Developing a new genre (new product category) and achieving commercial success in the Interactive Industry is an expensive and complex endeavor. We're still working on that, but given what we have learned, we'll be part of mainstream popular culture very soon. However, it's always good to look back and learn from the obstacles we have encountered:
Wrong launch time:
When we launched in 2003 a 17MB download still somewhat limited our market. With current broadband speeds, that's no longer an impediment.
Today, a new generation of gamers is more open to explore new kinds of interactive entertainment. They openly discuss the lack of originality found in mainstream games.
The U.S.-- the wrong launch market:
The American gaming industry turned out to be very sensitive to adult content. That prevented us from getting any large distribution deals. Fortunately, we have found other markets very open to our content. Or you might say, the markets found us.
Most people in the US industry were unable to differentiate Masq from an old school adventure game or a branching story, or unable to overcome our lack of flashy graphics. Europe gave us a fair shake, and loved it.
There are many people in the US gaming industry with a sort of narrow-minded engineering mindset. They neither understand nor respect the aspect of storytelling. They believe that injecting a little funny dialogue into a game, or asking the character for a key is equivalent to storytelling. This may have changed in the last 5 years, but most people in the US industry seem to have difficulty understanding or even enjoying a design model based on verbal-social interaction and interpersonal relationships with characters. They'd rather not know about the millions of people who would rather watch Robert Zemeckis' Forrest Gump than Kubrick's 2001 or Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. I guess we can enjoy all kind of movies.
