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Windward development stopped and it's now free

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Today some more bad news, Windward a promising looking Unity based MMORPG has been stopped. A game we showed you back in December.

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This is another sad tale of an indie developer not making enough sales on their game to continue:
QuoteUnfortunately Desura doesn’t have anywhere near the same market share as Steam, and the 68 units sold via Desura added up to $462 in 4 months… meaning I still haven’t seen any of it as the payout will only happen once the balance reaches $500.


I think this developer (although he is not alone in this) is asking a lot for a unfinished game to sell in the thousands.

All too common nowadays it seems that developers are releasing games in "alpha" and "beta" states and expect to rake in the money, it's getting sad, sad because games like this actually look quite interesting.

The game is now free.

Download: http://www.tasharen.com/windward/WindwardLinux.zip
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly.
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5 comments

Alex V.Sharp Jan 30, 2013
I suppose we could debate the reasons behind 'why' it happened all day long, however ultimately this would lead into pointless speculation. It's always sad when things like this happen, especially with titles that look so promising. Still, it was extremely generous of him to offer the game free of charge, and provide a Linux version too! I do wish him best of luck with his next project, whichever it may be.

Hmm...
Mind you, I'm just thinking out loud, but do you think this game would get updated further if it was made open-source?
Makes me wonder if it could gather enough oss developers' interest to get the wheel rolling again...
zerothis Jan 30, 2013
Give it some time. Considered virtually worthless for the first 2 years of its existence, Rollercoaster Tycoon went on to make $180 million so far, not counting the feature length movie currently in production.
StayPuffed Jan 31, 2013
Man, that game looks awesome! Glad to see Unity has some working multiplayer, I've got some friends interested in using that engine.
Andrew Perry Jan 31, 2013
It's also worth noting that the developer of Windward also wrote the highly successfully NGUI GUI framework for Unity. At $95 per license and every second serious Unity game using it, from a purely financial perspective it would have made far more sense to focus on further developing and supporting NGUI tool than Windward.

Still, I hope Windward development gets resurrected one day (I think it's unlikely it will go open source, since it almost certainly uses the proprietary frameworks like NGUI that Tarshen developed) - otherwise, better luck next game !
Sigg3 Feb 3, 2013
Games like these will die without financial backing or going open source. Tarshen should open source it.
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