I saw the announcement of Grey Goo receiving more or less an expansion pack of new content for free tomorrow and it got me thinking about the possible tragedy of that game failing despite the developers' best efforts and intentions. I'm not privy to any inside information about this game, so I'm just giving my perspective on what's publicly available. Though I have no real stake in the game's fate, I can see some reasons to wish it and its developers more success than they seem to have found with it so far. Though they certainly did themselves no favors with that name.

I'm glad I picked up Grey Goo last year for full price, even though it went on sale for 50% off a couple days later. I could have returned it and repurchased it on Steam to pocket the savings, but I had bought the game with the intent of voting with my wallet to support the kinds of games and developers I want to see more of, so I didn't return it.

Since before its release, the developers have been making an outgoing effort to try to do right by their customers and build the game as a passion-driven project, which makes the game's middling sales numbers depressing. To some degree, I feel sorry for them. They're trying to deliver a high-quality old fashioned RTS game, something that's been all but extinct for a decade (with the exception of StarCraft II), and do it without customer-unfriendly features that business people want to have in games these days (pervasive online, microtransactions, aggressive monetization, etc). As one might have reasonably/cynically expected, it's been tough going.

Petroglyph, the company that made Grey Goo, is a mid-size independent studio largely making PC-exclusive games, something that was almost completely killed off as AAA console games took over in the last two console generations. Their predecessor, Westwood Studios, was one of many victims of that period. That Petroglyph, which is a pretty similar company, has remained in the games business all the way through 2016 without any big hits is pretty remarkable. At times, they've made board games or card games to keep the lights on when funding for computer games wasn't available, but they're still around. They look like they've been one big canceled project away from bankruptcy since the beginning and they've probably teetered on the cusp multiple times.

Grey Goo strikes me as a bit of a desperation gambit, like the origin story of the Final Fantasy games, with no real plan B to fall back on. If this game doesn't pan out in the end, I wouldn't be surprised to see them downsize precipitously and start making mobile games or finally just quit the games business altogether, like so many other old developers have done.

To make matters worse, Grey Goo finding success seems like a real longshot. It likely has a mid-range budget and was made by about 100 full-time people, giving it the sales burden of a relatively large game, but without the serious marketing money or cutting edge production values that drive sales for truly large games from the familiar big publishers. It's also not piggy-backing on a hot trend that could aid in its discoverability or buzz; it's in a genre that has long since been declared dead. From a business point of view, this game looks like a terrible investment with no hope of making a decent profit or probably even breaking even. I have no idea how they secured enough funding to make it in the first place. I almost fear the publisher will, at any point, suddenly discover that their money was actually spent making a genuine RTS and not a microtransaction-riddled F2P MOBA, and pull the plug immediately.

Anyway, as a game-player who fondly remembers the RTS heyday of the late 90's, I'm pleased to see a little revival going on between this and the new expansion packs for Age of Empires and Age of Mythology. I hope Grey Goo is carving out a viable niche for itself, since it's a cool game that deserves a modest following, and the people who made it deserve some vindication for their efforts.

I also really appreciate that the developers' business strategy is largely centered on trying to serve their fans' interests as opposed to the business peoples' (again, no idea how they've got funding that allows room for this). Presumably, after adding fan-requested features and giving away substantial new content for free, they then cross their fingers and pray that the fans will return the favor with good sales. I love the principle there, though I recognize its probable foolhardiness. SteamSpy says they've got 145,000 Grey Goo owners on Steam, which seems so-so, but with the big price cuts they tried over the course of last year and the cost of the free updates, I can't imagine they're out of the red. But there are some success stories they can optimistically look toward. CD Projekt Red has seen big growth while continuing to embrace the same philosophy of generously serving their customers and, to a lesser extent, so have Larian and Flying Wild Hog. So, who knows, maybe Petroglyph can find a way to follow those examples.

I do hope that they get the chance to make a sequel of some kind can build upon the foundation that Grey Goo has set down. But more than that, I hope that it remains possible for small companies like Petroglyph to keep making mid-sized games outside of the mainstream molds while carrying on a customer-first attitude.