Our Vision

Every Driftgrain release will still be playable by anyone, with or without us, decades from now, on hardware that doesn't exist yet, kept alive by communities we'll never meet.

This is our vision, founded on three inspirations - a quote, a question and a movement.

That's the quote that inspired Driftgrain. We want our games to take root in communities that love games for the sake of games and not for limited-edition DLC or pre-order gimmicks. And like seeds on a breeze, we want our games to live on, organically, even if we never see them grow to their fullest.

How many games from your youth did you fall in love with and can't play today? How many have you wanted to hand to your own kid, only to find that licensing servers and other key systems went dark years ago? Then we asked ourselves how chess, checkers, card games and tabletop RPGs survive decades, centuries, and even millennia. The reason is simple: their "source code" belongs to everyone.

The third inspiration is the Stop Killing Games movement, and we couldn't agree with it more. Gamers are tired of being treated as a commodity: paying for the game, then subscriptions, then the DLC, and then watching all of it stop working with nothing to show for years of loving something. If we offer subscriptions, they will be reasonably priced and never predatory. If we provide DLC, it's yours permanently. Most importantly, your saves, preferences, achievements and purchases are yours. They stay with you, they stay available, and you control them.

We know what it takes to make a game. Gamers know too, which is why they'll gladly pay well for a good one. What they won't do anymore is be treated as though their own contributions count for nothing - the videos, the guides, the word of mouth, the hundreds of hours. A game doesn't exist without the people who buy it, play it, love it, and share it.

We're not promising the next AAA blockbuster. We're promising games you can play for a lifetime and pass down. So here's the deal. We keep the source closed for a fixed number of years - never more than twenty, set on launch day and never pushed back. After that time the game and its source code belong to the public, permanently. We can't shut your game off, because core play never required a server in the first place. When a server component exists, the server application will be publicly available so anyone can run one. Its source is released on the same clock as the game. This isn't some vague promise or marketing gimmick. It's a promise written into the company's operating agreement and into the license that ships with every game.

This is our vision. Those are our inspirations. And that's our promise.