NEStalgia Has Been Greenlit… So What Now?

It’s hard to believe that it’s been exactly one year since NEStalgia went up on Steam Greenlight. It’s even harder to believe that it’s also been about a year since development of the game was inadvertently put on “pause” after I started a new job.

By sheer coincidence, I wrapped up that job this past Tuesday in order to start focusing my own new media production company. When my wife and I went out to dinner to celebrate my career milestone on Tuesday night, one of the things we talked about is how I was looking forward to putting time into NEStalgia again. As you can imagine, the last thing that I expected was to wake up the next morning to find out that NEStalgia had been Greenlit. Talk about serendipity!

What Happens Now?

Getting NEStalgia ready for sale on Steam is going to take some time. It could be two weeks, or it could be two months – I really don’t know at this point. The important thing to note is that NEStalgia launching on Steam isn’t going to affect any current subscriber’s access to the game. Once I have more information about how it’s all going to work, I’ll be sure to share the details.

The game itself is also in need of some updates in the near future. There are a ton of  bug fixes and minor tweaks on my to-do list (a year’s backlog really adds up fast). My biggest concern, however, will be working on the previously announced content expansion, ‘Key of the Exiles‘.

None of this is going to happen overnight. As patiently as all of you have been waiting, you’re going to have to wait a bit longer. New content is what the majority of you are craving, and as of now I don’t have an answer for when it will be released.

Management Changes

In the past, a great deal of my time has been spent in the day to day management of the community and dealing with customer service type stuff. From this point forward I’m going to stay out of all of that as much as I possibly can in order to focus strictly on development. Balzack is now the go-to guy for everything related to community management. That means moderation decisions, customer service issues, questions/complaints, etc. Balzack has always been the official community manager – the difference now is that I’m taking myself completely out of the equation.

Balzack can be reached via the forums or the team@silkgames.com email.

Distribution Changes

Our current distribution model was built to handle a small community. Restricting the game to a handful  of official dedicated servers is how we’ve quality controlled the experience and ensured that players don’t get too spread out over a bunch of small private servers. However, now that a much larger audience is potentially headed our way, things need to change.

What we’ll likely do is transition over to a Minecraft/Terraria sort of model. Players will be able to download the game to play single player or host small private servers to play with friends. People who purchase the game will also be able to host larger public dedicated servers. Last but not least, we’ll continue to maintain a large cluster of official dedicated servers as an option for players to join.

Under this model players will no longer be reliant upon joining the Silk Games servers, and people who don’t like the official servers can host and manage their own servers however they see fit.

Time to Celebrate!

Last year’s Steam Greenlight holiday event has been activated on all servers, so those of you who haven’t played the event before should stop by and check it out. Now that I’m going to be back working on the game around the clock, you can expect to see regular blog updates and the occasional podcast in the weeks and months to come.

Thank you so much to each and every one of you for all of the support so far! This whole Greenlight endeavor was a community effort, and NEStalgia’s success belongs to all of you who were a part of it. I also want to sincerely thank those of you who have stuck around with the game this past year during my development hiatus. You’ve been very understanding and patient, and I’ve really appreciated it.

There will be much, much more news to come…