HOW A GAME DEVELOPER TURNED 180 000 EURO OF UNPAID TAXES AND LOOMING BANKRUPTCY INTO MILLIONS OF EUROS BY SELLING THEIR GAME IN STEAM

Good stuff in Finnish national newspaper Helsingin Sanomat. Here is briefly summarized what they wrote about Bugbear.



Now there is one long post title. Bugbear Entertainment has been churning out car games better part of their history. Year 2013 looked like it might be the last as the publisher of their previous game had defaulted on some payments AND the current game had not attracted publisher. Money was running out and ever diligent taxman came visiting for some unpaid taxes.

SO HOW DID THEY MANAGE TO PULL THAT TOTAL TURNAROUND?

Bugbear noticed that the root to their problems were publishers. They wanted to go on their own and control the whole chain and that way keep most of the revenue. The first step was to use take money from their own and financiers pockets and develop a technical demo of the Next Car Game. The following step was to take the development version of the game into crowd funding arena but that sail didn't get any wind. It was looking grim...

As the last resort they put the game on sale on their company website just before Christmas and what do you know - Santa came knocking. The game torso was still badly in development but people were buying it. This was needed encouragement for the Bugbear and in January 2014 they put the Next Car Game on Steam and it went straight to January TOP10 list. In just one week it sold for 1 million dollars and in coming two months for 2 million dollars more. Multiplayer version is coming out for the Christmas. Good times to be an independent game developer.