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Developing games in Cuba, my experience

 It has been a long time since my last post. I have no time to write, specially not in english, and to make things worse, I found some sort of bug in Blogger. But you are reading this to know about my successful career as game developer, not to hear me complain about bugs.

In 2021 I released my first game. It was a remake of an old cuban game: The Labyrinth of Knowledge. You can get it free on itch.io, but I would appreciate if you leave a tip for a new keyboard and mouse. The future looked bright: there were changes and finally we could create software startups, including the ones dedicated exclusively to games. Two of those startups released successful titles for Android and made money of it. The first dev group, ConWiro, developed a payment gateway that used SMS, but was the second studio, Nameless, who made much more profit of it, with the first cuban made multiplayer game. Even the government showed some interest in pushing game development.

In march of this year I got my papers: I was the creator of a new bussiness oriented to game development. The process also required to create a fiscal bank account, that took a nice bite of my savings: 3000 pesos, frozen there forever and Wakanda. I had my own game group! I could make myself a card with "CEO" on it! Our second project was in late stage, two moths away from the first beta, after a very rough year of work (that year of work... is another story and will be told other time). Then things started to look not so bright. 

Remember the SMS based payment gateway? Well, the ISP takes 30% of the sales. Another company, Desoft, which has the only IP in the country allowed to access the SMS server, took another 30% (and guess what, they dont even developed the code to handle the payments via SMS). ConWiro needed a little percent too, so lets say that the game developer ends up receiving just a 30$ of the money paid by the player. From your cut, you have to pay a 15% monthly tax, and another 50% at the end of the year.

So, most of the money was lost in the process, but microtransactions were the way (my first game barely sold 60 copies, even when the demo reached 3000 downloads). I had to personally chase somebody to develop a Godot plugin to access the SMS gateway during a month. There was only month left for the first closed beta and I wanted to release it with microtransactions to test the process. And I got the plugin... just to find that I had no use for it. 

ConWiro had to close the SMS gateway, because the operational costs were too high. Im not going to talk about the hidden, weird fees charged by our ISP (ETECSA) and Desoft. Maybe you would ask why are SMS payments so important for us. Nobody uses that in the modern world! Are no other choices, like using a back acount, like civilized people? 

Ok, first let me remind you that it is Cuba we are talking about. Bank accounts and debit cards are something new. Payment gateways using bank accounts are... not in early stage, they are in primitive stage. ETECSA has an app (widely adopted and used, I was one of the first user, I bet) that lets you manage and pay for services using USSD codes, but its API is undocumented and they simply take months to answer your request to access it. Enzona is a more modern, web oriented service, a real payment gateway, but its API is poorly designed: you can only use it from a web page, not directly from a mobile/desktop application. And it fails, recently they were 20 days out of service. Not their fault, of course, they depend on ETECSA datacenter and it failed.

We released the closed beta, the public beta, and the final version in a couple of months, but still we dont foresee any significant profit. Im sorry, but I lied to you. Im not having a very successful career as CEO of a game studio. Actually, the other two serious groups have announced that they will not work anymore for the cuban market and neither will I. Seems that we had an very bad case of idealism, but we are cured now. 

In a future post I will talk about how difficult will be for us to work for the global market.

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