We're live on Steam — thank you for getting us here
Today OpenFront is live on Steam, and honestly I don't think any of us really expected to be sat here writing this.
It's a strange thing to look back on. OpenFront was a small browser game, something you could load up in a tab and play a round of against complete strangers, built out in the open with no real plan behind it other than making something people actually wanted to play. There was no publisher, no big studio and no marketing budget, just three guys and a community that decided to stick around. A lot of us, myself included, started out as players first and ended up helping because we loved the game, and that is still more or less how the whole thing runs today.
Somehow that has turned into over 21 million players, over 47 million views on YouTube, more than 5,500 videos made by 142 creators, over 65,000 of you in our Discord, and over 240,000 wishlists before we had even sold a single copy.
Behind all of those numbers are a lot of people who never really get a mention. The 300+ contributors who have fixed bugs and written features in their own time and asked for nothing back. The moderators who keep the Discord running. The creators who made videos about a browser game that nobody had heard of yet. The people who sit in test lobbies, fill in feedback forms, report the bugs nobody else noticed and argue about balance every single day. None of it was ever asked for, people just turned up and helped, and that is genuinely the only reason we are here.
OpenFront isn't perfect and it may never be everyone's version of perfect, but it is the community and every single one of you that takes part that makes OpenFront what it is today.
What Early Access means
Early Access means exactly what it says, we are nowhere near finished. There is a lot still to come and we will keep building it the same way we always have, out in the open and off the back of your feedback. And openfront.io isn't going anywhere either, the browser version stays free, that is where all of this started and we have no intention of changing it.
So thank you, genuinely.
Giving a bit back
We also wanted today to be about more than just a launch, so a share of today's sales and the revenue from our launch stream over on twitch.tv/iiamlewis will be going to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Come and hang out with us on the stream if you're around, it would be good to spend the day with the people who got us here.
One last ask
One last ask and then I will leave you alone. Steam puts a huge amount of weight behind reviews, far more than most people realise, and they genuinely decide how much the store shows us to people who have never heard of OpenFront before. The first couple of hundred reviews matter more than anything that comes after them. So if you have enjoyed OpenFront, even a couple of lines would help us more than you would think.
And just so you know where it all goes, everything else we make from Steam is going straight back into OpenFront. Into a mobile port, into hiring more people to join the team, into keeping the servers running and keeping this thing being built properly. And who knows, maybe one day OpenFront 2 - electric boogaloo.
Thank you for getting us here. See you in game.