playtime seems to be over 40 hours, and everyone seemed to really like the story. The English beta will be starting in about two weeks, and the signup is below.
The beginning of 2014 was good, but the more we went towards the end of the year the harder it got. Denis had heart surgery done, then crunch time to try and wrap up development, but that didn’t go according to plan. One of the reasons is the brand new UI – and while the redesign didn’t take a lot of time, the reprogramming did (the UI code is now 25% of the entire game code, and more than half of it had to be programmed anew). Closer to the end of the year the money was starting to get tight and for a moment we even considered running a 2nd Kickstarter campaign to raise some funds for marketing but decided against it. (We wouldn’t have done it without asking our backers opinion first anyway).
Why marketing? This needs a bit of an explanation.
This year of 2014 is a year where many things changed. While we were really happy with our launch on Early Access, Legends of Eisenwald was one of the last Early Access titles that got featuring on the main page. More and more games were released (in the first four months of 2014 more games were released than in the entirety of 2013). In order to attract more attention to our game we tried to participate in the summer sale but Steam didn’t get us any space on the front page. Then we were lucky to have a Daily Deal in August. We didn’t get a spot in Halloween or the Winter sale probably because our sales since the beginning of Summer were far from great. In a month or so I plan to write an article with a breakdown of our costs, units sold etc. In short, a few months at the end of 2013 and beginning of 2014 were the months we were doing alright. We didn’t raise our salaries or anything like that, but we participated in two game expos – GDC Play and Igromir – and it was a mistake.
With all these changes, we are now trying to see what else can be done for the release. And that’s why we are thinking to get some funds for marketing. One might argue that if a game is good it will find its audience and there is no need for any paid marketing activities. But right now we disagree. To show Valve our game is good, it needs to sell better in order to have some visibility at the launch and while we have good hope for our PR activities, we feel some marketing would give us a bit more. The Legends of Eisenwald release will determine the future of our company. If it goes well, we can continue working on the game and add all the nice features we wanted to have and even more. And if not, then it will be hard to predict what’s going to happen. We don’t want our game to be lost or go unnoticed. And we will use all necessary options to make our game survive.
To conclude, we wish all Happy New Year, and we will release the game as soon as we can.
Alexander and all of us at Aterdux
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Итоги года и поздравления с Новым годом на русском языке можно прочитать на нашем официальном сайте.
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