,
7 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
This is a great answer to all of those questions about scarcity and print runs you see on reddit. Nathan is right on the money about Root too. We didn't know it was going to blow up. We just worked hard and tried to make a title that we felt would resonated our core audience.
We also wanted to makea game that we would be proud to sell for years to come. The studio does it's best to avoid relying on any kind of churn. We could publish tons of titles if we wanted to, but we are all more comfortable doing our best to make 1 or 2 great games per year.
Maybe they blow up and we get another Root, but probably not. It's impossible to know if a game will do that and never worth the risk of committing to massive print runs early on. Instead, it's better to just keep working at the craft of publishing and not go chasing trends.
Root wouldn't have been possible in the first place if Patrick wanted me to bang something out quickly. And, the current game I'm working on has been cooking for over a year and much remains to be done.
Whenever folks ask me for "lessons" from Root my answer is always the same: be relentless in your self-critique, ambitious in your goals, stay focused, and then have a lucky break. If the luck doesn't come then at least you made something you can be proud of.
Though it's not discussed at length, the essay also illuminates why Kickstarter has been such a transformational blessing for game creators. Drew and I were able to design our Pamir campaign in a way that insured we could do good work and minimize risk.
But there's a cost to this. The game will probably be hard to find for several months or more at some point. That is a little inconvivent, but it's a cost well-worth paying I think.
