Final Rush - CURRENT STATUS:
Hello all! In the past few days, Final Rush has seen a small but noticeable uptick in sales, which means that more people have taken an interest in the game. We thought it would be best if we created a news article here to explain the current status of game, including where it is now, and what the future holds for the game.If you want to know what Final Rush is, please refer to previous news entries.
The bad news:
MEDIA - We've had a really hard time getting this game out there. We've contacted a lot of indie sites about the game asking them to run stories on the game - but none of them seemed particularly interested in mentioning us. Without that traffic or interest, it's been hard to get any sales for the game.
SALES - No sales means no revenue to continue development of the game; or even to fix any issues with the game. After several years of development, and a few generous handouts from friends and family, the spigot has run dry, and most of our developers have been forced to find work wherever they can, in order to put food on the table.
GREENLIGHT - We're coming up on a grim anniversary - on December 20th, Final Rush will have been on greenlight for a year. Back in the cretaceous period when we first posted Final Rush, we got some valuable information regarding what needed to be done to the game in order to make it more interesting. Unfortunately, you only get one chance for a first impression, and most of our Green Light traffic voted no. Since then, we've overhauled and massively improved the game, but it's nearly impossible to get back that original traffic.
BUGS - A few bugs have been popping up in Final Rush, including one problem which is causing our update system to ping that a new update is available for the game, when in fact, there is not. This system worked when we first launched the game. Nothing has changed regarding this system, but it still seems to have a bug. If you were wondering where the update is - SORRY! There isn't an update just yet, though it is coming.
THE FAILED CROWDFUNDING - This one is a bit of a doozy. Many months back we tried to do some crowdfunding for Final Rush, which failed spectacularly, due to a number of issues. At first, we wanted to do a Kickstarter campaign, but a single misplaced letter (read: typo) which somehow managed to make it past our triple check (not exaggerating), prevented Amazon Payments from authenticating our Kickstarter account and preventing us from launching the Kickstarter campaign. After several weeks of back and forth (mostly us just waiting days on end for Amazon to respond), we finally gave up on doing a Kickstarter campaign.
Frustrated, we turned to IndieGoGo, and setup a campaign there. Unfortunately, tragedy struck again. While we were able to create campaign, some sort of glitch in the system prevented the game from ever being listed on the website. The only way to get people to the page was to directly link them to the page. If you tried finding the game on the website, or even directly searching for the name of the game, it simply wouldn't appear - and this was after we received our first and only two donations.
With none of the indie news sites willing to run a story on our IndieGoGo campaign, there was no possibility of us getting it out to enough people for the campaign to be a success.
The good news:
THE PATCH - We're working on a fairly hefty overhaul and update to the game. We fixed a core, underlying problem which broke just about everything - meaning that the updated ended up being much more work than we originally anticipated. The patch will bring improved performance, bug fixes, and more intelligent enemies!
PREDICTABILITY - Since the beginning, Final Rush has had an impressively impeccable stealth system - it's never attracted much attention from anyone (except you reading this right now), despite our efforts. This is actually a good thing, because we expected the launch of the game to go a lot like this. We're not discouraged by the bad luck and failures on our own part. We're going to keep pushing.
STUBBORNNESS - Final Rush is our first game, and we're not going to let it disappear. We're going to continue to update and expand the game. It's going to continue to be a little rocky at first, but we'll stick with it, and we hope you'll do the same for us!
ANOTHER PROJECT - We'll be releasing some info in the near future about another project which might hopefully be a bit more successful. If the game does well, we'll use some of it's success to fund the stagnant development on Final Rush. Don't worry though, this doesn't hurt the development of Final Rush at all! Most of the dev-team are new people, while the people who built FR continue to work away on fixing it.
TL-DR:
The game hasn't done that well... but the good news is, since it's done so bad, it can only do better from here. We're still hard at work - don't give up on us yet!
