Howdy gamers. We have been cooking up a little venture and are now ready to start sharing it with all of you.
We are Foolhardy Horizons. We are a worker-owned games studio. And we want to make great games and to create a sustainable studio that supports and nurtures our developers and reward them for their hard work.
Seems reasonable, right? We think so. Which is why we are horrified to see our industry fail again and again at doing the bare minimum expected of any business. As an industry, we are releasing greater games than ever before. We provide value to millions of players who reward us with unbridled passion for our medium and dedicated fan bases. But game developers across the world are experiencing layoffs, studio closures and even veterans have a hard time finding new opportunities.
We believe games are a force for good, but that our industry has been infested with cynical speculation and cowardly management. When even commercial and critically successful titles cannot sustain the developers who made them, something is very very wrong.
We believe that the success of our games should not be measured by how much they reward shareholders and investors whose only stake in our art-form is the profits they leech from it. We believe that all profits gained from our games should be used to create more art and to future-proof our ability to keep creating against the whims of market trends and misfortunes.
We see our cooperative company Foolhardy Horizons not as an engine to generate profits.
It is a tree; currently a sprout; that we must nurture and grow until it becomes large enough to provide the world with impactful games that connect with players and make them feel something.
Our tree must be fruitful to sustain all of us who nurture it to share its fruits with the world. And it must be resilient and bend with the stormy tides of modern capitalism and not break.
Where other start-ups grow so they can eventually chop up the company and sell it as timber; we refuse to chop down our years of labour, love and sacrifice for a single time profit for the lucky few who happened to be around when the tree was planted. And we refuse to carve our beautiful tree into parts so that it can fit into larger constructions of grotesque mega-companies.
We want our tree to provide shade for those with like minds and to share what we learn as we grow. We hope to teach others how to grow trees of their own if they promise to help grow a forest of resilient game companies. And we hope our tree will help regenerate and heal our broken industry.
We believe it is foolish not to try.
