Merry Christmas everyone!
We hope you are spending a great time with family and friends.
Yesterday, a Youtuber SidAlpha made a new video for his DirtyDevs series Watch on YouTube, and Zero Gravity team took the lead role this time. First of all, we want to thank SidAlpha for his video because it is a pretty good retrospective of Hellion development. He did a solid research and he even made some legitimate conclusions about the fate of Hellion. It was all there - insurmountable bugs, insanely ambitious project, lack of experience, Unity limitations, and many other issues that made the survival of Hellion impossible. We talked openly about this. Some of you raged, some of you showed understanding, some felt cheated, others felt proud for being part of the Hellion story. It’s the story of Early Access, it’s the story of indie development, and it’s the story of true passion for games. We have put more than four years of our lives into this project and we couldn’t finish it. That sucks.
What we find illegitimate with this video is that the author labeled us as DirtyDevs just because he found the Hellion review by the ex-member of Zero Gravity. While we fully support journalistic enthusiasm, we must remind the author of the importance of hearing both sides before making any harsh labeling. SidAlpha could have contacted us, but he didn’t. He just wanted to make a “sensational” video.
As a reply to the statement that “we take the money and run” and to the comment of the aforementioned ex-member of the team that “we are fueling other projects from Hellion sales revenue” - Hellion is the opposite of a profitable game. The investor lost a lot of money, the team kept shrinking in phases since the Early Access release. There are only two programmers on the team now and their contracts will end in 5 days. This really sucks.
To conclude:
Dear SidAlpha, you are a very talented content maker and keep up the good work, but please take it to the next level and do the full research on the matter before you make a public statement. You can contact us anytime to talk about Hellion, game development or any topic you might find interesting.
Dear Hellion players, we’ll be on our Discord channel to talk about Hellion. The team will be fully disbanded soon and everybody will take (most of them already did that) a new professional route. But we will stay loyal to the idea of Hellion. And we will keep informing you on any changes in the future.
Peace and love,
Zero Gravity team