We committed to a specific number of Parts that we’d release as part of the Expansion Pass campaign.We committed to a specific roadmap of features and content, which we knew we’d have to produce to a quality level exceeding what we’d included in the game as free updates over the years.That’s maybe fine for Early Access, but we graduated from Early Access in 2017, and we felt that we needed to do better for this.Īnd in wanting that, I made some decisions that led us to the present challenges around the Expansion: We believed TALES would be one way to do that.īecause we knew that charging for updates would come with greater expectations than when people were getting them “for free”, we wanted to provide some assurances of what you would get, and when, so that we weren’t just saying, “hey, here’s a thing, give us some money even though most of it isn’t made yet”. That means finding the right way to generate revenue from it, one that is fair to our players that doesn’t burn out the team. So while this is a passionate endeavour for us, it’s also a business, and we’re focused on running it ethically and sustainably, and taking good care of our people. To a large degree, the ongoing financial health of THE LONG DARK, which we’ve built an entire company around, also determines what we can make in the future. But for a large and complex game like THE LONG DARK, one we’ve been updating for years without asking for any more money from our players, we wanted to experiment with the idea of creating a new revenue stream that would help us continue updating the game well into the future, in a financially sustainable fashion. This is how we like it, and our independence is paramount to who we are and what we make.
But it also means that we carry all the cost and risk for the project ourselves. This means we get to keep our revenue and don’t have to share it with a publisher, and we can work without external interference. You see, Hinterland is an independent studio, and THE LONG DARK is a self-funded, self-published project. We wanted to give Survival some love, but also wanted to see if we could do so in a more financially sustainable way, that might set a path for the future. When we originally discussed the idea of doing an expansion pass for THE LONG DARK, we did so recognizing that in the years we’ve been working on getting the WINTERMUTE Episodes out, we’d naturally had less time to focus on Survival. In my opinion, they haven’t gone that well.Ĭertainly not how we want them to go.
We’re nearing the mid-way point of TALES FROM THE FAR TERRITORY, our paid expansion pass campaign for Survival Mode, and this seems like a good time to talk about how things have gone so far.
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