Armada

Update: Following the publication of the original story below, Pocketwatch Games’ Andy Schatz responded to XBLA Fans’ requests for comment about working with Microsoft again. As he originally stated, Schatz hasn’t made any final platform decisions for Armada just yet.

“The deciding factor will be based on ho[w] closely we can interact with our fans and whether the platforms enable iterative development,” Schatz wrote in an email to XBLA Fans.

“We’ve been able to much better serve fans and interact with our community with the extremely easy process of rolling out updates through Steam,” he elucidated. “That’s not something I’ll be willing to give up for a game that may require constant balance changes and content additions!”

Gamers may remember that Microsoft was repeatedly lambasted by many in the independent game development community over the past few years due to its bug fix and game update policies. Those developers who complained were upset with issues surrounding costs, update sizes and certification processes and lead times. Some developers, like Uber Entertainment, went as far as to release subsequent games on platforms other than XBLA after feeling burned by Microsoft their first time releasing a digital game on Xbox 360.

Original Story: The next project from Pocketwatch Games, the two-man team behind 2013’s co-op heist title Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine, is a real-time strategy game codenamed Armada. Pocketwatch’s Andy Schatz stated in a blog post that the success of Monaco, which sold more than 750,000 copies total despite only selling about 36,000 on XBLA as of last month, has put the studio in a position to create whatever it wants. What it wants is an RTS optimized for gamepad controls.

“With apologies to those devs who have tried, no one has ever made an RTS that played well on a dual analog gamepad. We’re gonna be the first to do it right,” Schatz promised. That does not, however, mean the game will be restricted to only a gamepad. Schatz goes on to write that playing Armada should be as enjoyable with dual analog as it is with a keyboard and mouse.

And there’s more to the game designer’s desire to create an RTS than just showing predecessors how it’s done with a controller. There’s his passion. Schatz has a love/hate relationship with the RTS genre and wants to put his own spin on it, which means designing a game in which “strategy is creative and complex and the micro is accessible and fun.”

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