Swallowing Our Pride and Selling Our Soul: A How-To Guide

Dinowaurs has been in open beta for over a month now and one thing is obvious. It’s not making money.

For over 1.5 years, we’ve been working like dogs on this Flash game called Dinowaurs. About 6 months ago we ran out of funding to feed ourselves. So when that happened we started scrambling to find extra work to eat. I think it’s safe to say we hate Dinowaurs. Or at least we hate working on it. It’s been this tumor that has sapped the spirit of our lives and company for so long at such a slow and steady rate that we are now more or less consumed by it without really knowing it. What’s worse is that we’ve hated it for so long that now some of us are drifting to an even worse state of mind. Apathy. But we march on. We’ve learned a lot. Lessons that are way more valuable than the money we received while learning them. And for that we are grateful.

For those 1.5 years, we have fought the notion of making the in-game items in Dinowaurs affect gameplay. We’ve always felt its not in the spirit of our game to have earnable items give advantages to players. Our game is about pure skill, and we never wanted to sully it with tacked on add-ons that would disrupt that balance. Beyond the balance though, we didn’t want to put a premium on earning buffs. We want the premium to be on the gameplay itself so players focus on new strategies but that usually gets dwarfed when there are these arbitrary power-ups that become more obvious than the underlying and ultimately more important base gameplay.

Surprisingly enough, Halo has some influence on the design of Dinowaurs. Players levels are merely aesthetic and they level up as a byproduct of gaining skill in the game, rather than simply sinking time into it. Other elements bled into Dinowaurs as well. The simplicity of two weapons equipped at a time, and a purely aesthetic customization of the look of your avatar/character model.

BUT like I said in the beginning. There’s a problem…It’s not making any money and we’ve spent 6 unpaid months extra on the game that we’ve put a lot of our souls into. How can Dinowaurs make money? Do we even care at this point? Would cutting this godforsaken thing off our backs and releasing as is be better than trying to salvage it into some malformed money-machine? Maybe.

Letting it go would be a cathartic experience for all of us. It’s very tempting. We’ve mused at the death of this beast for quite some time and what we’ll do as soon as its released. We’ll get back to making games as a team again! We haven’t made games for about 8 months. Or at least it feels like it. But as romantic and deliciously indie as that feels, is it smart?

Perhaps too often our hearts get the best of our business decisions. We make games with our hearts, and it will never change, but we’re not businessmen. We have to be explicitly clear about that with ourselves. Most of the time our concerns are with the game, not with the business of that game and perhaps sustaining us for future games. To me, mixing business with game development feels like making a 5-year plan after you’ve finally found your soulmate. It just doesn’t work. But that’s stupid. My bullshit detector is getting louder throughout this whole thing. Maybe this whole feeling is just a symptom of our own indie pride getting the best of our thought process. We’re not above anything, we don’t have the option to be, nor do we really deserve any kind of pedestal. Are we really fighting this because it’s the wrong thing to do, or are we just fighting it because we have some convoluted ideas about an ideal development process? It’s most likely the latter and that pride can be a very dangerous thing to everyone involved.

Making games isn’t a romance, so Dinowaurs isn’t really going to be perverted all that much. It’s a game about dinosaurs with weapons on their backs killing each other. The majority of it is derivative and the theme has absolutely nothing to do with anything other than being quirky and making us feel good. It’s not a meditation on prehistory or a comment on our relationship with the natural world and war. It’s a fun game. That’s all we ever aimed at. So if we achieved our goals and got to the summit, why not allow it to make some money for us so we can maybe make a deeper game later down the road? That’s a good thing, right? Making more games with the people you love, the way you love to do it? Of course it is. But it doesn’t end there.

We have a community. We’ve grown relationships with testers that have dedicated metric weeks of their time to helping us find bugs, supporting our community and just generally being awesome. What about those guys? JT, pachuco, EP, Orangie, liukk, Momose, Flopear, and many others. Those guys kick ass and I’m honestly choked up just thinking about them. Literally welling up. But to have a group of people love your game so much that they are willing to donate that much of their valuable time to simply help. It’s not something to just brush off and take for granted. We are so thankful guys. Thank you. And that’s the problem. These folks and many others who play the beta everyday are most certainly going to be disappointed. They’re going to feel cheated and used. I hate that. We probably wouldn’t have as big of a problem with it if it’s a change we wholeheartedly believed in [nerfing the jetpack] since it’s something we could defend. There’s no real way to defend this other than to say: “We need the money”.

It’s a fact. We need the fucking money. We can’t pay rent next month. But we’d manage… maybe… And if we didn’t, our lives would go on.

So that’s where we’re at. We’re going to sell our soul. It’s maybe one of the hardest things I’ve had to choose in my life. We hope it’s the right decision but like so many important choices, we’ll never know. Items are going to affect gameplay in a pretty small way, but that way will most likely have a significant impact on the players and hold weight in the decision whether to buy our items or not. I wish it were different. I wish there was a better way to tell folks that if they bought our items we would be able to eat and possibly make more content for Dinowaurs. But it’s just not going to happen. People are water. They flow where they can, and we’re no different.