Revolution 60 is number 42 38 on Steam Greenlight in under 48 hours! I can’t imagine why we wouldn’t be Greenlit at this point. I want to thank everyone for the support.



What’s frustrating for all of us at GSX is watching our forums on Steam under seige. Let’s be honest, most of this blowback is because Revolution 60 is made by a well-known feminist. A lot of toxic gamers feel like Steam is their turf, and they want to bully us off the playground. It’s predictable, but I can’t pretend it’s not exhausting.

Some of the more valid criticism is about our textures and gameplay. I’d like to address a lot of this criticism head on. This is going to be completely open and honest.

First things first - I’m not going to hold Revolution 60 up as a perfect game. As the creator, my God do I know it’s not. I could easily list 50 things we didn’t succeed at. I wish we’d had the money to hire a dedicated lighting person. I wish I had added more body type diversity. The walking sections were too slow. The HRZ corridor shouldn’t have had 5 fights in a row. I could name 100 examples like this.

Revolution 60 was made by a core team of 4 people for a budget of about $400,000. None of us had shipped a game before. Starting the project, I had no idea of the massive amount of work it would take. It’s a miracle we shipped at all because the game was way, way too ambitious. To be blunt, there were 1000 times the GSX starship should have exploded.

The biggest limitation we faced in developing Revolution 60 was RAM. We supported the iPhone 4S and up, which meant supporting devices with 512 RAM, most of which is eaten up by Unreal and the system. When iOS 7 came out, we found ourselves short 132 megs of ram, which required completely rebuilding the game! We lost 4 months rejiggering the game to work with mere vapors of RAM.

I had hundreds of heated discussions with my lead engineer about texture budget. I often had 4 1k maps to texture entire sections on N313. I could write a book about extremely efficient methods of stacking/recycling textures. Are the game textures good? Given our extreme memory limitations, yeah - they’re damned good. It takes drastically more skill to do textures with these kind of limitations than to make something pretty with ample texture memory at your disposal.

We made the opposite choice of Infinity Blade, which threw everything into textures and graphics. We threw everything into uncompressed animsets, multiple characters onscreen and voice acting, which was absolutely the right call.

A lot of people have critiqued the flat shading of the characters. Well, unlike Infinity Blade, we regularly have 4-5 people on screen at once! So, we couldn’t go for the more expensive materials for skeletal meshes. This was a limitation of mobile, and it was absolutely the right call. I understand it doesn’t look as great as Infinity Blade, but engineering is about tradeoffs. I cared about story, which required scenes with multiple people.

We’re getting a lot of blowback about the number of QTEs in our game. Hold on tight, this is going to be a long screed.

When you put out a call for playtesters, this is what happens, you’re inundated with 20-something core male gamers eager to help. If we’d stopped there like most studios do, Revolution 60 would be a different kind of game - it would be much harder, much faster, and Holiday would run everywhere. Many men suggested we get rid of the story altogether and just ship the combat engine.

You should understand this: As we made Revolution 60, the traditional core gamer was not our priority. I’ve seen your playtesting reports - visuals are your highest priority. You like your combat extremely fast paced. You’re unhappy when you have to wait for anything. You have literal contempt for conceits that help less experienced players, complaining loudly about “stupid casuals.”

I have watched playtesting sessions where core male gamers would HAMMER the iPad glass so frantically trying to attack everything, I was worried they’d break our devices. If that’s what you like, that’s great. But, making yet another game for the core gaming audience was never my mission.

At GSX, we went out of our way to make our playtesting cohorts 50/50 men and women. It radically altered our game’s outcome. We weren’t going to just listen to you, we wanted to listen to everyone. And, as a result, our game is different.

Revolution 60 is a game for people that like story, period - no matter their gaming experience. This is why our combat was rhythm based, not reflex based. And I knew I succeeded when I saw quotes like these in our playtesting reports.

“This is the first game I’ve ever played that didn’t make me feel stupid for being new.”

“I’m going to buy an iPad so I can play this when it comes out.”

“This is the first game I’ve played that makes me feel welcome even though I’m not a gamer.”

QTEs, what R60 calls “action events,” are actually fun for many players, and they’re a great fit for a story based game - which is why Quantic Dream uses them. It’s flatly inaccurate to say everyone hates QTEs. This is the central flaw core gamers have in their logic - they assume their tastes are everyone’s tastes.

GSX’s mission as a studio is to make different kinds of games for the new gaming audience. Our primary mission objective is to hire diverse talent, let them drive the car and ship new kinds of games.

I strongly believe the reason innovation in games has stagnated is the monoculture of gamedev. If you look at senior positions in gamedev, it’s almost always led by white, male heterosexual core gamers. Yes, gamedev teams hire some women, but we’re rarely in a position to make the final calls. As a result, gamedev repeatedly makes this same kind of game over and over.

I believe diversity is the only way our industry moves forward. I believe making different choices than the ones you prefer is the only way forward.

Revolution 60 is about things many core gamers don’t particularly value. And that’s actually the whole point.

To support Revolution 60 on Steam, it would help us if you went here and upvoted. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=386454385