Thought I would comment on this.

I can't give out real numbers due to legal agreements we haev signed, but I can say that the total sales of the game are over 10 times the membership here on PlanetThinkTanks. We only get a % of the total sales, and while it is doing ok, it is not like we are rolling in piles of cash.

We have not given up on ThinkTanks, and we intend to keep it alive, it is unfortuante, but we have had to take on contract work to keep money rolling in so that we can put oursleves in a postion to be able to stay around.

In this message, I will try to address some concerns, straigten out some misconcpetions people have, and offer up other interesting though probably not so useful tidbits of info.

So, BraveTree.

BraveTree was formed in late 2001 after the closure of a game studio called Dynamix. All of the members of BraveTree worked there and most had worked on several titles, including StarSiege, Tribes and Tribes 2. After it closed, a group of us were a little sick of working at a big shop and making games the marketing department said we should make, so we decided to strike out on our own.

The Original Members were myself (Joe Maruschak), Clark Fagot, Mike Jahnke, Mark Brenneman, and Jackie Carpentier. The first few months were slow, as 9/11 had just happened, we had all lost our jobs, and we were struggling to find a direction. Early on, Mark decided he wanted a break from games and decided to go back to school and get a Masters degree in Architechture (that is where he is now). Jackie had a crisis of faith (being Indie and in startup mode is hard on yoru physche), and decided to depart and move back east to where her family was.

This left me, Clark and Mike. We had decided we were NOT going to try to pitch an idea to a publisher, or seek outside funding. Now, Clark and Mike pretty much gave me free reign to come up with a cool design for a game. I came up with the idea for ThinkTanks.

We worked on on this game, from our homes, for about 8 months. It was hard. We were living on our savings and our severance package from Dynamix. During the development of ThinkTanks, I had a few life changing events. My father died un-expectedly of a heart attack (age 62) just 5 months before the birth of my first child (she is now 18 months old).. The savings that we were living off of where the accumulated savings of 6 years of my wife and I saving for our first house. We were also working with another group on project that was trying to get funding, and we put a lot of work into it only to have the funding end up not happening. This hurt a lot, as we were running low on funds. So, we sprinted to the finish of ThinkTanks, hoping for the best, and when it shipped, we were delighted and surprised it actually sold and people liked it.

Because we were under pressure to ship it, as we were really close to the wire money-wise, we shipped, knowing full well that we did not have things such as registered names and admin stuff on the servers. Some of this was because of the effort needed to make these features and do it right, and some were game design decisions. We wanted to make it as easy as possible for new players to get into the game without having to 'sign up' in order to play online, and we know we would not have the resources to adminstrate and manage such a system if the game were to take off.

In game design, there are a lot of trade off one has to make in order to make a fun game that will sell. You may not like the direction some of the decisions forced us to go in, but they were not done without a great deal of thought and deliberation.

Now, The origianl intent of the game was to just SHIP something in the hopes that we could pick up some contract work with this in our portfolio. We were happily surprised that it was actually selling.

We lucked out and we were able to get a small office in the same building as GarageGames. It is cheap, and it allowed me to get out of the house and focus on work (having a newborn makes it very hard to work from home)

So, BraveTree.. 3 guys, not a huge corporation.

So, ThinkTanks..

It was bringing in money, but not a ton, and not enough to fully support the 3 remaining members of BraveTree. At the end of last year, after spending time trying to build the community, get builds out for shockwave.com, real arcade, reflxive, and a few other channels, doing a few overseas box versions of ThinkTanks (german and russian), and doing our best to get it out on shareware sites, we found ourselves looking at a grim future. We just were not making enough to support 3 guys.

Mike was offered a full time game development job, and he took it. He is still a member of the company, and we were totally behind his decision, as he has a house, a wife, 3 kids (one in college) and the stress was starting to get to him.

So, this left Clark and myself, and since then, we have been working on mostly contract work, building up a bunch of money in the bank so that we can have the funds needed to make the updates to ThinkTanks that we want to make, so a ThinkTanks 2, and get the next couple of games out the door.

Now, we are not making a ton of money. We are getting by, and my lifestyle pretty much defines 'lean'. We don't go out, we don't buy expensive things, and we are pretty much making enough for food and rent.

I read the salary comment above and I had to snicker. We don't get salaries. We get whatever we make from sales. We don't have the kind of fundage that allows us to pay anyone salaries (not even ourselves)

With all the contract work we have been doing, things have stabilized a bit. We are bringing on two new people, and this should increase productivity quite a bit. I will save the announcement until everything is official.

ThinkTanks marketing..

Yeah, we need more marketing. Marketing is expensive. If anyone has any ideas of a good place to spend money on marketing that they are SURE will increase sales, spit out the ideas, we are all ears. Don't want to make this too long and talk about cost per customer and other boring matters, but we want to be very careful where we are spending our money in this regard. We don't want to shell out 5 grand to make 5 grand, end up breakign even on the deal and increasing our support costs and having to pay for more servers.

On box deals.. We talked to a few publishers, and we were told we don't 'profile well'. Yeah, I know.. Marketing people don't know what they are talking about. If you feel so inclined, write to the publishers and the console companies and tell them about ThinkTanks. The more they hear about us, the better off we will be when we talk to them about our next game.

Don't worry about us forgetting about ThinkTanks. This was my vision, and it is probably the closest to THE game for ME that I will ever work on. We will not abandon it unless we absolutely must in order to save our families from life in the streets.

The future of ThinkTanks..

So, this may be something that may sound harsh. It is not meant to sound that way. I want everyone to take this as I intend it, which is the straight truth.

We make money off of new sales of ThinkTanks. We do not make any money off of you (other than your purchase of the game). When it comes to the business of ThinkTanks, we are concerned about the people who have not yet purchased. This may sound lame, but we NEED to sell the game in order for us to be able to spend time on it. We need to convert demo players. This means the focus of the game is right now, and for a while more will continue to be focused on the enjoyment of the NEW player, and not the vetrans.

Although a monthly subscription would help, that is something that we do NOT want to do unless we were able to offer something compelling for the $$$. We do not want handouts. We want to be able to survive based on the quality of what we produce and the value it offers to you, the end user. Unless we can offer up a compelling reason to charge a susbscription fee, we don't want to do it.

We were concerned about the modding and our fears are consistent with what we see happening. Most of the old players are online in locked MODs or palying team scrum. I have been checking out the demo players on the servers and I am seeing, for the most part, the battle mode servers empty. This is what the demo players first see and first play, and there is no one to play against.

We are talking over some deals that may get us more distribution, but nothing is definite. We still rely on word of mouth to let people know about the game. It is the most effective means of getting people to know about it. If you like the game, tell people. We are doing what we can, but we can use all the help we can get.

AND, if you really want to help, get online and play at least an hour a week in Battlemode with the new demos. No matter who they are, how lame they are, and whether or not they are playing a crack version, make them feel welcome.

Cracks..

Yeah, we know about the cracks. Takes about a week after you ship to see your game cracked. No one can stop it and it is a fools errand to try to fight it. It will happen, and when we fix it, it will happen again. Most of the crack build player would probably not have purchased anyway.. And most will play for a day and move on. In the future, with the next version of the game, we plan to 'break' the crack build, and maybe get a few of these lamers to give in and purchase or else drive them away for good.

I hope that this helps to get people to understand where we are at and where we are going. We totally value every single member of this community, and I personally feel a special bond with everyone here who thinks so highly of the game that I designed to appeal to myself. In many ways, it makes us kindred spirits, and I am very happy that I was able to make a small positive contribution in your lives by making this game.

Seeing all of you enjoy this game makes me feel really good, and it makes all the struggle worth it.

Joe

Maybe we could get some more battlemode servers up with a name like "Demo's Welcome" or something like that.

I don't have the bandwidth for that, but I will play with any demo I see. Maybe teach them some tactics, see how they are liking the game, and make general conversation.