State of the Game needed

Whether this is what you want to hear is beside the point, I think you want the truth and that's what I will give you. I didn't feel like engaging in this because I've said this before in some ways, and the situation is still ongoing.

iGP has never raised enough money to keep a team of people around. The rate of development is absolutely not a choice, attitude or conscious decision. We simply don't have the resources. Unlike many other games, this was not started by a medium sized or large company with any investment capital or resources to throw at it. It was created by me and a friend, in our bedrooms, from nothing but our own time, energy and money. It's a 100% indie game with no commercial backing. Most indie developers that get featured on Steam barely break even on the time they put in to their games, many don't. We've discovered how tough it is for an indie developer to make it without funding, the hard way.

There are bigger reasons for our struggle than iGP out pricing itself as a couple of posters have suggested. Things were going just fine, until we hit some technical limitations a while back. That set us back a long way and stunted growth. We tried to tackle this while still doing creative work for a while, but it resulted in the stability of the service struggling to keep up with demand.

To boot, the only people that could remove the series of highly technical limitations left iGP, due to the lack of funds shortly after. Until those technical problems are resolved it's hard to put as much energy as we'd like in to other projects. This technical work can often be more time consuming than something that adds a new feature or widget to the game, and it's often taken for granted. But I'm sure if you have been here long enough, you've seen quite a substantial improvement in the reliability of the service, because we are making big progress on that front, but there is still more to do. We don't just care about what features things have, but that they work, reliably, 24/7. There is no point in building anything on a shaky foundation. It has never been "stagnant", as evidenced by such improvements in the service.

All of this has required bringing in new people and ensure they are trained up adequately as replacements, and to not take a salary myself for many months to ensure they get paid during that training period. Do I think that's acceptable or what you want to hear? No. But I've heard people often wrongly assume that there are people with healthy salaries behind iGP not taking their jobs seriously. That could not be further from the truth. We do this because we care. It's essentially voluntary work for myself and others that doesn't pay a fair wage (or any wage at times).

That's not something you're ever going to hear from the big companies out there. They do these kinds of projects for money alone, and if iGP was their product, they would have ditched it long ago as a waste of time on that basis. There is a reason companies like Codemasters are avoiding this area of the market. They dipped their toes in the water with F1 Online and ran a mile, seeing no sustainable business model.

I see a market big enough for this to be sustainable eventually, but right now it's a hard slog to get it off the ground. All of your feedback is welcome and justified, even the constructive and no so constructive stuff. When it comes to the pace of adding new widgets though, I don't have a card up my sleeve for you, this is the best we can do right now with what is at our disposal. I've considered doing a kickstarter or something to get the injection of capital we need, but don't know if there is enough support out there for it, especially not when our biggest fans (you guys) read something like this. But I hope if it shows you anything, it's that we're not bad people, and you can trust that we have the same goals as you, to have a great game. That's the truth.

Anticipating the inevitable replies that say what we should be doing, only we have the data. We are doing the right thing in the long run, and shouldn't go for a nice short-term situation that hampers the long-term potential of iGP. There is process that has been set in motion that is already producing results. I'd rather not make flashy promises right now, those will come later once those plans gain some momentum.

The last announcement was in the middle of April, the one before that at the end of February.  There hasn't been one in May yet, but probably will be in the next week. I would like to know more about your decision so that we can learn from it. How often would updates/blogs be reassuring to you? And would another blog or two in this period really have made any difference? Would it have reassured you to know about our situation, or would it have raised more questions than it answered?

If it's just that we haven't added enough new features or content, unfortunately our hands have really been tied on that one. Those of us that are here are the ones trying to fix that for you, and most of us aren't even paid for it. A bigger company might have produced lots of updates and blogs quickly, but it would have disappeared just as quickly. I'd like to do whatever we can to improve things and show you that we are using all the resources available to us. If that means writing more often, then we'll have to do that. Perhaps we should inject more of the "story" behind iGP (even if it does come across as slightly unprofessional) if it helps clear up these misconceptions. We are taking this seriously.

At this stage I think it's more important that we've ensured that iGP is still here, it has survived the worst, and it's stable. We kept the turmoil out of the public arena and focused on rolling out updates when we could to you instead, such as the tyre compounds which should arrive any time now. Actually, it was just when we were able to start producing updates again that we were hit by those Java updates and the heartbleed stuff, which stopped us from being able to move on as we would have liked initially.

Thanks for the feedback. There was a lot of good stuff in there, and it will be taken onboard.

When it comes to things needing to change, there has always been a missing piece from that picture, because again it refers to it as if it were a choice. The bugs/faults that have all been pointed out all reside in one area of the game. I already alluded to the fact that we lost people, and it just so happened it was the people responsible for that area of the game. It took a long time to find and train replacements, probably a year was involved in that process alone. The momentum wouldn't have shifted by posting more blogs or making "decisions", because there has been nothing to make decisions about. We had all our power over the situation taken away the moment we didn't have a team of people that could update the whole game, only parts of it.

I've been moving things in to place to sort this out, and it has taken much much longer than I would have liked, we're talking a timescale of years rather than months. There were many obstacles put in my way along that journey, but I've persisted through thick and thin to get this back on track. On a shoestring that is all that has been possible until now.

If we had blogged every month about the behind-the-scenes story, it would have read something like this every month: "We still don't have anyone developing the simulator. We still don't have a budget and can't find a replacement developer on a shoestring. Lots of updates are in the pipeline but can't be released until the sim supports them, which can't be done because we don't have a sim developer... In the meantime I've been occupying myself making updates that you won't see for a year until we have a capable sim developer" and so on.

My intention in publishing some of this on the forum now is simply to inform the discussion, not to engage in it as such or in a debate. I can see your faith in iGP has really been tested, which doesn't surprise me, but knowing the full picture, I think it has done very well to get this far. Things are boding well behind the scenes now, we've really increased the stability of the service and we are releasing updates, even if it's every couple of months. That's a rate which will improve, as long as we can stick to our plan and don't get sidetracked.