Hi everyone! I don't post here too often these days, but some of the old hands may remember me - I'm Russ, the founder and CEO of Payload Studios.
There's obviously been a lot of feedback and questions recently about the R&D updates, DLC strategy and the future of the game in general, so I wanted to step in and provide some context to these decisions.
Firstly I want to thank you for all the feedback, questions and suggestions. We value this highly and I can assure you that we read every comment and take it all seriously. We don't always do everything we're asked for, but as you know we do update our plans in response to what you tell us.
The RR/EXP rebrand was first and foremost about adding value to the R&D mode, which has been somewhat neglected recently. As you have correctly guessed, we will be making this available on consoles, as part of our drive to bring the game towards parity across all platforms. At the same time, we are scaling back the idea of R&D as an unstable content testing environment - which doesn't make much sense any more. We already have the unstable branch for that - at this stage in the lifecycle we think R&D should justify itself based on the value in the package (on all platforms), which is why we've given it a complete overhaul and added a load of content.
There was always a risk of this being taken as announcing RR as a playable corp. We tried to defuse that in how we presented it, but with hindsight that was a bit unrealistic and we didn't do the best job of it. My apologies to anyone who feels they've been sold a dummy over this.
We're not going to 100% rule out (or in) RR as a full Campaign corp, for now. We've heard your feedback, we're discussing it internally, and we'll come back to you soon with an update on that point. If we did do this, it would not be as a paid DLC - we have no plans to release corporations that way.
However, we will continue to add paid DLC content to the game, going forward. It should not be a great shock for a five-year-old game (which we effectively develop as an on-going service) to offer additional paid content for long-time players. There is nothing cynical about this - we have running costs and it's clearly unsustainable to provide endless content for players to spend hundreds or thousands of hours enjoying, without some way for us to bring in new revenue.
We thank you for your understanding on this point!
We are sincerely grateful for your support and companionship on the long journey of TerraTech so far! There is some really exciting stuff coming, so please look out for new roadmap updates soon, for this year and beyond.
-Russ
There's obviously been a lot of feedback and questions recently about the R&D updates, DLC strategy and the future of the game in general, so I wanted to step in and provide some context to these decisions.
Firstly I want to thank you for all the feedback, questions and suggestions. We value this highly and I can assure you that we read every comment and take it all seriously. We don't always do everything we're asked for, but as you know we do update our plans in response to what you tell us.
The RR/EXP rebrand was first and foremost about adding value to the R&D mode, which has been somewhat neglected recently. As you have correctly guessed, we will be making this available on consoles, as part of our drive to bring the game towards parity across all platforms. At the same time, we are scaling back the idea of R&D as an unstable content testing environment - which doesn't make much sense any more. We already have the unstable branch for that - at this stage in the lifecycle we think R&D should justify itself based on the value in the package (on all platforms), which is why we've given it a complete overhaul and added a load of content.
There was always a risk of this being taken as announcing RR as a playable corp. We tried to defuse that in how we presented it, but with hindsight that was a bit unrealistic and we didn't do the best job of it. My apologies to anyone who feels they've been sold a dummy over this.
We're not going to 100% rule out (or in) RR as a full Campaign corp, for now. We've heard your feedback, we're discussing it internally, and we'll come back to you soon with an update on that point. If we did do this, it would not be as a paid DLC - we have no plans to release corporations that way.
However, we will continue to add paid DLC content to the game, going forward. It should not be a great shock for a five-year-old game (which we effectively develop as an on-going service) to offer additional paid content for long-time players. There is nothing cynical about this - we have running costs and it's clearly unsustainable to provide endless content for players to spend hundreds or thousands of hours enjoying, without some way for us to bring in new revenue.
We thank you for your understanding on this point!
We are sincerely grateful for your support and companionship on the long journey of TerraTech so far! There is some really exciting stuff coming, so please look out for new roadmap updates soon, for this year and beyond.
-Russ
