LDW started as a mobile game developer (back in 2002 - remember Palm and Pocket PC devices?) starting with a series of casino games and moving into Little Pocket Pet, Fish Tycoon, and Plant Tycoon (all on mobile). The VV series actually began on mobile - a game called Village Sim for Palm OS devices - in 2005, three years before Apple opened their iTunes App Store to developers. We expanded that game and released it as Virtual Villagers: A New Home for PC and Mac, but the core of VV1 is Village Sim. That game, and the earlier release of Fish Tycoon on PC and Mac, marked our move away from those early mobile devices and solidly into desktop casual games.
Actually I never heard of Pocket PCs or Palm devices away from this site
But now that you say it, I do remember Little Pocket Pet purely because there was talk about redeveloping it for PC. When I first heard of LDW, VV2 had only just been released, so while I've been around a long time, I haven't been here right from the start.
Arthur's comments about being "saved" by mobile were true then, and they're true now. The simple fact is that not enough people buy desktop games to keep the lights on at LDW. With every new PC game we released, sales were lower and trickled off to near nothing sooner than the game before. Also, we're still
pretty much the same size now as we were years ago.
I would say there's a thriving community of PC gamers on Steam, but I'm approaching this from the point of view of the consumer here and I have no experience of dealing games through Steam so I have no idea what might be involved re distribution costs. I'm sure you guys have already considered this
Mobile has enabled us to keep making games instead of riding off into the sunset, like so many other indie developers have done. We've really tried to make sure that we're not like the developers who "bleed people dry" through in-app purchases. Our goal is to give people games that they can play and enjoy without feeling exploited.
I apologize for the 'bleed them dry' comment. I was talking about games like that in general, not targeting LDW specifically. I should have made that clearer in my original post
We know that there will always be people who absolutely loathe the current trend in mobile gaming, and you will never see us defending some of the exploitation we see out there. However, for us, it's either make games that fit with today's market, or stop making games altogether. It's simple arithmetic.
Absolutely. I've never had any kind of issue with that. My biggest problem was that people have been asking and asking about new games, whether those games will be available on PC etc, and never got a response.
I get that you can't commit to specific release dates. I also get that you don't want to give a definite yes or no answer about whether there will be a Fish Tycoon 3, Plant Tycoon 2 or another VV game until you're 100% sure you won't have to change that answer at a later date.
But I'm not the only person who's been asking about PC releases, and reading your post it seems like LDW made the definite choice to stop releasing PC titles a little while ago. If that's the case, it would have helped a lot if someone at LDW had taken five minutes to create a sticky thread to explain what you just set out in your post above. Because I still stand by my statement that it's very, very rare to actually get an answer from LDW (whether it's yes, no or maybe) no matter how many people ask the same question.
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