Hello,

Happy Co-op Fest! I bet there's going to be some great games. I set out on this project in 2016, in part, beacuse I was mad there weren't more co-op games. Now there's a bunch, which...maybe means my game in particular hasn't done as well, but..I'm looking to forward to Co-Op Fest nonetheless.

While the title claims this is a "Major Update", I must confess this it isn't very spectacular. I've added a "flight report card" after every flight (aka run) and there's now a poster in the treehouse that displays your top 10 "highest flights" (aka high scores). There's a few bug fixes (but plenty of bugs left), aaand you can now name the whale.

While I was hoping to do more in anticipation for Steam's Co-op Fest that starts tomorrow (the 10th), I've really lost motivation the last few weeks after I traveled to attended my grandma's funeral. Very strange the perspective death provides. It's also very strange how, whether I had sold 2 million copies of Flock of Dogs or 2, my family and my cousins would treat me and love me just the same. I think my loss of motivation was impending, regardless of the traveling. A pretty good chance this is the last FoD update.

Anyway, not that anyone's asked, and all my friends and game dev buddies have heard me drone on and on about this, but I thought I'd just like to post a long, boring public documentation of some of my bad business decisions with this game..........

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If you weren't following the development of Flock of Dogs for the last few years, then maybe you're not aware that it was in Early Access and it was free for almost 2 years. My plan was for the base game to provide the Minigame Park and the Friend Pass for free and then charge a "premium" amount (like $10) for the campaign in the form of a DLC. In other words, FoD was never a typical F2P game (you know, with lots of microtransactions). In Early Access over the last 2 years, about 60,000 people did claim a free copy of Flock of Dogs. Of those, about 15,000 actually ever installed the game. Of course, they weren't able to actually play the roguelike portion and if you think the tutorial is confusing now, it was much less clear then.

If I could do it over again, I would never have done free Early Access. It may sound obvious, but one of the few metrics Valve has openly stated they use to determine a game's early viability is how much revenue it is generating. Since I didn't want to do microtransactions and the game was free, I generated no revenue.

Not only that, but since the game was free, I figure some of those 60,000 people maybe would have wishlisted the game, then maybe bought it launch, rather than "add to library" and forget about it. Who knows.

When I launched, I only had 2.5k wishlists after having a Steam page up for 4+ years, so I pretty much already knew the game wasn't going to do well. Some might say the problem was the game. Hard to disagree. I have learned from reading different resources about marketing on Steam that really your best bet for success is to have at least 10k wishlists from within 6 months or a year of putting your page up. Then you have a chance of a lot of people, all at once, buying your game. Then you have a chance of Steam featuring your game on its New & Trending list and then, if it catches on with the wider Steam audience, you can do quite well.

Anyway, I got scared that my sales model with a free base game + paid DLC for the campaign would be confusing and ineffective. I switched to a paid product. The Valve team warned me this would reset my 97 reviews with a Mostly Positive rating to 0 reviews. They also said those 60,000 people would immediately be granted a full icense of the game. I bit the bullet and converted to paid product. At this point in my journey, I don't know if that was a bad choice, but pretty much the game couldn't have had a much worse launch, so maybe it was.

I also released in the middle of the holiday season, just 2 days before Winter Fest. I knew this was all ill-advised, but I had promised myself I'd get the game out in 2024.

I'm proud that I've released a game on Steam and I think it the game does offer something special.

It came as a surprise that the 60,000 people who suddenly now own a free copy of the game didn't get a notification email when I released into 1.0, and that really upset me. Like, I know those people are unlikey to just donate me money or something, and I know that any reviews they write now won't show up, because they "received the product for free", but damn man.

If they thought Flock of Dogs looked interesting, I'd love for them to actually see how it ended up.

I worked very hard on the Festival at the end of the game and it does bum me out that a lot of people who were interested in the game will probably never see it. Maybe this message will reach some of them/you, but maybe this message is too long.

Also, the decision to add network multiplayer was bad. It's a great feature, but it cost me probably 2+ years of development time and then after working on it for a year, Valve released "Remote Play Together" as a free feature. I remember when I read about that, I just laid down on the floor for like half an hour.

TL; DR READ IT. Hehehe.

Yours truly,
-Max

P.S. I will be applying for jobs, priotizing game dev and I will be working on some other game ideas, and I will be continuing my Georgist and sortition activism. You know, to save the world. If you don't know what either Georgism or sortition is and you're curious, or you do know what they are and you think they're seriously flawed, send me a message!