The biggest mistake on our first game launch...
Some more dev-talk. Here's what I think the biggest mistake was on the launch
more than 2 years ago...
The Wastes was multiplayer only (albeit coming with bot support).
In hindsight, all this might seem totally obvious, but for quite some time it
didn't ring any alarm bells.
With The Wastes we did not set out to make a modern shooter at all - this I
thought seemed obvious and clear. It was supposed to be something you play
and share on LANs and play like you would Quake 3 and QuakeWorld.
This was highlighted in our pitches to the Steam Curators - which some
reviewers seem to ignore (I have proof to back that up... [1]).
We ourselves host private servers for older games all the time. We made the
game for players like us - but it turns out we're in a tiny minority.
Obviously the platform of choice (Steam) was a very bad fit.
Players on the digital-only platform expect different. Throwback titles are
present but are not nearly as relevant as we thought they would be.
I've had players tell me that I should make it free-to-play and add micro-
transactions to earn money instead.
That together with other sorts of feedback (matchmaking? ques? awards? leveling)
painted the picture that even the few people who liked retro-shooters, had very
different expectations of a game release on a platform like Steam.
I think it's just what games have evolved into for a lot of these players.
It would have been too expensive to make it a singleplayer game the likes of
RtCW or Half-Life. That we made a release is an achivement on its own I think.
Overall the development took 2,5 years of my life. No, none of us shipped what
we thought was the best we could do.
I hope the next update will rectify that. It's been delayed because of COVID-19,
economic issues and so on. Life is a burning mess right now.
We've been working very hard on that and hopefully it'll make it easy to move
onto the next thing with what we've learned.
[1] One of the curators who misinterpreted our intent, asked us for our mail
details via twitter, when it's mandaroty info to be put into the Curator
pitch document. Their review painted an odd picture of us competing with
Fortnite (???), go figure.
-- Marco