Matrix Games

As you know, our relationship with our community is one of our most important priorities, and we keep doing everything we can to make it stronger. 

That is why we have thought of a way to answer all your questions, even those that may remain unanswered during Tea Time, so that we can be closer to you. 

You wrote a lot of letters to our dedicated address letterstoslitherine@slitherine.co.uk, and we thank you very much for your interest.

After a long process, we have finally selected three letters, that we will answer in this first article.

Keep writing us your questions, because you could be selected for the next article!

Nelson Braendle wrote an interesting question about merchandising:

Hi,

Will you consider selling merchandise for your company? I would happily buy a Slitherine t-shirt or beanie or something. 

Thanks!

Nelson 

We think about this all the time. We’ve got a load of ideas to design t-shirts based on our games, and on our company logo and brand, but we’ve often kept them on the side because there’s always something more important to do. There are a ton of service companies offering help in producing and dispatching merchandise items, but we’ve not found one that offers the correct amount of quality we’re seeking.

Alan L., big fan of Starship Troopers: Terran Command, asked more about the future of the IPs acquisition at Slitherine.

Hi Everyone,

Big fan of Starship Troopers and looking forward to Terminator. I am a huge rts fan and I think Slitherine has done a great job so far in the rts genre. I am hopeful for Terminator and the dlc for Starship so thank you for these great games. 

My question today is regarding acquiring IP's. In particular, Command & Conquer has been killed by EA. One of the best franchises of all time will remain dead while EA holds the IP rights. Have you ever internally discussed the idea of buying this IP (That EA obviously doesn't care about)? I think it would be a great idea as it would be a guaranteed success financially for Slitherine, it has a huge fan base already which can grow. The excitement if this was announced would be incredible! A new CNC rts game would be incredible! 

Maybe someday you may consider it? :)

Thanks,

Alan

Thank you for your email, Alan, this is a massive subject, and we’d love to give you more insights about how the wondrous world of IPs works and how we tackle it. It may be a good subject for a live stream and recording that we then upload on YouTube. We’re going to think about it and maybe do a show to explain some of these business mechanics. To answer on Command and Conquer specifically, and other IPs owned by other publishers: we keep talking to our peers at other publishing companies to see if there are opportunities to grab, and there are some of these heritage games that could potentially see a new life and in a not-so-distant future.

In the end, we selected Aussiecoffeebean's question about Field of Glory.

Thank you for the Field of Glory II franchise. I understand that work with Field of Glory II has come to an end..

Could I suggest an extension to the original Field of Glory II franchise to cover Ancient China, Japan and Korea.

Thank you for the opportunity to provide feedback.

Kind regards

Aussiecoffeebean

Hello Aussie! 

We just had a very long Field of Glory Day on June 6th, and we’ve tried to address some of these questions during the stream. Making other Field of Glory games based on different historical periods is not always as easy as it seems. Richard Bodley Scott and the whole development team are adamant that we keep a high level of accuracy in depicting the military tactics of the time. Doing that means that we need to adapt the game to very fine detail, and sometimes the core gameplay loop doesn’t suit some of these rules of engagement. 

That is when the commercial viability of a longer development process kicks in. Very narrow historical subjects are only interesting to niche parts of our audience and the incremental cost to make the relevant changes is not sustainable. Even wider subjects like Napoleonic, and American Civil War are increasingly harder to produce if we wanted to make them very accurate and fit for the Field of Glory brand heritage.

Thank you all for the interest you put in our games, keep writing your questions to letterstoslitherine@slitherine.co.uk.