“I knew that I shouldn't take a look at what people say, but as soon as I opened Twitter and saw these reactions, I was like…” Abandoned creator and Blue Box Game Studios boss Hasan Kahraman stops for a second to consider his words. “The thing is, people are disappointed and people are frustrated and angry. And the thing is that they're calling me or Blue Box a scammer. That is the biggest thing that, even today, is still bothering me”
There can be few games that have had as long, hard, and strange a road to release as the upcoming Abandoned. The game has been hit by conspiracy theories, its marketing plagued by technical issues, and Kahraman has made marketing decisions he now wishes he could take back. After a huge backlash to the game’s latest mishap – where a much-touted ‘Realtime Trailers’ app went live after multiple delays without any new trailer content to show – the community around the game began looking deeper into Blue Box’s history to try and work out exactly what the Dutch developer had been before all of this.
What they found (as demonstrated on Reddit by TicTacPaul) was a set of five promised games, none of which had seen a full (if any) release. It led to a response that Kahraman says has been unfair, with some characterising the Blue Box team as scammers; a group that announced games to, in some way, earn money without having to release a project. Kahraman says the reality is less exotic – Blue Box is still a small company, and began even smaller, and took some time to learn the ropes of game development, cancelling many of its projects before they began eating up the time and money it would take to bring them to life. Kahraman spent some time talking us through each of those games’ journeys.
Kahraman also tells IGN that one of the few games Blue Box had charged customers for – Fatal Frame homage The Haunting: Blood Water Curse – will be finished and released for free ahead of Abandoned’s launch. Those who bought the Early Access version will be offered an Abandoned bundle for free as a make-good.
It’s clear at this point that Kahraman isn’t the kind of person that necessarily looks before he leaps. The developer admits some of Blue Box’s decisions have caused trouble for the studio and disappointed fans, something he seems to genuinely regret. Blue Box is now made up of 10 full-time staff (boosted to around 50 people on Abandoned, accounting for freelancers and outsourcing studios), but it’s been as low as two, with just Kahraman and a friend working on some early projects. The upshot is that Kahraman would often announce games before it was totally clear they were feasible to make.
The studio’s earliest project, Rewind: A Paranormal Investigation Game, was put up on Kickstarter, before that campaign was cancelled due to securing private investment. Kahraman says that investment allowed Blue Box to rework the game, retitling it Rewind: Voices of the Past. However, the project grew beyond the young studio’s capabilities and, without further investment, it was fully cancelled.
Contrary to some thoughts expressed on social media, Kahraman insists that the original investment money was paid back, to ensure Blue Box wasn’t left in debt. “It doesn't work that way,” he explains, “because if you don't return the funds, then you'll have debt – and it's not that an investor is like, ‘Hey, here you go, here's 200K. If it works out, cool. If it doesn't work out, keep the money.’ It doesn't work that way.”
Other early projects included The Lost Tape (a game that used early concepts for Rewind, and was cancelled before any version was released because of the potential costs) and The Whisperer, another attempt at a Paranormal Investigation game. The Whisperer did see release on mobile – as a free-to-play game with a $0.99 purchase to turn off ads – but was quickly pulled. Kahraman says the game was removed because it had been made for PC and didn’t run well enough on phones. To Kahraman’s knowledge, all those who bought the game received refunds, but he says anyone who didn’t can email Blue Box with proof of purchase to claim one.
"The games that we've made in the past were just [made] part-time with small audiences."
Similarly, Tales of Six Swords – a mobile homage to JRPGs with a far more vibrant style than Blue Box’s other projects – was released for free on Android, but subsequently pulled because the company couldn’t reach the scale of game it was aiming for with limited file sizes. Kahraman says that, in this case, pulling the game wasn’t because Blue Box won’t complete it, but because it wants to do the idea justice: “We aren't actually done with that. We actually still like the idea and maybe in the future, we'll definitely do something with it.”
All of these early projects share an element in common – they were announced or released very early, a pattern we’ve seen repeated on Abandoned. Overenthusiasm can easily become a mistake rather than a virtue, and has clearly caused problems for Blue Box and those interested in its games. But Kahraman repeatedly tells me that it’s inexperience that’s to blame, not the malice that’s been perceived by some circles.
“I'm still trying to figure out why people call us scammers,” says Kahraman, “because our past is like... we are a small studio, and we were even smaller, and the games that we've made in the past were just [made] part-time with small audiences – or actually having no audience at all.”
Indie studios at the start of their lifespan regularly begin and cancel projects with little to no notice paid by the public – it’s just that few gain the public attention (and scorn) that Blue Box has. Kahraman says his studio is no different to others: “[Some of] these games were actually put there in the hope to create an audience. And when you see that there is no audience, you just cancel it out, or if the game doesn't work out, you just cancel it out. But it isn't that people bought something, it isn't that someone has spent money on it, it was just showcasing it. If there was no audience, you cancel it.”
But with the gaming world’s eyes now on their every move, Kahraman and Blue Box now want to prove their value by making good on the last of the projects announced ahead of Abandoned.
Blue Box’s last release before Abandoned was The Haunting, a horror game inspired by Fatal Frame and launched into Early Access last year. It too suffered due to a lack of experience around releasing a game still in development:
“It was released in Early Access in an alpha version. So it had a lot of placeholders and involved animations and character models,” Kahraman explains. “We've learned that if you are making a story game, a single-player game, you shouldn't do an Early Access because people didn't get that. People assume that, ‘Hey, there's this game out there, let's buy it and play it and we'll see some production quality stuff right there’, but the truth is that it's actually an Early Access game. And that is the reason why it didn't go well because it wasn't received well because people saw that it was broken, that it wasn't finished.”
Some confusion has surrounded the future of The Haunting – instead of updating the project, it was removed from sale and Blue Box announced that development would be completed by an unknown indie studio called CreateQ. Kahraman explains to me that CreateQ is in fact a four-person developer made up of friends of Blue Box, a team comprised of full-time developers who are working on The Haunting as a side project. According to Kahraman, development is ongoing, using some of Blue Box’s original ideas, but reworked by the members of CreateQ.
The idea now is to release The Haunting as a full, finished product, for free, with Blue Box acting as its publisher.
“I started working on The Haunting and I think most of the components that I used are still being used, but it's just that the concept has been changed from the ground up,” Kahraman says. “The Haunting was like our Western version of Fatal Frame, with the camera, and shooting [ghosts] and stuff. That's basically what it is. It has some puzzles. We use some old school style exploration from horror games like Fatal Frame 1 and 2. [...] The screenshots you see on Steam right now, that was a concept that we were working on, but it's not that game. We will put [new] screenshots on the Steam page very shortly.”
The idea now is to release The Haunting as a full, finished product, for free, with Blue Box taking the financial brunt of the project and acting as its publisher. The aim is to release The Haunting on Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox alongside Abandoned’s first gameplay trailer – now due in “a few months”, according to Kahraman.
For those who had already bought the Early Access version, Blue Box will soon add a form to its website and, upon receiving proof of purchase, will offer a ‘complete bundle’ of Abandoned for free in return once it sees release (it’s not clear what that complete bundle includes, other than the game). I asked Kahraman whether full refunds could be offered instead, who replied saying this is a more difficult process, presumably due to payment originally being taken through Steam, but the team would work on providing them should there be enough demand.
Taken in the context of Blue Box’s past projects, the issues Abandoned has faced become more obviously a part of that story, rather than a cause for conspiracy thinking. The hazy announcement that led to speculation is yet another example of Blue Box seemingly talking about a game too early. The reveal of marketing assets that seem to fan those same flames is a symptom of still being a small studio – as Kahraman puts it, “I have to admit that was a big mistake, but it was completely unintentional. [...] We're small and this is the first time we actually got the world stage. We don't have experience with marketing and PR at all. Excuse my language, but it's really easy to f**k up.”
Even the announcement of a trailers app that won’t actually show a new trailer for some time is borne out of inexperience: “What went wrong was we announced everything too soon. Let's be honest, even the app was just too soon. First, we were like, yes, it's going to be [released in] June, but then again, we never thought that we would have this huge world stage. What I'm trying to say is that with this amount of eyes looking at your game, you need to polish it even more. [...] That's definitely something we learned for the future.”
Blue Box is by no means blameless, and by courting the kind of publicity it did while development on the app wasn’t finished, there’s no doubt that it managed to sow the seeds of its own social media backlash. But that Kahraman and the team are being made the centre of harmful conspiracy theories – and getting personal threats as a result – is far beyond the punishment deserving of those mistakes.
"We don't have experience with marketing and PR at all. Excuse my language, but it's really easy to f**k up."
Kahraman actively wishes he could take some of his decisions back, perhaps make Abandoned a project that was announced later, described more cleanly, and managed to pull off its big marketing gambit. But this is the internet – once the mistakes are made, there’s very little chance of taking them back (proven by the fact that even the company’s earliest mistakes are now on show for the world to find). As he puts it, “If we put something up, just in that instant, we [would already have] 80 likes or 100 likes in just a second. By then, it's too late to do [anything], but I don't know. It was just unfortunate really.”
It’s fair to question Blue Box’s experience with releasing games on the scale of what Abandoned promises to be – but I find it hard to question the conviction of Kahraman to actually make it happen. This isn’t a story of scammers thrust into the limelight – it’s the story of a group of young developers that were handed a much louder microphone than expected, and saying the wrong things to a lot of people simultaneously. Where Abandoned goes from here, and if it makes more mistakes, is up in the air, but Kahraman is determined to prove the doubters wrong:
“Is the Realtime Experience App going to be there? Yes, definitely. Everything you see there in the menu, that is going to be released. People are waiting for content and we're not going to abandon it. [...] I 100% understand everyone. I completely agree with why they're raging. I'm not saying that I don't understand them. If I were a gamer and if someone else was doing exactly the same thing, I would be really hyped to see a realtime experience, and if it wasn’t coming, I would be disappointed. But they're labeling us as scammers – that hurts. I still respect everyone really, and I'm hoping to see them still looking out for Abandoned, [despite] what they say. I do understand and I have nothing against them really. It only hurts.”
Joe Skrebels is IGN's Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].
Continue reading...
There can be few games that have had as long, hard, and strange a road to release as the upcoming Abandoned. The game has been hit by conspiracy theories, its marketing plagued by technical issues, and Kahraman has made marketing decisions he now wishes he could take back. After a huge backlash to the game’s latest mishap – where a much-touted ‘Realtime Trailers’ app went live after multiple delays without any new trailer content to show – the community around the game began looking deeper into Blue Box’s history to try and work out exactly what the Dutch developer had been before all of this.
What they found (as demonstrated on Reddit by TicTacPaul) was a set of five promised games, none of which had seen a full (if any) release. It led to a response that Kahraman says has been unfair, with some characterising the Blue Box team as scammers; a group that announced games to, in some way, earn money without having to release a project. Kahraman says the reality is less exotic – Blue Box is still a small company, and began even smaller, and took some time to learn the ropes of game development, cancelling many of its projects before they began eating up the time and money it would take to bring them to life. Kahraman spent some time talking us through each of those games’ journeys.
Kahraman also tells IGN that one of the few games Blue Box had charged customers for – Fatal Frame homage The Haunting: Blood Water Curse – will be finished and released for free ahead of Abandoned’s launch. Those who bought the Early Access version will be offered an Abandoned bundle for free as a make-good.
Blue Box's Early History
It’s clear at this point that Kahraman isn’t the kind of person that necessarily looks before he leaps. The developer admits some of Blue Box’s decisions have caused trouble for the studio and disappointed fans, something he seems to genuinely regret. Blue Box is now made up of 10 full-time staff (boosted to around 50 people on Abandoned, accounting for freelancers and outsourcing studios), but it’s been as low as two, with just Kahraman and a friend working on some early projects. The upshot is that Kahraman would often announce games before it was totally clear they were feasible to make.
The studio’s earliest project, Rewind: A Paranormal Investigation Game, was put up on Kickstarter, before that campaign was cancelled due to securing private investment. Kahraman says that investment allowed Blue Box to rework the game, retitling it Rewind: Voices of the Past. However, the project grew beyond the young studio’s capabilities and, without further investment, it was fully cancelled.
Contrary to some thoughts expressed on social media, Kahraman insists that the original investment money was paid back, to ensure Blue Box wasn’t left in debt. “It doesn't work that way,” he explains, “because if you don't return the funds, then you'll have debt – and it's not that an investor is like, ‘Hey, here you go, here's 200K. If it works out, cool. If it doesn't work out, keep the money.’ It doesn't work that way.”
Other early projects included The Lost Tape (a game that used early concepts for Rewind, and was cancelled before any version was released because of the potential costs) and The Whisperer, another attempt at a Paranormal Investigation game. The Whisperer did see release on mobile – as a free-to-play game with a $0.99 purchase to turn off ads – but was quickly pulled. Kahraman says the game was removed because it had been made for PC and didn’t run well enough on phones. To Kahraman’s knowledge, all those who bought the game received refunds, but he says anyone who didn’t can email Blue Box with proof of purchase to claim one.
"The games that we've made in the past were just [made] part-time with small audiences."
Similarly, Tales of Six Swords – a mobile homage to JRPGs with a far more vibrant style than Blue Box’s other projects – was released for free on Android, but subsequently pulled because the company couldn’t reach the scale of game it was aiming for with limited file sizes. Kahraman says that, in this case, pulling the game wasn’t because Blue Box won’t complete it, but because it wants to do the idea justice: “We aren't actually done with that. We actually still like the idea and maybe in the future, we'll definitely do something with it.”
All of these early projects share an element in common – they were announced or released very early, a pattern we’ve seen repeated on Abandoned. Overenthusiasm can easily become a mistake rather than a virtue, and has clearly caused problems for Blue Box and those interested in its games. But Kahraman repeatedly tells me that it’s inexperience that’s to blame, not the malice that’s been perceived by some circles.
“I'm still trying to figure out why people call us scammers,” says Kahraman, “because our past is like... we are a small studio, and we were even smaller, and the games that we've made in the past were just [made] part-time with small audiences – or actually having no audience at all.”
Indie studios at the start of their lifespan regularly begin and cancel projects with little to no notice paid by the public – it’s just that few gain the public attention (and scorn) that Blue Box has. Kahraman says his studio is no different to others: “[Some of] these games were actually put there in the hope to create an audience. And when you see that there is no audience, you just cancel it out, or if the game doesn't work out, you just cancel it out. But it isn't that people bought something, it isn't that someone has spent money on it, it was just showcasing it. If there was no audience, you cancel it.”
But with the gaming world’s eyes now on their every move, Kahraman and Blue Box now want to prove their value by making good on the last of the projects announced ahead of Abandoned.
The Return of The Haunting
Blue Box’s last release before Abandoned was The Haunting, a horror game inspired by Fatal Frame and launched into Early Access last year. It too suffered due to a lack of experience around releasing a game still in development:
“It was released in Early Access in an alpha version. So it had a lot of placeholders and involved animations and character models,” Kahraman explains. “We've learned that if you are making a story game, a single-player game, you shouldn't do an Early Access because people didn't get that. People assume that, ‘Hey, there's this game out there, let's buy it and play it and we'll see some production quality stuff right there’, but the truth is that it's actually an Early Access game. And that is the reason why it didn't go well because it wasn't received well because people saw that it was broken, that it wasn't finished.”
Some confusion has surrounded the future of The Haunting – instead of updating the project, it was removed from sale and Blue Box announced that development would be completed by an unknown indie studio called CreateQ. Kahraman explains to me that CreateQ is in fact a four-person developer made up of friends of Blue Box, a team comprised of full-time developers who are working on The Haunting as a side project. According to Kahraman, development is ongoing, using some of Blue Box’s original ideas, but reworked by the members of CreateQ.
The idea now is to release The Haunting as a full, finished product, for free, with Blue Box acting as its publisher.
“I started working on The Haunting and I think most of the components that I used are still being used, but it's just that the concept has been changed from the ground up,” Kahraman says. “The Haunting was like our Western version of Fatal Frame, with the camera, and shooting [ghosts] and stuff. That's basically what it is. It has some puzzles. We use some old school style exploration from horror games like Fatal Frame 1 and 2. [...] The screenshots you see on Steam right now, that was a concept that we were working on, but it's not that game. We will put [new] screenshots on the Steam page very shortly.”
The idea now is to release The Haunting as a full, finished product, for free, with Blue Box taking the financial brunt of the project and acting as its publisher. The aim is to release The Haunting on Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox alongside Abandoned’s first gameplay trailer – now due in “a few months”, according to Kahraman.
For those who had already bought the Early Access version, Blue Box will soon add a form to its website and, upon receiving proof of purchase, will offer a ‘complete bundle’ of Abandoned for free in return once it sees release (it’s not clear what that complete bundle includes, other than the game). I asked Kahraman whether full refunds could be offered instead, who replied saying this is a more difficult process, presumably due to payment originally being taken through Steam, but the team would work on providing them should there be enough demand.
Abandoned in Context
Taken in the context of Blue Box’s past projects, the issues Abandoned has faced become more obviously a part of that story, rather than a cause for conspiracy thinking. The hazy announcement that led to speculation is yet another example of Blue Box seemingly talking about a game too early. The reveal of marketing assets that seem to fan those same flames is a symptom of still being a small studio – as Kahraman puts it, “I have to admit that was a big mistake, but it was completely unintentional. [...] We're small and this is the first time we actually got the world stage. We don't have experience with marketing and PR at all. Excuse my language, but it's really easy to f**k up.”
Even the announcement of a trailers app that won’t actually show a new trailer for some time is borne out of inexperience: “What went wrong was we announced everything too soon. Let's be honest, even the app was just too soon. First, we were like, yes, it's going to be [released in] June, but then again, we never thought that we would have this huge world stage. What I'm trying to say is that with this amount of eyes looking at your game, you need to polish it even more. [...] That's definitely something we learned for the future.”
Blue Box is by no means blameless, and by courting the kind of publicity it did while development on the app wasn’t finished, there’s no doubt that it managed to sow the seeds of its own social media backlash. But that Kahraman and the team are being made the centre of harmful conspiracy theories – and getting personal threats as a result – is far beyond the punishment deserving of those mistakes.
"We don't have experience with marketing and PR at all. Excuse my language, but it's really easy to f**k up."
Kahraman actively wishes he could take some of his decisions back, perhaps make Abandoned a project that was announced later, described more cleanly, and managed to pull off its big marketing gambit. But this is the internet – once the mistakes are made, there’s very little chance of taking them back (proven by the fact that even the company’s earliest mistakes are now on show for the world to find). As he puts it, “If we put something up, just in that instant, we [would already have] 80 likes or 100 likes in just a second. By then, it's too late to do [anything], but I don't know. It was just unfortunate really.”
It’s fair to question Blue Box’s experience with releasing games on the scale of what Abandoned promises to be – but I find it hard to question the conviction of Kahraman to actually make it happen. This isn’t a story of scammers thrust into the limelight – it’s the story of a group of young developers that were handed a much louder microphone than expected, and saying the wrong things to a lot of people simultaneously. Where Abandoned goes from here, and if it makes more mistakes, is up in the air, but Kahraman is determined to prove the doubters wrong:
“Is the Realtime Experience App going to be there? Yes, definitely. Everything you see there in the menu, that is going to be released. People are waiting for content and we're not going to abandon it. [...] I 100% understand everyone. I completely agree with why they're raging. I'm not saying that I don't understand them. If I were a gamer and if someone else was doing exactly the same thing, I would be really hyped to see a realtime experience, and if it wasn’t coming, I would be disappointed. But they're labeling us as scammers – that hurts. I still respect everyone really, and I'm hoping to see them still looking out for Abandoned, [despite] what they say. I do understand and I have nothing against them really. It only hurts.”
Joe Skrebels is IGN's Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].
Continue reading...