to be blunt I have a good and a bad news for you. Let me begin with the bad one as this is really a tough one:
I want to be completly honest with you guys, because I think as faithful fans of Towns you deserve to know the facts. The only
thing I ask for is that you read my entire post and not just a few sentences. If you are angry at me after you read it that's
okay, just go ahead and post a comment.
When I signed up for working on Towns I was told that we sell a minimum of about x copies/month of the game. I agreed to work on Towns
for 15% of what would remain after removing all the taxes and the Steam fee. Xavi and I agreed that this would be a fair amount, and I still
think it is.
After getting used to the source code and publishing the first new version of the game, we talked about the agreed payment and it turns out that
the sells are getting down rapidly. So we are now selling less than a third of the x copies a month, loosing about 33% of sells per month.
To be completely honest, I can't work for that little amount. I have to pay for the rent and food and this doesn't really suffice
for any of it
I also settled for the 15% of the minimum of x copies which is already well below my normal sallary.As some of you might know I already have a project that I'm not paid for (yet), so at the moment I can't really afford having another one of
that kind. So if I don't really get paid for it then I would pledge for rather making Towns open source. That way I could still contribute
to it (without payment) and have other people help me with that. But that is a decision that I have very little to say about ...
I hope you are not too disappointed. And if you are: I'm really sorry. I'm quite new to indie game dev and I couldn't really see that the
game sales were declining that rapidly. I guess if I had more experience I would have seen it comming ...
But after all Towns is a really great game and after reading through all your suggestions I realized that Towns as an idea
has a lot of further potential. But the current game would need a lot of heavy changes to make them happen. And for
that the game is just not new enough. But that brings me to that good news I mentioned at the beginning:
Xavi and I were talking about a possible Towns2. At the moment this is just in an idea stage and we can't really say if he, I or
eventually Ben have the time to create a Towns2. As faithful fans of Towns we would of course reward you in some way, when/if the
new game is released.
A new game will give us the following advantages:
- we can implement all the cool things that are not possible at the moment due to how the core mechanics works in Towns 1
- we can also rise attention as this is a completely new game and a successor for once great runnning game
- this will also make it possible to have a financially sound basis for a long development of Towns2
I want to end this post by thanking you for reading this and for all your support in these two months. Again I'm sorry
that we had to pull the plug right here, but I sincerely hope you can understand why we had to make that decision right
now.
Moebius
