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North Side Forced To Pull Plug On Bot Colony Due To Poor Sales
The creative game, which aimed to innovate in video game A.I.-conversation, has been shut down by developer North Side.
Bot Colony was the creation of aerospace engineer Eugene Joseph, and was intended to do what has never been done in games - truly free-form conversations with A.I. characters. The game's plot involved a man tasked with investigating what's gone wrong at island filled by worker drone A.I. robots.
The game had previously launched a failed Kickstarter, but had gone into Early Access on Steam. However, apparently sales were incredibly bad, and now Joseph has been forced to permanently shut down development of the game.
In a (somewhat heartbreaking) statement, Joseph details the financial hard times have have hit his company:
I am very sad to announce that we will have to shut down Bot Colony due to lack of sales. Bot Colony sales are so low we can't even cover the cost of the servers running the Natural Language Understanding software - which is $524 per month ( we don't even sell 2 units per day, which would enable us to keep the servers running).
To give you some figures, the NLU technology powering Bot Colony cost around $20M and many years to develop. It is probably one of the best NLU technologies available in the world today. The game itself probably cost another $2M - $3M. On the other hand, the lifetime sales of the game to date are about $10K - not even one day of operating costs for us when we were fully staffed (we worked on it for 7 years). The update that we launched last Friday cost about $460,000 to develop. Incidentally, this update features some really innovative, unique gameplay, and I urge those who bought the game to try it - we worked really hard on it. When we released the update on Friday, we made public a video showing what we had achieved in Episode 3. Unfortunately, all of this only brought in a measly $200 in gross sales (we went up from 793 lifetime units to 814). This was the last straw that led to the decision today to shut the game down - 96 hours after launching the update.
Joseph also says that he's $5 million in debt and will be forced to sell his house of 15 years.
[Source: Steam]
Our Take
This is a shame on two fronts. Obviously, it's terrible for the people who have lost their jobs and for Joseph himself. Secondly, the game was trying something genuinely innovative. For a hint of what might have been, read this preview by Ben Reeves.
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