King under the Mountain always rubbed me wrong. They hit right at the tail end of “wow. kickstarter is awesome” and right before people realized how many DF-like colony sims there actually were. And then their kickstarter survey, for a key with no add-ons, required an insane amount of personal information. I think they claimed it was for VAT but saw a few “ask a lawyer” threads that pointed out that was nonsense and could have been done with a checkbox.
And the super duper secret publisher right around the time interest was spiking because of DF-GUI was more than a bit sketchy
I dunno. I know that it is hell out there for indie devs (not so much in 2021/2022 but…) but all that combined with the game never feeling like more than a “unity school project” REALLY raises a massive number of red flags. Probably just a single kid in over their head and trying to act like a “real” studio but… yeah.
Still, good to see it was released as open source and here is hoping the fanbase that glommed onto this can carry it forward.
And then their kickstarter survey, for a key with no add-ons, required an insane amount of personal information. I think they claimed it was for VAT but saw a few “ask a lawyer” threads that pointed out that was nonsense and could have been done with a checkbox.
Not heard about that? Who did they do the survey through?
Not sure if they had a third party manage it for them (there has been a LONG history of super vague “secret” dealings) but it was for their kickstarter rewards through backerkit or whatever. So the same survey you get asking how many extra books you want to buy or whatever.
Ah, that’s actually a really common thing and quite normal really for reward systems. Although Kickstarter just announced their own in-house solution, finally.
I think a lot of new indie Devs, having little knowledge of the actual state of the industry, see a publisher offering them big money to make video games (their dream!) and ignore (or lack resources to properly interrogate) the fine print. There are countless examples of publishers simply destroying indie Devs on a whim like this.
I wonder if the Dwarf Fortress Steam Release has something to do with this … But it feels like the timeline might not check out?
This happened in January, but:
King under the Mountain was picked up by a unnamed publisher, who helped finance a big upgrade to the game. 9 months into expanding the game — the publisher backed out. Why? As the developer said “They were worried that a number of similar games that have released in the time between would cause it to struggle to stand out.”.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
King under the Mountain from developer Rocket Jump Technology, a simulation-based settlement-building strategy game, that was going through a big upgrade and re-brand with Mountaincore ended up shutting down and being open sourced.
You see King under the Mountain was picked up by a unnamed publisher, who helped finance a big upgrade to the game.
As the developer said "They were worried that a number of similar games that have released in the time between would cause it to struggle to stand out.
That didn’t go well either, as the developer posted on Steam back in January, with the release being so small they didn’t pull in enough revenue to “keep even a single dev employed working on the game”.
In this case though, it’s somewhat a happy ending, and probably one of the best endings you can hope for, as the original game King under the Mountain was made fully open source under the MIT license.
Real shame to see, no one wants to see a developer have to shut due to low sales, but in this case it’s also partly because the publisher backed-out after making them go silent on it for so long.
The original article contains 336 words, the summary contains 195 words. Saved 42%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
