Greetings!

Star Control: Origins is a hit.  Its sales are better than Ashes of the Singularity + Offworld Trading Company combined.  

Critically, the game is has gotten mostly positive reviews that is broadly split between people who were expecting something very different and the people who are happy with the direction we took.

What's next?

In October we will be releasing v1.1 which is the big update that facilitates modding more easily.  You can mod right now but sharing mods and enabling/disabling mods is a lot of effort.  v1.1 makes it a lot easier for people to share and use mods which in turn will encourage more people to create them.

Myself, Derek Paxton (Fall from Heaven) and a few others will be creating the first set of mods to show people how mods are done and how easy they are and how to share them.

Season Pass: Earth Rising

We have gone back and forth on the best way to release new story-related content for Star Control: Origins.  Let me walk you through our thoughts and why we chose the path we did.

Option 1: DLC.  We could just release a bunch of $5.99 DLC for the game but over time, this would become very unpopular.  We learned this the hard way with GalCiv III.  Even though we stuck with only 3 or 4 DLC per year, by 2018, that added up to a lot of DLC and a lot of unhappy new players (and subsequent negative reviews which also hurt sales).

Option 2: Traditional expansion.  This path would require us to wait until we have finished a full on expansion before players could get anything.  That's not viable.

Option 3: In game micro-transactions.  Yea, you can imagine how well that would be received.

And so we are looking at a Season Pass called Earth Rising which will deliver 6 mini-expansions over the next year for $19.99.

These would be released as follows:

1. Earth Rising: Aftermath (November)
2. Earth Rising: The Lexites (December)
3. Earth Rising: The Syndicate (February 2019)
4. Earth Rising: The Lost Parsec (April)
5. Earth Rising: Enemy Within (May)
6. Earth Rising: Destiny (August)

As a collection they would introduce new species, new ships, new star systems, new quests, new ship parts, new game features (like being able to modify your ship) and so on.

Now the base game would still be getting updates with QOL updates and such.  But the story would continue through the Earth Rising season pass.

We invite you to comment on this and express your opinions and ideas on the subject.

Cheers!