{"id":5690,"date":"2024-05-10T09:00:55","date_gmt":"2024-05-10T08:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lofigames.com\/?p=5690"},"modified":"2024-05-09T15:56:20","modified_gmt":"2024-05-09T14:56:20","slug":"games-before-profit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lofigames.com\/zh\/games-before-profit\/","title":{"rendered":"Games Before Profit"},"content":{"rendered":"

Celebrating the core value at the heart of Lo-Fi Games<\/b><\/p>\n

Lo-Fi Games is a <\/span>games<\/span><\/i>-first studio. This means that before profit and ratings, before fan-art and fancy dinners, we have a very, very, very good game. And in order to make a game that is up to the standard that our players, and developers, deserve, we\u2019re driven by a set of core values that will absolutely, unequivocally get us there.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For these last few months, we\u2019ve been celebrating those values internally, but today we\u2019re airing them out to the world! Our first value: <\/span>Games Before Profit<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What this means to us<\/b><\/p>\n

Games Before Profit<\/span><\/i> underscores our very purpose as a company; it means we prioritise a solid creative vision over predatory monetisation practices, lazy design shortcuts, and selling ourselves out to chase the next trend. It\u2019s easy for a company to say \u201cwe don\u2019t care about money,\u201d but the proof is in our books. We\u2019ve sold a grand total of 0 armour skins, 0 weapon packs, and, roughly, 0 battle passes; we\u2019d never let monetisation get in the way of a complete, well-crafted experience. It\u2019s worked out for us so far!<\/span><\/p>\n

Games Before Profit<\/span><\/i> is the same reason why we\u2019ve <\/span>previously said<\/span><\/a> that Kenshi 2 is \u201cready when it\u2019s ready\u201d. The success of Kenshi and generous support of our players has kept us unbeholden to investors in suits, keen to tell us when our games should come out, and what they should be. We embrace this freedom as our <\/span>strength<\/span><\/i>; the freedom to deliver a game up to our own standards, and beyond our audience\u2019s expectations.<\/span><\/p>\n

Recognition over Revenue<\/b><\/p>\n

It\u2019s absolutely incredible that 2.3 million people have bought Kenshi, and that we\u2019re at a 95% positive review score on Steam; it makes us feel warm and fuzzy inside!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But units and review ratios aren\u2019t our biggest drivers. Our measure of success is <\/span>playtime<\/span><\/i>, and our top 10% of players have clocked up at an average of 500 hours of gameplay. To make a game worth spending that amount of time in: that\u2019s our goal. If everything goes according to plan, Kenshi 2 will have 80% of players averaging 1000 gameplay hours, with a 0.01% drop in global productivity.<\/span><\/p>\n

Game Values<\/b><\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to say \u2018make a great game!\u2019, but <\/span>how<\/span><\/i> exactly do we stay on track to get there? How do we stay true to our original vision? It\u2019s crucial that everyone across every aspect or our game development is on the same page when it comes to what our priorities are and what they mean to us.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This is where the Game Values come in, our very own list of Lo-Fi commandments:<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Gameplay comes first<\/b><\/p>\n

But what does this look like in practice? Let\u2019s take our character creator (which is capable of creating some <\/span>interesting <\/span><\/i>people shapes) – we might have a situation where the art team isn\u2019t realistically able to make a certain piece of armour fit on every possible character without some clipping occurring.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Instead of abandoning said armour, restricting our character creator, or restructuring the company to be entirely focused on cloth physics, we\u2019d recognise that this is a situation where the gameplay comes first, as we\u2019re not wanting to limit the player. Game development is a balancing act, but when we\u2019re forced into making hard choices we\u2019ll always err on the side of the player\u2019s experience. Sorry cloth physics lovers!<\/span><\/p>\n

What we\u2019re doing to implement this\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

It\u2019s important that our team members know they matter as people, that they\u2019re not just skin for the peeler machine. As such, the focus of our latest all-team meeting was on discussing our values, opening the floor to discussion, critique, and celebration. We keep company communication open across departments: our localization team sees our concept art, our audio team sees our narrative discussions \u2013 no one gets left in the dark!<\/span><\/p>\n

To further this end, we\u2019ve set up a computer where staff can stream the latest version of Kenshi 2, at any time. We also do regular company-wide streams showcasing the game\u2019s latest features to help keep everyone excited, show-off our different teams\u2019 victories, and prove we are, in-fact, well on our way to a finished and good video game.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the spirit of finishing a good video game, we also ran a workshop for our team leads that focused on our Games Values. We discussed the ins and outs of what these mean to us, and how to better integrate them into our teams\u2019 workflow so that we can stay on track to make Kenshi 2 even greaterer.<\/span><\/p>\n

Up next<\/b><\/p>\n

Much like this blog, the workshop was the first step of a long-term plan to hammer out our most critical objectives. Values are just words on a page if you\u2019re not actively putting them to practise, and for a company that values integrity above all else, well, we\u2019ve got a lot of work ahead of us. Watch this space for what\u2019s to come!<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Celebrating the core value at the heart of Lo-Fi Games Lo-Fi Games is a games-first studio. This means that before profit and ratings, before fan-art and fancy dinners, we have a very, very, very good game. And in order to make a game that is up to the standard that our players, and developers, deserve, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":5692,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[306],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized-en","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lofigames.com\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lofigames.com\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lofigames.com\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lofigames.com\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lofigames.com\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5690"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lofigames.com\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5690\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5696,"href":"https:\/\/lofigames.com\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5690\/revisions\/5696"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lofigames.com\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lofigames.com\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lofigames.com\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lofigames.com\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}