Harlequins: Not Sure If Good

Harlequins are decent at best.

I'm just going to come out and say it:  I don't think Harlequins are looking too good from a competitive standpoint.  With the book firmly in hand now, I don't see quite as much value from them compared to Dark Eldar when the army first got teased.

Before I completely put them aside, just note that I think there are a few things that Harlequins bring to the table.  These are few, they're niche, and they're certainly conditional, but I think Harlequins can have some interesting options that no one else can really pull off.  For example, when you look at some of the things that Soaring Spite can do with their Masque Form, you'll know that the army will be able to move 16"+6" and still shoot with 6" Fusion Pistols without penalty for 28" threat range.  This awesomeness simply cannot be ignored.  Similarly, if you take Faolchu's Talon for your Soaring Spite Warlord, you can move an additional 6" in your movement, and when you blow up, nothing happens.  No explosion, no models dying, you just roll out of your drive-by mobile and find another joyride to blow people up in.  This is great and all, but it's also very niche.  Hell, even their big fancy Webway Gate wants me to drop multiple Talos or a fat unit of Grots out of them instead.

So here's where I have problems with the army:  They're melee Horrors.  They're melee-based units that cost a ton but still have the same statline as those little pink dudes.  You have an army of 1W T3 4++ melee Horrors that desperately want to be relevant in a meta filled with resilience and anti-alpha.  Everyone and their mother knows that T3 and 4++ with a single wound just get absolutely murdered by almost any type of shooting and even below-average melee fillers that play much better in attrition simply because of the points.  Harlequins are great if you think that killing MEQ with 3+ for almost 30 points is great.  You know what else is 30 points?  A Grot, and a Grot comes with so much more resilience because a single Grotesque can be T6 with 4 wounds and 4++ with FNP.  Speaking of 4W, this is actually much bigger than people realize.  It takes 2 D2 shots to kill, out of kill scope of D3 weapons, and makes D6 weapons very nervous.  It's pretty much the sweetest spot for being infuriating at 30ppm.  When it comes to bashing in a Marine's face, a Grot does just as much damage but can stay alive much longer vs. almost any kind of shooting and any kind of melee.  In fact, Harlequin melee stopped being relevant ever since stronger alternatives came out:  Genestealers, Grotesques, Dawneagle Shield-Captains, the list goes on and on.  Hell, even Wyches are better for the points if you want a melee option.  Marines are dead easy to kill with any competitive army worth their salt because single-wound that cost a lot are just not cost-effective in today's meta.  Attrition matters and Harlequins play the game the worst out of all the units in the game.  Every other army that wants to be in melee does it better for the cost.  For me, since I play Dark Eldar in a very shooty manner, why bother being in melee if you can shoot them to death from far away?  My T3 5+ AS with an FNP Warrior that cost 6 points is looking a lot more cost-effective next to a 28-point Harlequin with a Fusion Pistol and an Embrace.  You are essentially paying a premium for a luxury that's not needed.

Arguably the best Form in the book.

This brings me to match-up.  In any given competitive setting, you're going to be looking at your local meta or even the greater meta (GTs or national events) and comparing yourself to all the other armies out there.  You have to factor in the fact that Harlequins are not cheap, not in the slightest.  Their unit choices are limited already, but what you pay for is a unit that's not very durable but has a ton of bad match-ups.  If you run into a Tyranid list with a lot of Genestealers for example, you know for the points that you're going to fight an attrition battle that you're not going to like.  If you're fighting a lot of Gaunts, forget about it because you already lost the points game here (anything with Fearless sucks).  God forbid you to run into a unit of Wyches, or even worse, a unit of Grots.  With Meat Mountain being so popular these days, just running into a unit that you're not going to be able to really hurt while still taking assloads of damage in return is going to suck.  The worst part is when you start thinking about this from a points perspective.  Having Harlequins killing cheap fodder units is a waste of time and it's only going to get you shot up afterward and killed.  A canny opponent is just going to spread out his line so he sets up kill zones for your units afterward (why Midnight Sorrow might be pretty decent).  IG carparks are going to be super annoying and so are most armies with cheap armor and plentiful shooting.  I feel very confident with my pure Kabal army vs. any army that takes a decent amount of Harlequins for example.  When you bleed expensive models, your firepower and melee threat goes down a ton.  That's one of the reasons why I prayed to the dice gods that GW was going to give the army -1 To Hit all-around.  Alas, this was not to be.  Instead, you have to pay up the ass in CPs and bet on Psychic powers or other instances to keep your basic stuff alive long enough to be relevant.

Harlequins are points-prohibitive.  If you take them, you won't have a lot of anything else.  If you want to run them in any meaningful way, you will take them as a Battalion.  You will already need multiple HQs to get the most of your army like the Shadowseer and Troupe Master, and Troupes just naturally fill in the rest of the core choices.  The difficult part here is getting into a points zone where you can still be relevant and be a threat to the enemy without costing an arm and a leg.  It's not just the points that matter here, it's about being relevant and a threat to the enemy.  What I mean by this is that you need to pack anti-tank in any competitive list as well as being a threat in melee because that's what you're taking Harlequins for.  The army, in general, is bi-polar.  If you want them to be a strong AT threat, you take Fusion Pistols.  If you want them to be a big melee threat, you mix up Caress and Embrace.  The problem is that they both go on the same model and when that model dies, he takes both of those upgrades with him.  Some people argue saying that you can take them stock, or leave specials off them as extra wounds, but why the hell would you do that?  If you're just looking at a few models that can do damage, Wyches can fill that role for much cheaper.  Unfortunately, you have this current situation where both ranged and melee special weapons cost a good deal of points on an already expensive model to begin. This is why the attrition factor sucks so much for this army.  It's not very durable and every model lost feels like chunks out of the army's total strength compared to other armies.  Hell, most would agree with me when I say that Soaring Spite is arguably the best Form right now for Harlequins, but what people talk about but don't consider is how many points a boat filled with Fusion Pistol Troupes really are.  If you want to decrease the cost by removing Fusion Pistols, you lose out on the Form's benefits.  You cut the melee weapons and you're now a glorified Wych.  Grats.  More importantly, for how many points you're spending trying to make this clusterfuck work, you're also taking away points from allies who can possibly perform the same role better.  Case in point, you can buy an entire Black Heart Spearhead for less than 500 points if you just want something to shoot.

Too much, too little.

So what am I getting at here?  It means that if you put a lot of points into Harlequins, you need them to be a decent standalone force.  But if you need them to be standalone, in the fact that you need your points to also equate out to the ability to kill tanks and infantry, then you're simply increasing the cost of each Troupe unit.  Taking a deeper dive:  For 500 points, I can buy a Black Heart Spearhead with 3x Ravagers with Dissies on all of them.  What do Dissies do?  They can pretty much wreck anything because this buys the army 27 BS3+ S5 AP-3 D2 shots that can threaten GEQ, MEQ, multi-wound, single-wound, high-armor, whatever, you name it.  This is just from shooting because you're not counting access to Agents of Vect, Living Muse, Cunning, or FNP on all your vehicles.  You put 500 points into a Harlequin force and what do you get?  You do the math and get back to me with exactly what firepower you have in shooting and in melee and see if the numbers pay off for you.  First, you need to be a certain distance from the enemy to threaten them with AT Fusion Pistols, then you need to be in combat to get the most out of them.  To get in, you have to brave the Overwatch, hope none of your 28 point models die, roll to get in, and then you can really shine.  You have to play much cleaner, much more precise and pray for some good ol' dice rolls because there's a lot that can go wrong.  With Grots, you just push models forward and results happen.  With Ravagers, it's the same thing, but you don't need to commit because you're 36" away from your target.  With Harlequins, it's all risk, and I hate risk.  And so do most competitive players.

You know what else is risky?  Conditional effects.  When you look at Harlequins, almost everything in the army requires you to be within 6", roll something to enable (Veiled Path), cast a psychic power, drop multiple Strategems across multiple phases, or something else.  Most of these things can fail to bad luck, some can be outright countered (Vect, Denied), and others can be counter-played sufficiently to really take the wind out of your sails.  The best counter to melee-oriented armies is proper spacing and understanding threat range and averages.  A good player with solid understanding of melee threat range and bubble-wraps will be murderous to Harlequins.  In general, the army is almost too much fluff and not enough consistency when it comes to a lot of their army mechanics and that is a huge risk to competitive players looking to win a GT.  The variables are already great, with matchups and different strength of schedules and players, so you don't need more randomness.  It's almost like you're playing Orks, but you're trying to build a competitive army so you took Eldar or Dark Eldar allies and they're all looking at you like WTF, you took up half of my army points?  A common theme within competitive armies is that they're consistent in their performance.  Just look at some of the discussions around Harlequins being a competitive threat.  It always starts with:  Oh first you take this, then you do this, then you cast this, then you play this Strategem, and then you shoot and lel you embark back in your transport!  Yeah, that's nice, but I play Prophets of Flesh and my entire army has 4++.  That's what consistency looks like and that's why it wins games.  That's why Meat Mountain is doing so much work right now.  That is until people figure out how to beat it.

There is a mild saving grace for the army though, is that they're Battle Brothers with both Dark Eldar and Eldar.  I would say that both of these armies are very competitive with a multitude of unit options.  Eldar arguably has the best psykers (Doom, Jinx) in the game, Shining Spears, Dark Reapers, Wave Serpents, and both the Hemlock and Crimson Hunter Exarch are insane.  Dark Eldar can run Meat Mountain down your throat and cost-effective Kabal units, Ravager Spearheads, Agents of Vect, and CP manipulation up the wazoo.  There is a lot of good stuff in both of these armies, but ultimately it comes down to the points question all over again.  Is Harlequins competitive enough to share the same points as these armies here if you're trying to build competitive?  Only time will tell.  Personally, I think the best Harlequin lists will be the ones mixed with either Eldar or Dark Eldar.  Cegorach knows that I've been trying to make it work.

I really hope I made some solid points here.  Don't get me wrong, I own a ton of the little fuckers and I love them to death, but they're definitely more of a fluffy choice than a competitive choice for me.  There are just too many good unit choices out there that makes army building with them difficult.  I know, I've been trying to design a good army list with Harlequins/DE and/or Eldar for the last couple of days and it's mind-boggling.  When I have something good, I'll show it off.

Movie Reviews: A Star Is Born, Bohemian Rhapsody, Christopher Robin, Eighth Grade, First Man

See all of my movie reviews.

A Star is Born (2018) - Bradley Cooper directs, writes, and stars in this third (at least) remake of the 1937 story. He is joined by the captivating and talented Lady Gaga. I assume you know the story, so here be general spoilers.

The original story is about a talented man whose best days are behind him. He is on the way out, but he finds and starts the career of the young woman. They fall in love. He is depressed, not only because he is no longer wanted, and is an alcoholic, but because he can't take the idea of a youngster and a woman besting him. Meanwhile, out of love - or maybe out of what is expected of a woman - she is on the verge of giving up her career because she thinks she can save him if they live a normal life. He overhears this and decides to end his life, either because he has finally reached bottom or so as not to allow her to give up her dreams for him.

This remake downplays the parts that make it seem like it is natural for her to give up her stardom for his sake. He has a drug and alcohol problem. She doesn't consider giving up her career, although she makes an attempt to get him booked on her tour, threatening to not do her tour if he is not allowed to join her. Her manager is a creep who flat out tells him that he is in her way, which leads him to end his life; this is far more sinister than having him overhear a conversation he should not have heard.

This is a pretty good movie, with good original music. Everyone gives a solid performance, and most of the camera work and directing is excellent (I had one or two minor quibbles, nothing major). The leads have good chemistry, and Lady Gaga's singing can blow you away; I suppose some will complain that no one can sing like Barbra Streisand in the second remake from 1976, but that movie wasn't as good as this one.

It is emotionally draining, however, if you have a hard time watching someone resort to suicide (not graphic, but the scene is long) or a woman having to deal with a lover who is an alcoholic and drug addict. Just so you know.

Bohemian Rhapsody - A biopic of Freddie Mercury of Queen, and also the story of Queen, from its founding until Live Aid. The main plot elements are Freddie vs his girlfriend Mary (as he comes to realize he is gay), Freddie vs his manager, Freddy vs some boyfriends and the swinging 80's lifestyle, Freddy vs his family and his traditional background, Freddy vs his contracting AIDS (only superficially covered), and Freddy vs his band-mates.

If you love Queens's music, of course you will love the movie. If you hate Queen's music ... what's wrong with you? Some of their songs, like We Will Rock You and We Are the Champions, seem like they were chiseled out of music itself. On its own merits, Rami Malek does a great job as Freddy, and Lucy Boynton as Mary and Gwilym Lee as Brian May also shine, as does the rest of the cast. The plot is captivating, since Freddy seems equal parts genius arranger and singer, but also self-destructive and helpless. Mary, if you believe the movie, is the one who drags him back into sanity, even while she is kept apart from him due to his sexuality.

As an ending to the movie, Live Aid, while a lovely concert, doesn't really answer all of the questions. If you know the real story, you know that a lot of the early days are skipped over or compressed (they went through a bunch of bass guitarists and their first album was not a great success), Live Aid was a phenomenal triumph, and the story continues to the early 90's. So threads are left dangling.

But it doesn't matter. Good performances and great music, an interesting portrait of a tormented genius. Not the best movie ever made, but worth watching.

Christopher Robin - Ewan McGregor plays a grown up Christopher Robin, famous son of A. A. Milne, who works as an efficiency expert in London and who is tasked with firing a bunch of people unless he can figure out a way to save their jobs. He runs into Pooh Bear who needs Christopher Robin to help him find more honey in the 100 acre woods. CR tries to make sense of this, and they go on several adventures. Everyone learns something by the end of the movie.

The closest analogy here would be Hook (Robin Williams). It's an okay movie, though rather childish and cliche. Kids will probably enjoy it. I got a bit bored.

It's a little odd to see this movie after last' year's Goodbye Christopher Robin, which painted a rather grimmer picture of CR's relationship to his father's stories.

Eighth Grade - A good but intense look at a high school girl (Elsie Fisher) who spends all of her time, and tries to find all of her validation, on social media. Her real life, unfortunately, doesn't conform to her expectations from her virtual one. Not only does she have low self-esteem and low popularity and fall for the wrong boy, she also runs head on into a few moments of real danger and harassment that up the significance of what happens in real life.

Josh Hamilton plays her single father, desperately trying to help and support her while she fights to keep him out. It's not an easy movie to watch, but it's a fairly good one.

First Man - A biopic of Neil Armstrong, and also the story of the mission to land a man on the moon. Unlike Bohemian Rhapsody, in which the focus on one character made the story interesting, I wan't as happy here. Neil has a few problems with his wife and kids, but not really; I'm pretty sure most of the problems were invented by the screenwriters. The conflict with his wife was not believably portrayed. Meanwhile, all the parts about the moon landing were fascinating, but they were not the main focus of the movie.

The movie makes several other mistakes. Instead of a grand story of triumphs and tragedies (i/e, what really happened), the story concentrates solely on a series of tragedies (real ones). I guess that's the screenwriter's way of ratcheting up the tension, but it a) makes the story very narrow and small, making it more like a Marvel movie than a real story, and b) it makes it unrealistic: why would anyone continue with a program that fails so tragically and continuously over and over, killing people each time? Of course, that wasn't the real or entire story. But we don't get to hear the real or entire story.

The worst parts for me were a) the long sequences of shaking cameras that simulated the shaking rockets and flights. One such sequence of reasonable length in a movie is great. This movie does this at least three times, for 20 minutes each time. At some point it moves from being a good simulation to being distracting and unwatchable. Enough already. 2) About sixty percent of the movie is a closeup of someone's face. This is the same mistake used in Jackie. Again: a few face closeups are great but 60% of the screen-time spent on face closeups is not, It's just pretentious, distancing, and annoying. Which is a crying shame, because the cinematography of the other 40% is beautiful.

Aside from all that was bad about the movie, the movie did everything else  well: well acted, well scored, well paced, and an important piece of history. For what its worth, my fellow movie-goers (friends) liked the movie.

Schrodinger's Review


So, Endzeitgeist posted his review of Sexual Predators over on his blog.

There's a few things to say about it, so I'll just dive right in...

Apparently, not having the numbers on a map is a big deal to virtual tabletop gamers.  I knew about secret doors, labels saying "this is a trap right here", and obvious icons like the nuclear hazard symbol, but didn't know that an unnumbered map was even more useful to those folks.

But now I do thanks to Thilo's review and Sexual Predators has an unnumbered Crimson Dwarf map as of last night.  FYI, I'm not so high up in my emerald tower of tentacles that I won't listen to fans of my work.  If you guys want something, first ask me if I can provide it before cursing at the darkness.

Next, I'd like to discuss the title.  Yes, Alpha Blue is a sexual game, Predators is the name of the movie I was referencing and showing in the cover image, so Sexual Predators seemed like the perfect fit.  Indeed, I was also trying to be provocative... but not actually offensive.

For one, the main adventure's antagonist actually is a sexual predator, and the PCs struggle against him and what he represents.  Any RPG title that mentions dungeons or lairs or keeps is inevitably about entering someone else's home, slaughtering them, and stealing their belongings.  I get it, there's a reason we don't title scenarios "Home Invasion Butchery & Theft."  That's an ugly thing to dwell on and we have a host of rationalizations to assuage any negative view of our selves or our characters' actions.  Nevertheless, that darkness is in there.

Sure, there's some deeply unpleasant, not to mention morally repugnant, things associated with "sexual predators;" however, like most English words and phrases, there are a variety of meanings.

Here's the "sexual predators" wiki page and it mentions the really bad stuff like human trafficking.  But it also mentions having to hunt for your sex partners or habitually seeking sexual situations that are self-serving or exploitative.  And it's not always "toxic masculinity" displaying "problematic" behavior towards women.  As we all know, the female of the species can be deadlier than the male.  So, the title is apt in several regards.

I just want to make it clear that when I titled that Alpha Blue scenario Sexual Predators, I wasn't trying to pull off a Tournament of Rapists.  That's a line even I don't want to cross.

Lastly, Endzeitgeist posted his review of Sexual Predators on rpg.net yesterday morning.  Since then, the listing on rpg.net has disappeared, reappeared, and occasionally disappeared with no explanation. When I check the review page (like just now), it shows up.  But the main page shows there are no reviews for Friday, that OSR reviews will resume on Monday.  Likewise, there's no thread in the review board of their forum.

So, it's like the Sexual Predators review both exists and doesn't really exist on rpg.net.  Hence the title of this blog post, Schrodinger's Review.

I'll end by mentioning the continued polarization of the entire world that seems to increase every single day.  It's gone far beyond politics.  It's in everything, and I don't think we can ignore it any longer.  It's gone from existential crisis to palpable atmosphere of fear and hatred and irreconcilable differences.

While I'm fucking sick and tired of it, I can't simply pretend that it'll go away on its own.  Deep, foundational divisions don't get better over time, they only get worse until substantive repairs are made.  And I don't see that happening anytime soon.

VS

Super AiG Screenshots Of The Year: 2017

It's been a while, but I'm back with a brand new post for you, filled with old content you've already seen! It's the seventh annual Super Adventures Screenshots Animated GIFs of the Year, featuring some of the very best images from the last 12 10 or so months of my site.

I have to be honest, this is going to be a much shorter post than it's been in years past because I just didn't have many games to pick from. I've only made 32 posts this year and one of them was a message reassuring people that the site wasn't dead, followed by a list of games I promised I was going to write about and then never did. Well, to be fair I did manage to get around to half of them.

Speaking of things I'm not going to be writing about in the future, there'll be an important announcement at the end of this article and it's not good news. So be sure to stick around for that... or just scroll down and read it now and then scroll back for the screenshots afterwards, either's fine. All game links will take you back to the original Super Adventures game article, so don't worry about ending up on Amazon or something. Wait... I could've had Amazon affiliate links all over my site this whole time and made 3% on every sale! Oh no!
Read on »

Secret Of Evermore (SNES)

Oh damn it's Super Adventures' 8th birthday today! I didn't write anything for the site all last year but I'm fairly sure those 12 months still count towards its age.

I gave writing about games a long rest because it became too much like work to me and I was so done with this site that I couldn't even get one post finished a week anymore, but I've managed to slowly regenerate my interest in playing games in the meantime thanks to my time off. In fact I've decided that the break I took worked out so well that I should take more breaks, more often. So this year I plan to take a two month break every two months!

Unfortunately this does mean that I have to give you two months of game articles each time or else I'm not actually taking a break from anything. So it is with deep regret that I inform you that Super Adventures is now back (for two months).

Developer:Square|Release Date:1996 (1995 NA)|Systems:SNES

This week on Ray Hardgrit's resurrected Super Adventures in Gaming I'm playing Secret of Evermore, which I'm fairly sure isn't a spiritual successor to Secret of Monkey Island.

All I know about it is that it's an action RPG on the SNES by Squaresoft... made in America... with music from Jeremy "Elder Scrolls" Soule. So that's a bit unusual. This was actually the only game ever developed by a Square team in the US, which sounds like a bit of a warning sign but probably isn't. They briefly considered making a sequel to the game in fact, until it was decided that it was time to jump ship from the sinking SNES.

The US only got one more Square RPG on the SNES after this, Super Mario RPG, and us folks in Europe didn't even get that for some reason. Evermore was only the fourth Square RPG to ever get a release in PAL regions, after two Mystic Quests and Secret of Mana, and the next game we got was Final Fantasy VII on the PlayStation.

Okay I'm going to play the game for a couple of hours, write about what happened, then finish with a bit of a review at the end. Even though I've got no business reviewing a game I've only played a couple of hours of.
Read on »

The Nocturnal Financier

I may be a lot of things, but I'm essentially a Capitalist. A Capitalist believes in nocturnal finance. The way you retire is to have your money work for you while you sleep. For many, that's a 401K, but for the small business owner, it's the exploitation of labor, to quote Marx. Most small business owners have little in savings, and I'm ashamed to say, I'm not an exception.

To be a Capitalist is to put your eggs in the nest of others, hoping they'll warm and nurture them in exchange for payment. It's also to accept the rightness of your willingness to work for others back in your day as a nest warmer. That's the main difference between my nest egg and the nest egg of an employee. Rather than relying on the numerical supremacy of an index fund, I let some kid in their 20's, with little nest sitting experience, sit on my valuable eggs. Hopefully you discover the cracks early enough.

This Capitalist egg sitting may seem to fly in the face of the general social welfare, but I believe we can work towards a more equitable society while insisting people take the initiative to improve their individual situation. Only a cretin truly believes there's a level playing field. The game is rigged. Sometimes it's rigged in my favor but most of the time, not so much. I like the game, but it is a system designed by the winners to keep them winning. I know we can fix the game with a well thought out expansion (with a lot more players), rather than tossing the game (an egg toss).

I vacuumed my million square feet to get to my exalted seat known as "the middle." If I can keep the balls in the air long enough, I may slowly recede from my business while others do the heavy lifting. Because I have a bad back from that heavy lifting and no workers comp insurance. If I can raise up, mentor, or at least pay well my employees along the way, I consider that a double victory. One manages a game store now. Another is head buyer at a major distributor. I am a stepping stone, so I can't take credit for their victories, but I hope we came together to build something wonderful that positively impacted their future.

All of this could come crashing down with a couple bad months. Perhaps I injure myself. I have key man business insurance if I die, but a good maiming? Not covered. Perhaps a national tragedy keeps people at home. A major Bay Area earthquake, long overdue, could eliminate my entire community in a moment. There is no backup plan, no unemployment, no explaining the situation to the boss. The vast majority of my nocturnal capital is tied up in worthless cardboard. Does this instability and painful chance of failure make the true socialist feel any better about my exploitation? Doubtful, but there it is.

The restless sleep of the nocturnal financier means you're never quite rested. I taught my young nephew the phrase, "I'll sleep when I'm dead!" It angered his mother, but it should be the mantra of the small business owner. No safety net. No rest. No real time away. The boss is a jerk. The customers are unreasonable. The employees are stealing. Your partners carry knives for the inevitable stab to the back. I can't imagine life any other way, and if I had to have my labor exploited again, if I had to mind someone else's eggs, I would be longing for the sleepless nights of the nocturnal financier.

SOMA - Two Years Later


It's over two years since we released SOMA, so it's time for another update on how things have been going.

First of all, let's talk about sales. As I've said many times before, sales are not straightforward to count, and the number you come up with is reliant on many different factors. For instance, SOMA was part of the Humble Monthly Bundle, which meant that everybody subscribing to that service was able to download a copy of SOMA. These are not really "sales", so should we count them? It's also worth noting that pricing differs a lot between different sales. A single unit sold at full price means more than one sold when the game is 75% off. I think it's important to think about these things, and remember you can't directly compare the sales of two games.

With all that said, what I'm going to do here is to basically take every single download of the game as a sale. Doing so gives us a total of 650 000 units, a 200 000 units increase since the the same time last year. This is a very good result.

It's interesting to compare how sales have changed across the two years for SOMA. The normal day-to-day income, when there are no discounts or anything, is 33% of what it was the same time last year. However, when the game is at a discount (such as a Steam summer sale), the generated income is about 75% of what similar events generated last year. This means that discount events are extra important this year.

Taken as a whole, the sales that we make from all our games will cover all our expenses every month, and even make us a profit. This is quite amazing. Given that we currently have about 16 people working with us full time, we have a pretty high burn rate, and to still be able to support all that on your ongoing sales is great.

This means that we still have a good buffer from our launch sales. While it will by no means last forever, it gives us peace of mind and lets us take the time we need. While we'll continue to generate income next year too, I'm not so sure it'll be enough to cover all our costs. This is when that initial buffer comes in handy, and will let us continue working on our projects without any monetary worries. To put things in perspective, it is worth noting that most companies start using up their buffer just a few months after release, so we are in no ways in a dire situation right now - quite the opposite!

However, this also makes it very clear that we need to be able to release games at a more regular rate. We were lucky that SOMA was a hit, and that the money is easily able to sustain us for the time we need to complete our next project. Had SOMA been a flop, the situation would have been a lot worse now. That's why we are focusing on becoming a two project studio, and the goal is to be able to release a game every two years. Had we managed to set that up prior to SOMA, we would be in the process of releasing a game right now. Needless to say, it would makes us a lot more financially stable, and able to handle a less successful release. In turn this should allow us to take greater risks, which I think is a key element in being able to create great games.

This leads me to another thing that's been on my mind. A few months back someone asked me: "How do you get people to buy your game?". This is a fairly basic question, but it really made me think. When it comes to sales made during launch, the answer feels quite self-evident. We generate a lot of buzz, there are reviews, let's plays and so on. There are a number of fairly obvious ways that people learn about our game.

But what about the customers that buy our game two years after release - why do they do it? That's a much harder question. I think most of this is via word-of-mouth recommendation. When the right circumstances arise (e.g.: "I feel like playing a game tonight") and when external influence (e.g.: "your friends said they liked our game") is strong enough, that's when a sale happens. I know that Steam and other stores have some forms of discovery tools, but I don't think they play a major factor. What really matters is not a single source, but the slow build-up of good will around a game - eventually this will make a player consider buying it. Discovery tools, such as "you might also like"-adverts, surely help, but they are just part of a much larger process [1].

Because of this, and considering the sheer number of games that are currently being released, I think the best strategy is to focus on unique experiences. You want to create the type of experience that is not only hard to get elsewhere, but also leaves a mark on those who play it. This is now a core philosophy here at Frictional. I guess we sort of always had it unconsciously, but we have now made it official. Our goal is to create games that are more than forgettable escapism. We want people to come out of their experiences feeling changed. A lofty goal? You bet. While it'll be impossible to make sure every single player has this type of experience, it feels like the perfect thing to strive for.

Now I will round of this post with a brief discussion on the status of our current projects.

The first project is in full production, and about 80% of the team is currently working on it. The focus for most of this year has been on creating the first few maps of the game to create a solid vertical slice based on our experiments last year. However, we recently came up with some new avenues that we wanted to explore. The stuff that has come out of this recent detour is feeling really great and I am certain it'll make the game feel very special. All of this came out of what I just discussed: our focus on making games that leaves a mark on the player. I'm not sure we would have gone down this route if we hadn't explicitly stated that goal, which makes me confident it's a really good way of thinking. I'm afraid I can't go into any details on this, other than to say that the project will be horrific in nature. There will be no release this year, but we hope to announce something during the first six months of next year.

As for the other project, that's also going well. We've been a bit delayed due to new tech taking longer than anticipated to develop [2]. The upside of that has been that the game has had  more time in pre-production than any of our previous games. This has been incredibly valuable, as the things we aim to tackle in this game are quite difficult, and allowing it all to brew for a bit has meant many of the basic aspects are clearer for us. This game will be less about direct, visceral horror, and more about the player gaining an understanding of different concepts. This can, as we know from working on SOMA, be quite tricky to get right and requires a slightly different approach than when working on a more direct horror game. Release for this game is quite far off though, so don't expect to hear any concrete details in the near future.

That's it for this update. I'm incredibly excited about the things that we have planned, and I'm very eager to give you all more updates. I also want to thank everybody for the support over the years, and rest assured that while we might not reply to every single mail, tweet, etc. that you send us, we make sure to read every single one!


Notes:
1) For games that are heavily based around online communities, such as a Rocket League, I think things work slightly differently. There is still a word-of-mouth zeitgeist going on, but a lot of it comes from your game become a habit for your players, something that they participate in on a daily basis. This forms a feedback loop that helps drives new buyers, which I think is quite different from how our games work.

2) We are currently working on the fourth iteration of our HPL engine for this game, and due to some of the things we need to be able to do for the game, we've been required to make some major adjustments. These things take time, but luckily we have most of it done now.