We are growing! A couple of weeks ago, I’ve joined Andrej as a community manager at Poetic Studio. He has recently described what he has been up to over the last 2 years. Now let me introduce myself and say a few words about our plans.
A long time ago in a town far far away our family friend returned from a trip to Poland and brought a great looking box.
In it was my first personal computer: Atari 65 XE. It quickly became an essential part of my childhood and in some way remained so ever since.
Fast forward many years and one December morning my phone is ringing. Andrej is calling. We’ve been in touch quite sporadically since we graduated from college, so it was a bit of a surprise. I knew that he had been working on a video game for a couple of years and I was eager to play it.
“Hey, Martin, things are going great and I was wondering if you’d be interested in joining me in my project.” Is this for real? 3 minutes before the phone rang, I realized that I should probably change jobs. And then this happens.
Fast forward 6 months and I’m writing this blog post. I’ve joined Andrej in Poetic Studio to work on everything related to community, marketing, PR and web. Over the last 13 years since I graduated from the same business school as Andrej, I’ve worked in various junior and later senior marketing and customer experience positions. I’ve also worked as an online editor-in-chief of the biggest business news outlet in Slovakia HNonline.sk.
<philosophy>Playing video games has helped me to improve my understanding of the world around. Games are simplified models of reality, they can help us to see the reality in its essential aspects.
For example in Civilization, the world is reduced to a bunch of concepts. Although they do not reflect the total reality, they give us a simple framework to analyze the world around us more easily. You can get a grasp of basic concepts and then build your understanding the complexity of the real world.</philosophy>
Anyway, what I want to say is that I see videogames as a way to make people’s lives fuller and richer.
So what’s coming in the next couple of months?
For me personally, it’s mostly a lot of learning how marketing and communication principles apply in the gaming industry.
I’ve been surprised how well developed indie gaming marketing is. Maybe it’s because the target groups are easier to define in the fields where I used to work before. Or perhaps because a game is something paradoxically more concrete than a checking account or a medical second opinion (I have professional experience with both). I’ve also realized how smart and business focused indie developers are.
We’ve just launched a new website for Sacred Fire and we’re inviting you to join the Firestarters Guild – an initial group of Sacred Fire fans who will:
- get early information about our Kickstarter early bird rewards when we launch our Kickstarter,
- be the first to play a preview version of the game with first couple of chapters and send us feedback to help us make Sacred Fire the best it can be,
- receive a special code to unlock an extra in-game feature when the full game is launched,
- receive important news about Sacred Fire and become a member of the community.
In addition, we’re preparing a fan vote which will affect character influence in the game and a fan give-away.
Sign up here! Only very limited number of fans will be able to join the Firestarters Guild.
Square Enix Collective, Steam Greenlight and Kickstarter
In the next few months we will submit Sacred Fire to Square Enix Collective. Later this year we will submit the game to Steam Greenlight and launch a Kickstarter campaign.
We will launch the full version of the game in 2017.