CROWDFUNDING : THE OMNI-PASS

"Game Industry"? That's bullsh*t. It's more like a Cartel. 

"Business as usual" is the rallying cry of the marketroids and strip miners; the gaming industry is starting to lose is touch with what it's supposed to be about, Games.  Instead, we live in a marketplace that expounds continuous and unbounded rent seeking behavior.

In plain English; the industry is gaming us, plays games around our culture, and our wallets.

"The Industry" keeps wanting to "demand value" where there is none.

Unconvinced? I remember a time when I could just BUY a game, and there it was in cartridge form, on a CD, on a specific console, and I knew to expect the entire game experience with something I could call "my game". Something I could hold in my hands.

Even arcade machines, and pinball weren't such money grubbers.

And these days?  Sequels upon sequels upon sequels (and even offshoots with sequels). DLC releases scheduled on the very first day of a games release. It's almost a shattered game experience that entirely depends on how big, and how quick, you can enter a credit card number.

Game developers have escaped into rent-seeking behavior as a means of profit, without necessarily providing any value.

THE OMNI-PASS AND CROWDFUNDING

Here at Mercenary Games, we're also tired of the bullsh*t. We have enough "rent seeking" behavior to deal with while developing games. Licenses for "developer programs" (usually, an arbitrary gate) not only dig into our production costs (which also, dig into the price of our delivered goods), it also digs into our time, and our players money.  We also have a technology space with myriads of platforms, each with their own dedicated sets of APIs and developer kits.

Developing a game, a studio has to either dominate the platform (ala Zynga with Facebook), or continuously crunch new expansions, essentially strip mining the value of a game (ala Call of Duty).

We refuse. The rent seeking "entitled" attitudes of certain game studios is not only cheap, it also kills a gaming community, and alienates the one thing that drives a game; the players.

We address this problem with our OMNI-PASS. In plain English; purchasing our OMNI-PASS is just like purchasing a game the way we all used to buy our games, once and only once. We do understand the advantages of expansions and DLC (yeah, we're thinking about those kinds of modules, but only if they truly add value to FleetCOMM as a game).  However, it doesn't make sense to stripmine a gaming populace through the use of "expansion bloat". 

 But, won't that get annoying if we have multiple expansions on multiple platforms? Don't worry about it. Once you commit fuel for an OMNI-PASS, you'll get FleetCOMM on *any system* our game engine supports. So, if we ever decide to move to other shores, like Steam, or the App Store, you don't have to worry about "buying the game again".

Since we are an alpha-funding project, we've decided to give equal, if not greater value, to gamers contributions. Gamers who support our concept, from the beginning, are essentially virtual world investors. Alpha funders take the risk of funding us, even though the game isn't made yet; in return, we will give funders the entire game, all it's expansions, "DLC", and all it's iterations, in every gaming platform we support, forever.

It's only a fair trade; we want to treat our gamers like patrons again.

We are offering our OMNI-PASS on Indiegogo. We've decided to extend our alpha funding process, offering the same terms we rolled out on Kickstarter, until we release this game in it's full version. Our OMNI-PASS will only be available until August 15, 2012.