I have no respect for what Starbound are doing.

Momizi

Rabby
I actually have no idea how "word got out" that we turned them down, but since it did, here's the reasoning we gave:

While being published by Chucklefish would absolutely give us some strong, free advertising among their pretty sizable fan base, letting a larger company put their name on your product creates a significant risk of customer confusion. Even now, when we aren't being published by CF people still say Grindea is a CF-game sometimes (luckily to be quickly refuted most of the time).

For example, I wager many don't know who made Risk of Rain, or who's making Stardew Valley and that pirate game. To many people, maybe even most, those are all "Chucklefish Games", myself included I shamefully admit.

We want Grindea to be a Pixel Ferrets game, and we hope we've got a good enough product at release to reach reasonable success without publishing it under a different name!

i honestly know about risk of rain and stardew valley before they were picked up my chucklefish lol
 

Chef Excellence

Green Slime
I actually have no idea how "word got out"
A lot of people made an assumption based on the fairly suspicious way they go about offering to "publish" games when it's not really needed.

As publishers, all they really seem to do is bypass Steam Greenlight, which is kind of useless since you got through that on your own.

They don't seem to give funding (they're "publishing" a game on Kickstarter right now), they don't even seem to do any marketing but they slap their logo on a game, take the credit and by the sounds of it, take a cut of the profits.


Aside from all that I wouldn't worry about turning down the chance to have what amounts to a handful of posts on the Starbound blog worth of interest in the game. You're bound to get much more than that once it's publicly seen as a thing on the front of the Steam store.
 

Teddy

Developer
Staff member
I've seen it stated as fact several times already (and not only on this forum), so regardless if the actual conversation has leaked or not, people seem to have made up their mind about the issue and so I might as well state the reasoning behind our decision. There's nothing controversial in the way we think, so any theories other people could conjure up could only be worse!
 

Momizi

Rabby
i dont think it ever got leaked out,
people mostliky gessed when you gave tiy a code way back then
and then theres the whole combat thing starbound is doing
the game is doing fine

i think this topic served its purpose honestly
 

Hobo

Rabby
I'd prefer we let it run it's course until it's life ends naturally of being cropped by the forums automatically, The conversation actually comes up more often then you might think, especially with that combat fiasco and I do believe locking this could cause smaller threads to crop up. On the other hand I wouldn't mind making this all past and moving on, which I have already done if you haven't noticed by my lack of replies as of late, but others aren't me.
 

Chef Excellence

Green Slime
There's nothing controversial in the way we think, so any theories other people could conjure up could only be worse!

The running theory on at lest one board was that you'd stuck to your guns and didn't want to hand over even a small portion of rights or credit to your work. It was also considered that you'd dodged a bullet if you had said no to them.
 

Xathos

Green Slime
I actually have no idea how "word got out" that we turned them down, but since it did, here's the reasoning we gave:

While being published by Chucklefish would absolutely give us some strong, free advertising among their pretty sizable fan base, letting a larger company put their name on your product creates a significant risk of customer confusion. Even now, when we aren't being published by CF people still say Grindea is a CF-game sometimes (luckily to be quickly refuted most of the time).

For example, I wager many don't know who made Risk of Rain, or who's making Stardew Valley and that pirate game. To many people, maybe even most, those are all "Chucklefish Games", myself included I shamefully admit.

We want Grindea to be a Pixel Ferrets game, and we hope we've got a good enough product at release to reach reasonable success without publishing it under a different name!
I didn't guess or weasel the information from Molly. I saw that Molly Carroll (CF Community Manager) is following you guys on Twitter. I figured there was some, or soon to be, communication regarding the whole bit.

Due all the capital raised from Starbound, Tiy is trying to be smart about his company's future, and not rely solely on the unexpected success of an unfinished project. Focusing on publishing is a way to ensure longevity. He's obviously being serious about it because he's persuaded most of his to team to fly halfway around the world to relocate to the London area. He gets to have the fun of dealing with work visas and immigration. Oh, the joy.

Anyway, they're the new kid on the block. I can understand your rationale behind not signing on. Like you, he's trying to build a brand through Starbound and publishing. Many successful companies publish and develop. I don't see how people can assume that games coming out with the Chucklefish logo on it are seen as "their's" (which could easily be negated by adding a simple "developed by" in the opening splash screens). Starbound's not even out of the first phase of beta yet. Why would they suddenly be releasing several other titles out of nowhere (if they weren't publishing)?

I was suggesting that for the sake of resources in helping the game development along. Refusing reasonable offers of help is generally unwise, then again, Jeff Vogel, of Spiderweb Software, has been "soloing" it since '94. He's managed to eek out a decent living in self-publishing indies. Like you guys, he does everything he can inhouse, and outsourced what he can't (freelance artists, open license sound assets, etc.). I hope everything works out. Indies only have a small window to build a fanbase around before they get sucked up in the crowd of everyone else.
 

Xathos

Green Slime
Oh, that's a lie. LOL. Many a good game, with or without those things, have failed to succeed. Multiple things factor in, along with a good amount of luck.
 
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