Hi Pilots and Commanders,
As some of you have astutely noticed today, some change is afoot.
Gato Games was founded in late 2018 as a means to give a future to Battle Dawn in the shape of the currently in-development Battle Dawn 2 while Tacticsoft can focus on Super Mechs. The situation however has changed since, we’ve been steadily scaling our company but wish to grow more in preparation for Battle Dawn 2 and find a lot of overhead in places like Marketing and even development inhibit that growth.
Meanwhile over at Tacticsoft focus has shifted away from Super Mechs onto newer projects, many of their team having moved on to new and exciting challenges and they’d prefer to focus on that.
As such we’ve come to an acquisition agreement with Tacticsoft, purchasing Super Mechs and giving it a new home under Gato Games, with the transaction being finalized earlier this week we are currently in progress of making it a reality.
We hope we can give Super Mechs the treatment it deserves, while utilizing our newfound scale to improve the quality of all four of our games: BattleDawn 1, BattleDawn 2, Earth Arena and SuperMechs.
We’ll open up some job openings soon so please stay tuned if you love any or all of our games. We’ll be spending the next weeks identifying the opportunities and problems facing Super Mechs and working it into our plans.
FAQ
Q: How will this affect Battle Dawn (2)?
A: Not much for now. Battle Dawn 2 is paid for from Battle Dawn 1’s income combined with an initial investment, SuperMechs was bought with a new one. In a few weeks to months we expect to be able to improve on both BD2 and 1 though, as the scale makes it much easier for us to market and develop the games.
Q: How will this affect Super Mechs?
A: Hard to say! Most of us are former Super Mechs players and/or team members, a few of us since as far back as the original closed alpha so we do have some idea of where we’d like to see the game. But we need time to assess the situation and figure out what to do next. We’re in the early stages of a few steps, though!
We’ll do our best to make it as good as we can.
Q: Will either game cannibalize the others?
A: No. While we do fund sequels and spinoffs from our games, we strictly try to leave every game to stand on its own and intend to allocate time based on the activity and spending of the players for that game. Some rare exceptions may be made occasionally (e.g. one game could do with a fancy new graphic and can’t afford it, we believe it’ll pay for itself and another game has sufficient budget for it to be a drop in the water) but we believe allocating time and resources based on success is both good business (prevent sinking hundreds of hours of work into games people don’t enjoy) and the most fair for our players.
We saw first hand what the opposite does.
Q: What is Gato Games like?
A: Players, mostly. We prefer to hire players, we were founded by players, we do muck up sometimes (like anyone does) but we try to fix it and we try to be fairly open. Usually when we keep a secret, it’s because we’re afraid of disappointing someone should things change.
Q: Will the forums unify?
A: Probably not. It tends to drown out less popular games to do so on Discourse and we quite like Discourse. If our players prefer other forum software like InvisionPower or XenForo, we are open to that and will seriously consider unifying them there if we can properly separate out our games.
Q: Discord…?
A: If the players want it, we’ll give Super Mechs an official Discord like Battle Dawn has, with the warning that we can’t guarantee people will behave there. Discord is hard to moderate!
Q: How can I help?
A: We will be re-founding the Super Mechs Maintenance Team as to give us direct feedback on the game, test it and balance it. Please look forward to it. We’ll also put up job openings on https://gatogames.net once we’re ready. We’re still transferring Super Mechs and our current timeline for finishing that is November, 1.