Dan-Adelman: Hi everyone,
This is Dan Adelman, the guy who responded to Barry's tweet.
To be honest, I had completely forgotten about this exchange. Late 2014 was 3.5 years ago.
But now that it's been brought up, I do now remember it. One thing that's missing from the transcript is the ability to click on one another's profile. IIRC, the reason I replied the way I did, and the reason that Tyler, Brian, and Steven joined in, was due to Barry's tweet history.
At first when Barry tweeted to us about GOG, I was of course flattered that a fan wanted a game he was excited for on his favorite platform. No problem with that! But when I clicked on his profile, it was literally hundreds of identical tweets to every developer out there. It was as if Barry just had a list of upcoming games (since AV) wasn't even out at the time and just went down the list asking them to bring their game to GOG. I actually thought I was replying to a spam bot.
And when Tyler found (or thought he found) that Barry was a real person and working as director of biz dev for GOG, that left a bad taste in everyone's mouth. It turns out that that was a misunderstanding. I certainly don't hold it against GOG.
[A little more context: For those who don't know my background, before I worked on Axiom Verge I ran the indie business at Nintendo of America. I had a similar problem to Barry in that there was a very enthusiastic fan that took it upon himself to represent himself as a Nintendo employee and contact developers to ask them to bring their games to Nintendo platforms. This was at a time when the eShop had some significant problems with store layout, transaction UI, and even basic Wi-Fi connectivity, and as a result, sales on eShop were very low. I always tried to be careful in talking with devs so as not to overpromise the sales numbers they could expect. Good biz dev is about establishing positive long-term relationships and trust, and trust starts with honesty and transparency. It bothered me that there was someone out there essentially trying to talk developers into making business decisions with misleading information. His heart, just like Barry's, was in the right place, but this does a lot more harm than good.]
In terms of if or when Axiom Verge will ever come to GOG, we're going to need to look into it. We have nothing against the platform and nothing against releasing a DRM-free version. It really comes down to the work required to bring it to the system and integrate it with Galaxy. I'm just the business half of the Axiom Verge team, and Tom Happ (the guy who made Axiom Verge entirely by himself) is the only one available to do the integration. We need to think about all the other things Tom could be doing - including working on his next game and taking care of his son - and decide how best to use his time. If I could wave a magic wand and have it out on GOG with Galaxy integration, we'd have done it already.
I apologize that my tone back then came off as overly harsh, but I hope this gives a little more context to that twitter conversation from 2014 and why we're still not on GOG yet.
fyi, i have been holding out in hopes to see axiom verge make its way here forever! :D so, if you and tom bring, i will certainly buy (galaxy integration does not matter to me, tho gog may feel differently).
