Today, as a hard decision that I had to make, I am finally removing the downloadable version from itch.io. As this will understandably upset most of you guys, I would like to at least explain the background of this decision.

Stick Veterans started as a small spare-time project here and on Gamejolt, and after a lot of personal work and time, it slowly rose to be a relatively popular game. I am sincerely grateful for each and every person who played the game, enjoyed it or disliked it, made maps for it or shared comments, reviews and gameplays of it.

At some point, I started work on a multiplayer version, which was almost 1 year of exhausting development. Eventually, it made it into the version "1.1", which was the downloadable version until now. This, however, was poorly done. Network gameplay suffered with lag, there was no auto matchmaking, and you had to manually connect to a LAN with friends to play. It was still far from what I wanted.

What needed to be done is to enlist a matchmaking network such as Photon to allow the players to connect to each other. This, however, is quite expensive, especially for a free game with no revenue at all. I was already spending personal money for the game website and map repository, and couldn't spend more.

Poki reached out to me unexpectedly at some point, after taking a good look in the game and expressing sincere interest and faith in its potential. They, too, wanted to see a multiplayer version as I imagined it, and they offered to take the game to their platform and cover the multiplayer expenses themselves. Eventually,  this became a reality, and now thousands of players visit the game there every day.

To be absolutely open with everyone, thanks to this move, I am now finally making some revenue from ads served in the game. Some people may be annoyed by ads, or they may assume that it was a significant factor in leading me to this transition. Most of the time, these people have little knowledge of how much personal work has been devoted to this game, and take for granted that free games can exist without any form of financial support to their developers. There is little I can do to convince them otherwise.

Until now, I continued providing downloads for the old version on itch.io and gamejolt. However, this has proven to be counterproductive: players kept playing the old version and asking for features or bugfixes that already exist in the new version. They even make youtube videos that still show the old version.

For as much as I could, I tried to please everyone. This has been detrimental to my physical and mental health. Even if I kept it up, I would soon burn out and give up on the game, as I almost did before transitioning to Poki.

As such, I have to make the difficult yet reasonable decision to cut off the legacy downloads. I know many people will be displeased, but there is no easier way for me. I will keep up the itch.io game page without downloads, for as long as itch.io allows it to exist (which may not be long).

There are downloads of the old versions in other sites, if people really want to google them. These contain some preloaded maps, and a ZIP archive of all the available maps up to now is here: SV maps archive

Again, I thank everyone who has played and supported the game so far, and I hope I will see them on Poki. The game's facebook page will always exist, and I intend to make a Discord server soon.