Next up, PAX East 2019!

We are super excited to announce that the Cloudfire Studios team will be bringing Starport Delta to PAX East 2019!

So, what’s PAX?

PAX is a series of gaming conventions held in Seattle, Boston, Melbourne, Philadelphia, and San Antonio. Founded by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, authors of the popular web comic Penny Arcade, each PAX is a show dedicated to supporting and celebrating video and tabletop gaming.

Since PAX’s inception, millions of attendees have enjoyed the expo floor halls filled with booths from major game publishers and independent developers, panels from video game industry insiders, game culture-inspired concerts, LAN parties, tabletop gaming, competitions and much more.

PAX East is held in Boston, and was established in 2010 after the original Seattle-based PAX (now PAX West) just kept growing and growing. The first PAX East drew tens of thousands of attendees in its inaugural year, so we’re really looking forward to being a part of next year’s event. With thousands of game players and games fans, creators, publishers and media, it will be an amazing opportunity to meet some like minds from all over the world and is sure to be a brilliant (if exhausting) experience.

We’ll be there at booth 24090, so come by to say hi and play the game! We’d love to meet as many people as we can while we’re there.

This past week has also been the first week of our closed alpha for Starport Delta, and it’s been exciting starting that process and getting it out to players away from the hustle and bustle of conventions and group settings where we’ve been showcasing the game so far. We’re distributing alpha builds through Steam (you can wishlist Starport Delta now!) and communications are being handled through Discord. You can sign up on the Cloudfire Studios home page if you’d like to apply to join our play-testing programme or keep up with our news via email.

The gaming community has been fairly abuzz over the last few weeks, with announcements from Steam indicating they would (slightly) lower their percentage cut from 30%, but only for extremely high earners on their platform (many millions of dollars). Needless to say, this upset a lot of the long tail of indie developers. There was also a large bug in update to the discovery algorithm in October which started to get a lot more press about its impact became more noticeable when there was a month’s worth of stats for developers to look at. Again, it seems to be the indie developer crowd that’s suffering. On the heels of this comes the altogether-completely-expected announcement from Epic that they are starting a digital storefront. After the success of Fortnite and their recent round of raising more than a billion dollars in capital, the competition is serious and is certainly welcome. To add to this, they also announced that the store cut will be only 12%, and that would include the Unreal license royalties if it’s a UE4 game! This is going to be an interesting space to watch to see what kind of pressure this puts on Valve/Steam, as all the indies ask the same question: how do I get my game onto the Epic Store?

For more information follow Starport Delta on Facebook, Starport Delta Instagram, Cloudfire on Facebook, Cloudfire on Twitter and check the Starport Delta page here on the Cloudfire Studios website.