Help fund the Strike Fighters 2 Windows 10 update!
Strike Fighters 2 is a series of popular PC games we released back in 2008 (over 11 years ago!). It was a unique series of inter-connected light/casual flight simulation games set in the Cold War. Despite its age, it's still being enjoyed by many users, thanks largely to its huge and active mod community.
The games were originally designed on (then brand new) Windows Vista, but over the years, new Windows versions have came and gone (Windows 7, 8, 8.1, and finally 10), the hardware has evolved at dizzying speed, and internet security and privacy have become major concerns. With all these changes, some people are reporting issues running our old games on newer machines.
We'd love to be able to update the series to the latest Windows and Direct X version. But we're a very small independent company with very limited resources, and we do not currently have the funds to do this. And this is where you can help!
$25,000 USD is the minimum we need to cover the cost of development and testing. At this level funding, the update will simply be Windows 10/DirectX 12 update with no other fixes, enhancement or improvement.
Of course, any funding we get above and beyond the $25K amount would be used to further enhance and improve the series. Our users have asked for Oculus VR support, air-to-air refueling, and many other features. These all cost time and money, a lot of it unfortunately, so they'll need to be prioritized. We'll put the decisions about which additional features to work on to vote among the contributors. So by funding this and becoming a contributor, you're not only helping us with the funding, you'll also have a say in which direction to go with the update.
We estimate it'll take 2 months of development and testing for the update to be completed. So if we can get started by mid-September, we should be able to release the basic update by this November before Thanksgiving. (Any features from additional contributions will of course take longer)
We'd like to thank our fantastic community, especially the mods community who continue to put out amazing work to improve our games for everyone. We couldn't do this without the community support. Thank you!
Contribute here:
https://fundrazr.com/31YZNe?ref=ab_A4B60kVy3KOA4B60kVy3KO
Answers to some questions asked online:
Q. What happens if the funding goal isn't met?
A. Not everything will be lost even if we don't make the funding goal. We do plan on securing the amount we're short by through other means (loans) and still get the Windows 10 update done at a later time (probably early next year). If we have to go this route however, the update will have to be a paid update and not free to everyone so we can at least recover part of the cost. It'll be free to only those who contributed to this and those who purchased the SF2 Complete Edition.
Please note that this campaign is set as "Keep it all", meaning we keep all the contributions even if the funding goal isn't met.
Q. Can we add <xyz> features and fix <abc> bugs?
A. We'd love to be able to do everything everyone is asking for, but unfortunately, all these take a lot of time and money. If you're expecting our games to have all the features from other AAA-quality games, then you'll be disappointed. Those games costs 10+ (some over 100+) million budget, and there is simply no way we can even come close to that with $100-500K budget we usually spend on our games. If this crowd funding makes more than the funding goal, we'll have the contributors vote and decide on which features we should spend that extra amount on.
Q. Are you going to continue to support the game?
A. We wish we could continue to support the game forever, but again, these things takes a lot of money, and we simply can not afford to keep supporting old games for years and decades. This crowd funding goal is enough to pay for just 2 months of operation. In order for us to continue to support the game year after year, we need the community to continue to buy our games (and not just play them) year after year.
Q. Isn't it better to do Strike Fighters 3?
A. We'd love to be able to do SF3, but we're not ready to commit that much time and money to a new PC game at this point (we still haven't paid off the development cost of SF2NA). A completely new game would take us at least 5 years and cost us at at least 2 million. Plus, everyone expect post-release support for 10-20 additional years, easily doubling the cost. We just don't think we'll be able to raise that amount needed based on numbers we have. We'd love to be proven wrong on this, if this fund raising goes way better than expected, we can re-consider this in the future.
Thank you!
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