Indie sandbox TUG has become the beneficiary of a huge windfall.
In a new Kickstarter update sent to backers this afternoon, Nerd Kingdom announced that it has raised an additional $8.5 million to “expand on TUG, move into openGL, and put a lot more emphasis on tools and modding bits.” That means the development team will be expanding too.
The downside is that the process of porting the game engine from DX11 to OpenGL will likely delay the game’s next update for a close to a year. A business model switch is probably imminent as well:
“Additionally, and this is potentially a HUGE change… we are seriously considering making TUG a free game… and I say this knowing FULL well that we already have people who have committed their own earned money to help us. So we are not taking this thinking lightly, and its going to take a lot of dialog and thought into what it will take to make this work. I go into detail of why I personally, and we as a team, think this is important. But the short of it being, we want to get this in the hands of as many people as possible, modders, researchers, players, and builders.”
“The great thing about solid financial support, is we have some freedom to build something great, and not have to worry about “monetization schemes”. To be clear, how we will monetize is unclear, but we have a bit of time, and a few ideas to think through. With this said, any “monetization” we apply to TUG, wont impact any of our backers ability to play. You all believed in us, and have been nothing but supportive… it’s not our intent to drain anyone of all the moneys. Treating TUG as a platform, as its intended, means we have a lot to consider.”
The game is currently on Steam.
We’ve included Nerd Kingdom’s Peter Salinas’ dev vlog on the topic below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDOr8EtGSvg
