YES, WE INCLUDED PIZZA JOKES TO MAKE IT LESS SAD.
An Open Love Letter to our PC Fans
It’s been over two weeks since the release of Kingdom Rush Origins and so many of you have reached out to us asking about the PC version, that we believe you deserve a straight and honest answer. So here it is…
To our Beloved and Awesome PC fans,
It’s not you, it’s us.
We love you. You are a crucial part of the gamer community. And we are very much aware that PC is where it all really started for Ironhide and the Kingdom Rush series.
PC offers so many cool features that makes the Kingdom Rush series fun and different from the Mobile experience. The large screen, the mouse controls, the free hand for stuffing pizza in our faces… it’s an awesome way to enjoy any game out there, not just our own.
But even if it breaks your hearts, and even if it makes you super angry, here is the bottomline…
We won’t be able to make Kingdom Rush Origins for PC. Period.
Wait! Don’t run off to make an angry post just yet! Let us explain!
It can be reduced to this:
Should we make a PC version? Absolutely!
Can we make it? Nope.
Are we focusing solely on mobile from now on? Not at all. We’ll keep making games for both mobile and PC in the future.
There is a reason for all of this and it’s not what you might think. Meaning, this is not because the PC market is not tempting, or because we don’t care about PC players.
As most of you already know, we had our big break in Armorgames with the Flash version of the first Kingdom Rush. We programmed it using AS3. And then we made the decision that would take us all the way to this letter you are currently reading… we decided to make a Mobile version without having any experience with that technology. Now, this was 2011 and the development tools weren’t nearly as friendly as they are today. We had to use Objetive-C + cocos 2d, which forced us to code the game from zero.
Frontiers came along so once again we made the game both for Mobile devices and on Flash (our contract with Armorgames was for two games, and they deserved our full commitment). But we were also trying to get the Steam Greenlight, because as both gamers and game developers, we always dreamt about having a game on Steam.
By the time we finished coding the Kingdom Rush version for Steam using Unity in C#, we suddenly realised that we were exhausted. In three years we had made five versions of our two games. For each version, the programming was done from zero. We can’t stress this enough.
At this point in our story we had a very real need to release a brand new game, with three separate engines (one for Flash, one for mobile and one for PC), and only one small team of stoic programmers to do all the work.
By then it was almost the end of 2013… and we just knew that if we wanted to keep making games in our own terms, we had to choose a path and stick to it.
So, after some very hard considerations, a tough decision was made. We are a small studio, we publish our own games, we have no fallback plan. So we must pick our fights very carefully. And devoting time and energy to create another version of Kingdom Rush Origins is a fight that will leave us with a pyrrhic victory (meaning that we can succeed, but at too much of a cost).
So, if there won’t be a PC nor a Flash version for Kingdom Rush Origins then…
What are we going to do for the next year?
Eat pizza until we learn to speak Italian by osmosis?
No. Not really. We’ll explore the possibility of coding for all platforms using a universal port.
And of course… We’ll keep on making games!
Not a Kingdom Rush Origins for PC though. It will be something different. We need to stay creative to avoid stagnation. Motivation is key in this industry and we shouldn’t repeat the hardships experienced while making our previous games over and over again. That was a hard won lesson for us.
This has been a bit of a long explanation. But you deserved to know exactly how and why we came up with some decisions that makes sense in our current state.
We hope that you can understand us. There is still so much to do, so much to learn, so much to improve. The road is long and filled with perils, and we would much rather have all of you walking with us along the way.
Thank you for reading all of this. Stay awesome.
Much love,
Juan Amorin
Community Manager
Ironhide Game Studio

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