Fan Powered Flight

Hello there! If you’ve just stumbled across this page, lucky you. Keep reading…

You’ve most likely been sent here by a FuturLab fan, or by one of us on Twitter or Facebook. And it’s because this page is our mission statement.

Progress

We’ve made some great progress in the last couple of years. We’ve won some awards, had some great coverage in the games press, and even signed a year-long contract with PlayStation.

Most importantly though, we have built a group of fans that are incredibly loyal and supportive. Our fans, we’ve come to realise, are cool people. People who are perceptive and have good taste, not just in games.

Our fans spotted the diamond in the rough, and championed what we were doing long before the mainstream press took any notice.

And we’ve benefited from that support a great deal. Velocity Ultra is 100% fan powered. All the positive vibes we received for Velocity helped Sony make a decision to support us. That’s amazing!

Indie

We call ourselves indie, but in the grand scheme of things, we have lots of work to do to become truly independent.

We’ve been very lucky to receive funding from Sony for 2013. It has taken a couple of very fortunate things to happen:

1. Sony has just released the PS Vita, and they need content. They have a certain amount of money to spend on bringing new talent to PS Vita, and we, fortunately, fitted into that slot at exactly the right time. If Velocity had been released a couple of months later it might not have happened.
2. Because of its release date, Velocity became the game people in the know played on their PS Vita once they’d finished playing MotorStorm:RC and Uncharted: Golden Abyss (and some others of course!). In other words there was room for us to build on the small buzz it was getting on a platform that was short on games.

Both of these things were exceptionally lucky.

And Sony’s money isn’t going to last forever. We can’t rely on other companies to keep paying us to make games next year or the year after. In fact, the only thing we can rely on is you. Our fans. People who champion quality, and are willing to pay hard earned money for it.

Our goal for 2013

In order to sow the seeds for independence, we need to boost our fan base this year.

We can’t compete with multi-million dollar marketing campaigns to reach more people, but we do spend a vast amount of time and effort thinking up bonkers PR campaigns to try and cut through the noise to reach people like you.

All that creative energy and time could be spent coming up with more awesome game ideas.

Some of our fans actually joke that we don’t sleep. Well, it’s true that we don’t get very much rest. We’re making games and doing PR around the clock.

What would you rather we focus on?

Looking at the answers to our recent questionnaire, it’s clear that the vast majority of people who didn’t play Velocity on minis simply hadn’t heard about it.

So, we need to reach more people more easily, and we can do that with your help.

All you need to do is subscribe to our site, and when we publish a story that you think is worth sharing, share it!

But we follow you on Twitter!

Twitter has such a high churn rate that so many of our followers miss important posts, and those that catch them probably get fed up of seeing the same tweets throughout the day as we try and get the message to all our followers. That’s not cool for us or for you.

The only way to guarantee you hear from us is to subscribe to our site.

So please, help us become independent by being a proactive fan. You can subscribe at the bottom left in the footer 🙂

Mission Statement

So many people in the games industry now think that rinsing gamers (sorry, users) with psychological tricks, grinding mechanics and freemium in-app purchases is the way to become successful.

Well, we know better. It’s fans that make a studio successful in the long term, and we’re playing the long game.

So far so good.