Into the Future

More than ever, I want to reject this silicon valley approach seemingly everything has been heading towards. The influencer culture, the consumerism, corporate, “slopware”, market trends, whatever. I just want to make genuine, human, weird things and share them with the world. White Lotus Interactive is a vehicle for me, and for anyone else who wants to join me on this endeavor.

John Bummerman

I’ll start by getting a few negative thoughts out of the way.

You gotta hustle, right? You gotta get yourself out there, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and grindset mindset, baby! Put that linkedin together, spool up that short form content machine, and crack on with the tiktoks and the YouTube ads. Raid Shadow Legends! NordVPN! You gotta pound pavement, man. This is the way the world works, you gotta capture mindshare and capitalize on opportunity. If you don’t like it, you’re an old man living in the past. Get with the times, embrace AI and big tech.

This outlook makes me unhappy. Let’s not do any of that.

.Plan

We’re going to focus on making video games. We are working on a new one.

I’m also gonna try blogging, because writing both feels like a cathartic expression of myself as well as a classic means of communication. I love reading things online, and I wish more people would return to writing traditional long form blogs. I’ll also try to encourage the other members of the White Lotus team to contribute as well.

I want to focus on smaller communities, and maybe try building one of my own. I’m not sure how to do this.

Compromises

White Lotus / XING has a handful of social media accounts floating around completely untouched for the past seven years. Naturally a few of these I want to nuke (rip twitter) but I think I need to fight the urge to completely avoid social media. Instead, I’ll try exclusively writing content here and simply linking back to this blog whenever there is an update. I’m not sure if that, you know, works, but I don’t feel dirty about it. Trying the whole Instagram Tiktok thing would be a mistake - I would be completely out of my depth, and I figure that any content we make would prove unviable for the platforms anyways.

I actually enjoyed writing these. There was something about adding features / fixing things then writing about them to ’the people’ that sparked joy

Historically I’ve blogged on Steam itself with some success. The Steam community at large can be nasty but the platform is good for news updates. By the time we ramp up public presence for “Game 2” I suspect we’ll be cross posting there. Should I post about updating this website? Probably not until we actually have some news, right?

Discord is another interesting platform of which I actually have experience with. I’m not certain about the future of the platform¹ but it continues to be a popular choice for building a community. I’ll study up on how successful servers are run and see what I can do. I can rah rah all I want about open source software and avoiding centralized platforms but at the end of the day, people have Discord accounts.

I was talking to my team a few days ago and posed an interesting question. Back in the day (2013 - 2017) it seemed like the most impactful thing we could do is get an article in a big publication like IGN.² These days though… when was the last time you conferred with a publication when looking for games? I know that Google still likes to serve up random articles from these places that algorithmically get blasted to your phone, but is traditional media even a worthwhile pursuit in 2026? Sure, there are the big “directs” the platform holders do - how the hell do you make your way on to one of those? Just ask them?³

White Lotus naturally has not had any presence at any physical trade / consumer events in a long time.⁴ Back in our XING days, though, we were constantly attending just about any and everything we heard of. Some events are still around (PAX West, Indiecade… sorta) and a few are long gone (E3, PlayStation Experience). There are some new shows popping up, like Summer Game Fest, but I can’t help but feel like the post covid landscape of shows has fundamentally changed since our experience with XING. If we do any event stuff, it’s gonna be different this time around, for sure.

Then there is YouTube. I enjoy a good trailer, and I plan on making a few for “Game 2”, but as far as other theoretical video content? I don’t think that is a great use of our time.

Do we hire someone for all this? Does that solve anything? Are there passionate PR experts out there willing to work for a company that doesn’t really want any advertisement?

Does any of this make sense?

But what about the money?

You can’t run a studio on dreams alone - someone has to buy the pizza. I’ve been reading lot of non-fiction lately regarding the nature of business, startups in the games industry, and whatnot, and there is this pervasive “It will be worth it” mentality that persists from story to story. The ends justify the means.

I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how I can support this dream of creation without embracing the trends that I believe are actively making the world a worse place to exist. I’m going to try, though, potentially at great cost. I’ve been self-funding “Game 2”, which affords us great independence at the cost of, well, the cost of years of development.

But what about a publisher?

Honestly I’m not totally opposed to the idea of working with a publisher. Theoretically, they can sorta just, handle, all this stuff, and we get to make a game. However, my experience with publishers in the past has been, let’s just say less than stellar, so I’m not exactly chomping at the bit to find one. I think there is a real possibility of finding a good match, especially if the partnership is less about funding and more about mutual success. I’m not going to hold my breath though, and I am fully prepared to self-publish here on out.

I am not afraid.

I’ve been poking around at other blogs while writing this, and found a common sentiment among entrepreneurs. “You are not making the product for yourself. Figure out your market, then make that product.”

I reject this mentality. At White Lotus, we make games that we enjoy. We make games in service of making the world a happier place. We do not make games to tap into some market, or to capitalize on trends, or to try and be the next big thing. What happens if we fail to get any traction on this project? Well, I guess we commissioned a kickass game for ourselves, then!

Does that make me a bad businessman?