EdCastilloIsAFuckingMoron

Posted byu/KoMiKoZa
11 months ago
From Ed Del Castillo, founder of Liquid Entertainment and Chief Designer on Battle Realms (hereafter, BR)
One heartbreaking read from Ed Del Castillo. A personal message to all of the fans out there. Dated September 2018. Brought to everyone by a steam user- KaReN (九条 カレン).

[Originally posted @ BR Community Discord]





Dear Fans of BR. I’m afraid that I’m here to confirm your fears that the steam revival of BR is in currently encased in carbonite.

…the rest of this is going to be pretty long, so you might want to go get a snack...



So back around 2014, we did a Kickstarter. It was for a Battle Realms card game. Why did we do that? One Reason. BR. Because I love the BR universe and wanted to do the RTS right, not on the cheap. Huh? The Kickstarter was a card game! Right. Let me explain. At the time, RTS was the “dead genre” of the games industry. None of the big boys were making them and you couldn’t get any publisher to talk to you about funding one. So I needed a source of income. Something that I could use to make the game I wanted to make and the game the fans deserve. A revenue stream that would go on for the duration of the product. So I came up with the BR card game. It was good. In fact, I think it was great. There were so many cool things in it that the fans would have loved. Things like more story exposition, more BR characters, more everything BR it would have been a truly great card game, and not just another Hearthstone clone.

Problem was, that despite all our market research prior to the Kickstarter, very few people backed it. In fact, 80% of the funding that made it on to Kickstarter was from my personal friends and family. Even many of the fans that had promised to back it didn’t do so. So I let the Kickstarter fade. If the fans didn’t want it, I wasn’t going to ask my friends and family to take that kind of risk with their money.

So, there we were. Dead in the water. In a bout of incredible foolishness or arrogance, I genuinely believed that the fans would trust me, the creator of the universe, to create something truly fun and engaging for them; and that off the back for the BR card game, we would build the next great BR RTS. Instead all we got was “it’s not an RTS. So I’m not interested.” It’s a fair point, but it’s like telling Spielberg or Jackson that they could only work on one genre of movie.



In 2014, Liquid came to a slow stop. We took really good care of everyone and did our best to make sure that everyone got a job and most never even missed a paycheck. Then, we closed physical operations. We hoped to find funding for new work but that didn’t pan out. Unending tension between myself and the remaining partner made working very difficult and moving on the much easier path.

It had been a tough road. Endless fights with partners. Endless attempts to get mediocre employees to care enough to do their work right. High Quality comes at a cost, and along the way I lost my best friend, and brought on partners who I thought would help but instead leaked company value day after day. It was exhausting and worthy of a book of movie.



In the end, despite all the pain, I look back on most of it fondly. During that time I also met my wife, had my two kids, gave many many, untrained employees their break into the industry, taught artists about art and designers about design, and made a few really great titles that I’m super proud of.

It taught me more than any school and I learned my most valuable lesson… if it’s not working with someone you brought on, no matter at what level, get rid of them right away. Each day you delay only makes the problem worse. I was a teacher/fixer when I started Liquid and had a real hard time letting go of problem children - always trying to get them to see things differently and trying to work with them to make them better. It was my biggest mistake. One that I will make much less from now on.

2015 was a much needed sabbatical. Took the year - reconnected with family - got back to basics.



2016 and 2017 were the consulting years. I made good money and took some great trips to India as a result. I tried over and over again to get something started but nothing worked out and the lingering division of ownership between myself and my former partner made me not want to work too hard on it.

In 2018, I got around to making Liquid’s closing official, and transferred ownership of all Liquid’s IP to myself personally. I gave my former partner half a year to claim her piece but she never did, so now all of Liquid’s properties, including Battle Realms, are wholly and soley owned by me, Ed Del Castillo.

So now, what am I doing? I’m starting a new company that will umbrella all of those properties in addition to my consulting work and other creative endeavors. I’m thinking it will be a non-profit.



What about BR? BR is the work that I am most in love with. It has deep connections to my childhood, adolescence, and to what I think RTS’s should be. It is closer to me than anything else I’ve created. I am looking for ways to get the original on Steam and to find the $5MM that I need to do a great remake. I have sooooo many pages of notes on the universe, on improvements to BR1, on what BR2 and 3 should be. There is so much thought behind everything BR that I think I will always love and cherish that universe.

I have no idea where that money will come from. No idea if it will ever happen. But I love the Battle Realms universe and will never give up trying to make the RTS that machines of today can now, finally, support… and the game that you all deserve to be able to play.

~ Eddy Del Castillo