We're done waiting for the industry to fix itself.

Society has taken a hard turn into a dystopian hell pit straight out of a Phillip K. Dick novel. Everything's a subscription, an ad, or a grift. Even physical products you used to own are now a "service" that can be neutered the second some board decides the line needs to go up faster. Gaming didn't dodge any of this, and arguably is among the industries hit hardest.

Big gaming is a husk

Outside of the indie world, things have been pretty bleak. Hundred-dollar editions of games that don't work on launch with battle passes bolted on for no reason... shit you used to just unlock by playing. Games ship 40gb day-one patches because releasing it broken is cheaper than finishing the fucking game. Studios we all loved that spent decades earning a reputation, gutted overnight after a botched launch, all so private equity assholes can "provide value to shareholders".

They're not making games anymore. They're building slot machines with better lighting.

The whole model now is just engagement metrics, monetization hooks, and massive marketing budgets at the expense of artists who want to create things that are special. The actual game becomes a rushed afterthought, and a delivery mechanism for fucking microtransactions. It's predatory, depressing, and you can feel the hollowness in the game when you play it.

The community is gaming

Here's the thing corpo-bots either never understood or don't care to: the community is the actual soul of this medium. They're the people who make, buy, and play the games. Not the publishers or shareholders.

Passionate people build the best games... Then people built better games on top of those games, for free, out of love. Modders have kept entire franchises alive that IP owners walked away from or couldn't continue to support. The reason projects like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. GAMMA can captivate hundreds of thousands of fans (shoutout Grok), and the reason people pour thousands of hours into worlds the original studios abandoned boils down to one thing: passion.

We've seen developers and modders entirely remake their favorite old games, only for industry giants to respond with cease-and-desists, and then quietly lift the good ideas later. I'm looking at you, Nintendo. Fuck you. They could have easily given this dev a publishing deal, his remake really was that good.

That's bullshit. Plain and simple.

The community is the backbone of this medium, and they should be supported when they put their blood sweat and tears into things simply because they love them. We should support and foster creativity and passion, not snuff it out for profit.

Your voice counts

We think what you want actually matters. Not in a focus-group kind of way that sands every interesting edge off until there's nothing left... but in a "people who love a thing deserve to be heard" way. There will always be haters who show up just to piss in the pool. Fine. Pound sand.

But the people who genuinely love something a studio is building deserve real discourse, real input, and the respect of being taken seriously. Your ideas have a home here. We're not going to pretend otherwise, and we're not going to talk to you like a wallet with a pulse. Post issues on our Github repos with feedback and ideas. Clone our broken, unfinished games to your machine and see what we're doing and what we're stuck on. Tinker, think, come up with ideas or provide feedback.

AI is a tool, not an author

AI could have been a gift, but instead we're watching it get used to hurt us. Leave it up to the billionaires to ruin literally fucking everything. That said, let me be clear about where I stand, because I'm not going to pretend I'm above anything:

I use AI. I've been a software developer in the corporate world for over a decade, and I use AI every single day to move faster. I don't use it, however, as a replacement for my brain, my creativity, or my judgement.

AI should be used as an accelerant for human creativity, never a replacement for it. If these assholes are going to take all of our compute, we may as well use that compute to make cool shit.

AI doesn't get to write our stories, make our art, or decide what our games feel like.

We use it in focused ways to clear boring or tedious shit out of the way, so we can spend our precious hours on the part that actually matters: the craft, the world, the feel.

For example, I'm not good at writing shaders yet. They make my brain hurt still, even though I'm slowly getting better. I used AI to learn how shaders work, and to help me build a performant, optimized procedural foliage/scatter system that doesn't make the game run like crap. These tools are useful if used with curiosity, human judgement, and actual creativity.

A game made entirely by a machine is slop. A game made by people who give a fuck, who reach for every tool they can to protect their time for the work only humans can do, that's an entirely different thing. We're building the second one. Hand-crafted assets, human stories, real engineering. AI helps us get there faster. It does not get to be the one telling the story, and it will never replace the value of human beings.

If our corporate overlords are going to use this shit to take over the world, I'd rather accelerate ideas and have a chance at building something meaningful than complain about it while cashing a UBI check.

What we're building

So here's what we're actually doing. We're building a community-driven, contributor-owned game studio. Our first game, Noosphere, is being built partly by the founders, and partly by people who see the vision and want in. Different people, different talents, every one of them bringing something new and valuable to the table. And when there's revenue, the people who built it share it. Meaningfully. You can learn more about our proposed model for this here.

We want to be the first game studio to pull this off for real: a collaborative team creating tools and games where profit is shared rather than used to enrich people at the top of a corporate ladder.

Now the honest part, because I'm not going to bullshit you. This isn't a free-for-all. Contributions get accepted according to established creative vision for the games and what we want them to become as an experience. That's not gatekeeping for its own sake, rather It's the thing that keeps the worlds coherent and deliver the quality gamers expect and deserve. You can't build a believable world if 40 people are dragging it in 40 directions. Strong vision, empathetic leadership, open doors. All at the same time. That's the balance, and we're going to drive in that direction like our lives depend upon it.

We support and build open source

Open source isn't a marketing thing for us... It's structural. I develop on Linux, and trapframe will always release cross-platform across Linux, Windows, and Mac. You shouldn't have to run a specific operating system to play a good game, and open source tools empower us to build this way.

This also goes way past our own games. We're open-sourcing the whole toolchain, starting with SIMN; the simulation/networking engine underneath Noosphere. The assets, worlds, and stories are our protected IP. Those are ours and they stay ours. But the machinery that runs it? Take it. Build your own world with it that looks nothing like ours. When somebody fixes a bug, makes it faster, or adds a tool we didn't think of, everyone building on it gets that for free. A rising tide, except the tide is actually useful instead of a stupid LinkedIn post. The more people building software this way, the better it gets for all of us.

Open source is the pathway to reclaiming ownership over our technology.

Godot, Rust, and Bevy's ECS implementation are the reason a small team can even attempt something this ambitious. So I'm committing to give a fixed percentage of trapframe's revenue back to the projects we build with; Godot, Rust, Bevy, and whatever else our work depends on. Not a one-time donation when it's convenient, but a standing cut every time we get paid. These projects are infrastructure for the entire industry, and they survive on scraps while billion-dollar companies build empires on top of them and give little to nothing back; while simultaneously locking developers into predatory ecosystems designed to profit from their hard work. We refuse to be one of those companies.

Good games should be the norm

The state of game engines and optimization is anti-community, hyper-capitalist dogshit. Performance became an afterthought because it's cheaper to tell players to upgrade their GPU than to actually spend time optimizing. Meanwhile the price of that GPU is going to the moon, because data centers are swallowing the entire supply chain to feed the AI gold rush. God forbid we sacrifice shareholder value temporarily for a polished product that will likely sell better. The idiocy is dumbfounding.

The message to a regular person who just wants to play something good is: spend $2k, or get fucked.

That's why we care about open engines, and it's why we're going to optimize for modest hardware. Within reason, of course. We probably can't make a game like this run on a toaster... but you shouldn't need a small mortgage and a flagship card to crack 60fps at 1080p without upscaling. If you've got an older rig, we're working hard to optimize with you in mind. Plus, Godot doesn't natively support fake frame generation. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Come build it

That's my pitch. No roadmap full of fake dates, hype reels, or pre-order tiers with a digital horse armor. Just a founder who loves this medium. I refuse to accept that it has to be the way it is right now.

Let's build something better, out in the open, together.

The door is open. If any of this resonates, come build it with us.