05/04/2021

Mooneye Indies Launch

You may have noticed that our homepage gained a new category: Publishing. That’s because – you might have guessed it – we’re now a publisher as well!

We decided to call our new label mooneye indies! As the name suggests, we will focus our efforts on games from small, independent teams that might need a little extra help with bringing their games to you.

If you’ve been following the development of Lost Ember, you will know that we went through quite the rollercoaster ride. During most of that time we’ve been in contact with various publishers of all sizes and always wondered, if the self-publishing route really was the best route for us.

In the end, we went through with it, and one thing is certain: we learned a lot from it! Since then we’ve been approached by a lot of indie developers who were struggling with similar problems as we were and who asked for advice. We’ve always been happy to help and – if we could spare the time – we would try and be as detailed as possible, but at the same time the questions would obviously repeat themselves and we realized that we spent way too much time answering the same questions over and over. So we decided:

  1. We would revive this blog that we’ve been neglecting for years and fill it with all the information that we think we could have used at various stages of development. Things like “How to pitch to publishers”, “How to run a Kickstarter”, “How to even begin with development” or “Why did we choose one engine over the other”. And of course the long-promised Post-Mortem of Lost Ember. We’ll try and post a new article every few weeks and be as open and helpful as possible. If you have any particular question you would like to have answered, you can always reach out and we’ll try and see if we can whip up a post about it!
  2. Arguably the bigger decision of the two: we would start a publishing label! We think our perspective and experience as an indie developer who went through basically all thinkable stages of releasing a game – Kickstarter, publisher pitches, public funding, private investors, simultaneous release on multiple platforms and just releasing on all major platforms at all – and managed to build and entertain a community through all of it can be incredibly helpful for other indie devs. We want to put that experience to good use and help other developers go through the entire process more effortlessly.

Luckily, the success of Lost Ember enables us to support other developers with funding, marketing, porting, community management, QA or localization. Obviously, we’re still a small team and can’t compare ourselves to bigger names in the publishing business, but we think we can stand out in other ways and are eager to work closely with teams around the world to put a spotlight on games that may otherwise have reached the audience they deserve.

Our focus will lie on narrative or wholesome games that we believe fit perfectly into our existing community. We always loved working with our community and believe that we are truly blessed with such a warm and supporting bunch of people around us, so we will try and bring you all new games that we believe you will enjoy!

The first one of those games you won’t have to wait too long for: Haven Park!

Haven Park entrusts you with the responsibility to look after the camping grounds left by the cute protagonist‘s grandmother. Equipped with nothing but pure motivation, you bring life back into the park and will have to try and keep the visitors happy. Haven Park is a relaxed and wholesome little game that we believe is the perfect escape from the stressed and exhausting life that – let’s be honest – most of us are living right now.

A demo of Haven Park will be playable during the Steam Next Festival starting June 16th and release shortly after, so make sure to hop over to https://store.steampowered.com/app/1549550/Haven_Park/ to wishlist right now!

In the meantime, if you are a developer who is looking for support in publishing your game and you think we might be a good fit, please reach out at www.mooneyestudios.com/publishing!

Stay healthy,
your Moonies!

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