by NorseGamer, HSM Publisher

At present, LOOT Entertainment can be roughly divided into three primary verticals: PlayStation Home, apps, and games — particularly, Forsaken Planet.

Home is currently where the bulk of LOOT’s consumer brand recognition comes from, since it’s a B2C endeavor. However, most people are surprised to learn that LOOT’s developed numerous apps for the PS3, such as the MLB app, the NHL app, the Crackle app, Gaiam, et cetera. These are high-profile B2B projects that get exposed to countless numbers of PlayStation consumers via the PlayStation Store.

Those are the two verticals I serve. But it’s the third vertical, which includes Forsaken Planet, that’s potentially the most exciting — because it’s a completely original IP. I don’t get to spend a tremendous amount of time with it since I’m assigned to apps and Home (the wonderful Olivia Peterson is the production coordinator for Forsaken Planet), but I recently had a chance to really dive into the game, and the only word that comes to mind is fun. Just pure fun.

The reason why I suddenly had more time with it: IndieCade 2013.

Richie Bisso wants YOU to start chikkinizing

If you’ve never been to an IndieCade, go. It’s just a really fun, upbeat vibe. If E3 is the Cirque du Soleil — all flash and glitz and polish and everything meticulously worked out to fifteen decimal points — then IndieCade is a fantastically overgrown LAN party at your best friend’s house. There’s a ton of business there, including all the big names, but it’s just…informal.

It really is the ideal setting to show off something like Forsaken Planet. This is a game that takes only four buttons to play, laughs at your silly plot devices, and just gets down to the business of having fun. It’s a bit like Mario Kart with guns and poultry. And since I had booth duty shifts during IndieCade, I figured I should probably brush up on the game.

If you tried Forsaken Planet a while ago, pick it up again now. There are a whole bunch of enhancements that have been made to it, just in the last few months. It’s like comparing a Corvette to a Callaway Corvette: both are very good at what they do, but there’s all those little extra bits in the Callaway that just make the whole thing better. And now that the game is out on Ouya as well as Amazon and Google Play, it really is easier to demonstrate the cross-platform functionality of the game.

During both days of IndieCade, we held hourly raffles, giving away Moga controllers, Ouya consoles, and even an Nvidia Shield. This, predictably, had the effect of bringing the entire population of North America to our booth. But then something interesting happened: people kept playing.

It wasn’t the prizes: it was the game itself. People were queued up, waiting under a boiling SoCal sun, just because they wanted to play again.

That’s a big deal. With Home, you have data, consumer trends, etc. to study. With apps, you’re creating something specific for a client. But Forsaken Planet, like any game, is a gamble: will enough people like this game sufficiently to justify its existence?

If E3 and IndieCade have been any indication, once people discover the game, they’re absolutely in love with it. And that’s not an easy thing to pull off. But it is validation of the ridiculously hard work and long hours the LOOT Forsaken Planet team have put into the game. And it was a very fun endeavor to help welcome people to the world of Forsaken Planet and watch their faces light up with joy as they experienced the game for the first time.

We also decided to create a video for it. As you know, LOOT is the only Home developer which has a podcast series: the LOOTcast. We’ve decided to reinvent it as a videocast series. Since I’d been putting together LOOT’s Home promo videos all year, I’ve become the de facto showrunner for the reinvented LOOTcast. This is somewhat the equivalent of letting the fat kid loose in the candy store with an AmEx black card, because this is exactly the sort of stuff I love to do. The LOOT team is comprised of some really amazingly talented people whom it’s a pleasure to work with, and to be able to showcase them — their travails, their successes, their products — is quite a thrill. Going from an outside journalist who wrote about LOOT to being a part of this team has been, and continues to be, an amazing journey.

I hope you enjoy the reinvented LOOTcast, and the entire LOOT team would like to invite you to check out Forsaken Planet. It’s time to start chikkinizing!

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