State of the Union 2021

Since the 4.0 update back in December I have been doing a bit of design on the next additions for Siberian Dawn, as well as working on two other projects, but after another negative review a few days ago, and the otherwise silence, I was thinking about what I was spending my creative time working on and what I should be doing with this time.

Four of the five tasks I planned for Siberian Dawn were content additions that would not change the base game. With the 4.0 update there are no more additions planned to make the game clearer, there is no simpler version of the game to come. This is a complex strategic wargame, with a deck building mechanic at its core, that was designed to give the player several tactical choices during a mission rather than just being a deckbuilder that ends up playing you and leaving you with no choices. So what you currently have is the finished game and what was planned was additional content that would add new tactical challenges, new missions, a new game mode.

Therefore if the game is still only getting negative reviews and there is nothing coming that is going to change this, if that is even possible, then it probably makes more sense to stop working on the new content for Siberian Dawn and just focus on the other projects or do something more rewarding. Also from the information I am getting I am not seeing any desire for the additional content so it just doesn’t make sense to work on it. The fifth task I had planned was to do some videos of me playing the game, but I am not sure if these would even help to get people playing, the game has been out for over two years so is it too late for how to play videos and would a lot of people want to watch a 20 – 30 minute video anyway?

So as it stands I am currently going to stop working on the additions for Siberian Dawn, and see if anything changes in the future. I expect it will still get negative reviews for the free base game as that is the trend it is now in and I know I will not be offering a free version of any future games I develop from what I have learnt from this experience. The knowledge I have gained from this project will be used in the future, and we will see where that goes.

Winterflood