Humble Games' last release before the studio was "restructured" last week, Bõ: Path of the Teal Lotus, has launched a Patreon to support the game "in these uncertain times".
Writing on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, developer Squid Shock said that whilst it did not fault the team's work, Humble's changes "have meant we have missed out on critical post-launch support, which may put our studio's future at risk".
Although Humble has disputed the statements of former staff that characterised the layoffs as a shutdown, instead insisting laying off its staff is merely a "restructuring", Squid Shock also describes the changes as "shutting down".
Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus - the gorgeous 2.5D platformer with Metroidvania elements based on Japanese folklore - released earlier this month across PC and consoles. However, due to its partnership with Humble Games, developer Squid Shock says it has faced a number of unexpected stumbling blocks since release, notably with its console ports.
In a recent post shared on Steam, Squid Shock acknowledged the "unexpected changes" within Humble Games, after layoffs were confirmed at the indie publisher, and said it was still unsure what was happening next.
"This news caught us off guard, and we are still working to understand the full implications," the Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus team wrote on 25th July.
Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus - the gorgeous 2.5D platformer with Metroidvania elements based on Japanese folklore - released earlier this month across PC and consoles. However, due to its partnership with Humble Games, developer Squid Shock says it has faced a number of unexpected stumbling blocks since release, notably with its console ports.
In a recent post shared on Steam, Squid Shock acknowledged the "unexpected changes" within Humble Games, after layoffs were confirmed at the indie publisher, and said it was still unsure what was happening next.
"This news caught us off guard, and we are still working to understand the full implications," the Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus team wrote on 25th July.
All 36 employees of Humble Games publishing have reportedly been laid off. According to business developer Nicola Kwan, staff were informed at 9am this morning, and told that “the company is shutting down.” Humble dispute this in a statement made to Game Developer, claiming that the publishing label is "undergoing restructuring," as opposed to a full shutdown.
Humble’s statement - which you can read in full here - attributes the events to “challenging economic times for indie game publishing,” saying that “Humble Games has made the difficult but necessary decision to restructure our operations.”
All 36 employees of Humble Games publishing have reportedly been laid off. According to business developer Nicola Kwan, staff were informed at 9am this morning, and told that “the company is shutting down.” Humble dispute this in a statement made to Game Developer, claiming that the publishing label is "undergoing restructuring," as opposed to a full shutdown.
Humble’s statement - which you can read in full here - attributes the events to “challenging economic times for indie game publishing,” saying that “Humble Games has made the difficult but necessary decision to restructure our operations.”
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, Ernie Smith’s newsletter, which hunts for the end of the long tail.
These days, computer users take collaboration software for granted. Google Docs, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Salesforce, and so on, are such a big part of many people’s daily lives that they hardly notice them. But they are the outgrowth of years of hard work done before the Internet became a thing, when there was a thorny problem: How could people collaborate effectively when everyone’s using a stand-alone personal computer?
In the early days of the computing era, when IBM’s PC reigned supreme, collaboration was difficult. Ross Anthony Willis/Fairfax Media/Getty Images
How the PC made us forget about collaboration for a while
Imagine that it’s the early-to-mid-1980s and that you run a large company. You’ve invested a lot of money into personal computers, which your employees are now using—IBM PCs, Apple Macintoshes, clones, and the like. There’s just one problem: You have a bunch of computers, but they don’t talk to one another.
If you’re in a small office and need to share a file, it’s no big deal: You can just hand a floppy disk off to someone on the other side of the room. But what if you’re part of an enterprise company and the person you need to collaborate with is on the other side of the country? Passing your colleague a disk doesn’t work.
The new personal-computing technologies clearly needed to do more to foster collaboration. They needed to be able to take input from a large group of people inside an office, to allow files to be shared and distributed, and to let multiple users tweak and mash information with everyone being able to sign off on the final version.
The hardware that would enable such collaboration software, or “groupware” as it tended to be called early on, varied by era. In the 1960s and ’70s, it was usually a mainframe-to-terminal setup, rather than something using PCs. Later, in the 1980s, it was either a
token ring or Ethernet network, which were competing local-networking technologies. But regardless of the hardware used for networking, the software for collaboration needed to be developed.
Stanford Research Institute engineer Douglas Engelbart is sometimes called “the father of groupware.”Getty Images
Some of the basic ideas behind groupware
were first forged at the Stanford Research Institute by a Douglas Engelbart–led team, in the 1960s, working on what they called an oN-Line System (NLS). An early version of NLS was presented in 1968 during what became known as the “Mother of All Demos.” It was essentially a coming-out party for many computing innovations that would eventually become commonplace. If you have 90 minutes and want to see something 20-plus years ahead of its time, watch this video.
By the late 1980s, at a point when the PC had begun to dominate the workplace, Engelbart was less impressed with what had been gained than with what had been lost in the process. He
wrote (with Harvey Lehtman) in Byte magazine in 1988:
The emergence of the personal computer as a major presence in the 1970s and 1980s led to tremendous increases in personal productivity and creativity. It also caused setbacks in the development of tools aimed at increasing organizational effectiveness—tools developed on the older time-sharing systems.
To some extent, the personal computer was a reaction to the overloaded and frustrating time-sharing systems of the day. In emphasizing the power of the individual, the personal computer revolution turned its back on those tools that led to the empowering of both co-located and distributed work groups collaborating simultaneously and over time on common knowledge work.
The introduction of local- and wide-area networks into the personal computer environment and the development of mail systems are leading toward some of the directions explored on the earlier systems. However, some of the experiences of those earlier pioneering systems should be considered anew in evolving newer collaborative environments.
Groupware finally started to catch on in the late 1980s, with tech companies putting considerable resources into developing collaboration software—perhaps taken in by the idea of “orchestrating work teams,” as
an Infoworld piece characterized the challenge in 1988. The San Francisco Examiner reported, for example, that General Motors had invested in the technology, and was beginning to require its suppliers to accept purchase orders electronically.
Focusing on collaboration software was a great way for independent software companies to stand out, this being an area that large companies—Microsoft in particular—had basically ignored. Today, Microsoft is the 800-pound gorilla of collaboration software, thanks to its combination of Teams and Office 365. But it took the tech giant a very long while to get there: Microsoft started taking the market seriously only around 1992.
One company in particular was well-positioned to take advantage of the opening that existed in the 1980s. That was the
Lotus Development Corporation, a Cambridge, Mass.–based software company that made its name with its Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program for IBM PCs.
Lotus did not invent groupware or coin the word—on top of Engelbart’s formative work at Stanford, the term
had been around for years before Lotus Notes came on the scene. But it was the company that brought collaboration software to everyone’s attention.
Ray Ozzie [left] was primarily responsible for the development of Lotus Notes, the first popular groupware solution.
Left: Ann E. Yow-Dyson/Getty Images; Right: James Keyser/Getty Images
The person most associated with the development of Notes was
Ray Ozzie, who was recruited to Lotus after spending time working on VisiCalc, an early spreadsheet program. Ozzie essentially built out what became Notes while working at Iris Associates, a direct offshoot of Lotus that Ozzie founded to develop the Notes application. After some years of development in stealth mode, the product was released in 1989.
Ozzie explained his inspiration for Notes to Jessica Livingston, who described this history in her book,
Founders At Work:
In Notes, it was (and this is hard to imagine because it was a different time) the concept that we’d all be using computers on our desktops, and therefore we might want to use them as communication tools. This was a time when PCs were just emerging as spreadsheet tools and word processing replacements, still available only on a subset of desks, and definitely no networks. It was ’82 when I wrote the specs for it. It had been based on a system called PLATO [Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations] that I’d been exposed to at college, which was a large-scale interactive system that people did learning and interactive gaming on, and things like that. It gave us a little bit of a peek at the future—what it would be like if we all had access to interactive systems and technology.
Building an application based on PLATO turned out to be the right idea at the right time, and it gave Lotus an edge in the market. Notes included email, a calendaring and scheduling tool, an address book, a shared database, and programming capabilities, all in a single front-end application.
Lotus Notes on Computer Chronicles Fall 1989
As an all-in-one platform built for scale, Notes
gained a strong reputation as an early example of what today would be called a business-transformation tool, one that managed many elements of collaboration. It was complicated from an IT standpoint and required a significant investment to maintain. In a way, what Notes did that was perhaps most groundbreaking was that it helped turn PCs into something that large companies could readily use.
As Fortune noted in 1994, Lotus had a massive lead in the groupware space, in part because the software worked essentially the same anywhere in a company’s network. We take that for granted now, but back then it was considered magical:
Like Lotus 1-2-3, Notes is easy to customize. A sales organization, for instance, might use it to set up an electronic bulletin board that lets people pool information about prospective clients. If some of the info is confidential, it can be restricted so not everyone can call it up.
Notes makes such homegrown applications and the data they contain accessible throughout an organization. The electronic bulletin board you consult in Singapore is identical to the one your counterparts see in Sioux City, Iowa. The key to this universality is a procedure called replication, by which Notes copies information from computer to computer throughout the network. You might say Ozzie figured out how to make the machines telepathic—each knows what the others are thinking.
A 1996 commercial for Notes highlighted its use by FedEx. Other commercials would use the stand-up comedian Denis Leary or be highly conceptual. Rarely, if ever, would these television advertisements show the software.
In the mid-1990’s, it was common for magazines to publish stories about how Notes reshaped businesses large and small.
A 1996 Inc. piece, for example, described how a natural-foods company successfully produced a new product in just eight months, a feat the company directly credited to Notes.
“It’s become our general manager,” Groveland Trading Co. president Steve McDonnell recalled.
Notes wasn’t cheap (InfoWorld lists the price circa 1990 as US $62,000), and it was complicated to manage. But the positive results it enabled were immensely hard to ignore. IBM noticed and ended up buying Lotus in 1995, almost entirely to get ahold of Notes. Even earlier, Microsoft had realized that office collaboration was a big deal, and they wanted in.
Microsoft’s first foray into collaboration software was its 1992 release of Windows for Workgroups. Despite great efforts to promote the release, the software was not a commercial success. Daltrois/Flickr
Microsoft had high hopes for
Windows for Workgroups, the networking-focused variant of its popular Windows 3.1 software suite. To create buzz for it, the company pulled out all the stops. Seriously.
In the fall of 1992, Microsoft
paid something like $2 million to put on a Broadway production with Bill Gates literally center stage, at New York City’s Gershwin Theater, one of the largest on Broadway. It was a wild show, and yet, somehow, there is no video of this event currently posted online—until now. The only person I know of who has a video recording of this extravaganza is, fittingly enough, Ray Ozzie, the groupware guru and Notes inventor. Ozzie later served as a top executive at Microsoft, famously replacing Bill Gates as Chief Software Architect in the mid-2000s, and he has shared this video with us for this post:
The 1992 one-day event was not a hit. Watch to see why. (Courtesy of Ray Ozzie and the Microsoft Corporation)
00:00 Opening number
02:23 “My VGA can hardly wait for your CPU to reciprocate”
05:17 Bill Gates enters the stage
27:55 “Get ready, get set” musical number
31:50 Bit with Mike Appe, Microsoft VP of sales
58:30 Bill Gates does jumping jacks
A 1992 Washington Post article describes the performance, which involved dozens of actors, some of whom were dressed like the Blues Brothers. At one point, Gates did jumping jacks. Gates himself later said, “That was so bad, I thought [then Microsoft CEO] Ballmer was going to retch.” For those who don’t have an extra hour to spend, here is a summary:
To get a taste of the show, watch this news segment from channel 4.
Courtesy of Microsoft Corporate Archives
Despite all the effort to generate fanfare, Windows for Workgroups was
not a hit. While Windows 3.1 was dominant, Microsoft had built a program that didn’t seem to capture the burgeoning interest in collaborative work in a real way. Among other things, it didn’t initially support the TCP/IP networking protocol, despite the fact that it was the networking technology that was winning the market and enabled the rise of the Internet.
In its original version, Windows for Workgroups carried such a negative reputation in Microsoft’s own headquarters that the company nicknamed it
Windows for Warehouses, referring to the company’s largely unsold inventory, according to Microsoft’s own expert on company lore, Raymond Chen.
Unsuccessful as it was, the fact that it existed in the first place hinted at Microsoft’s general acknowledgement that perhaps this networking thing was going to catch on with its users.
Launched in late 1992, a few months after Windows 3.1 itself, the product was Microsoft’s
first attempt at integrated networking in a Windows package. The software enabled file-sharing across servers, printer sharing, and email—table stakes in the modern day but at the time a big deal.
This video presents a very accurate view of what it was like to use Windows in 1994.
Unfortunately, it was a big deal that came a few years late. Microsoft itself was
so lukewarm on the product that the company had to update it to Windows for Workgroups 3.11 just a year later, whose marquee feature wasn’t improved network support but increased disk speed. Confusingly, the company had just released Windows NT by this point, a program that better matched the needs of enterprise customers.
The work group terminology Microsoft introduced with Windows for Workgroups stuck around, though, and it is actually
used in Windows to this day.
In 2024, group-oriented software feels like the default paradigm, with single-user apps being the anomaly. Over time, groupware became so pervasive that people no longer think of it as groupware, though there are plenty of big, hefty, groupware-like tools out there, like
Salesforce. Now, it’s just software. But no one should forget the long history of collaboration software or its ongoing value. It’s what got most of us through the pandemic, even if we never used the word “groupware” to describe it.
Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus is a stylish and impressive looking game, but a few too many rough edges bring down the experience, making it a fun, if not memorable experience. Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus Developer: Squid Shock Studios Price: $20 USD Platforms: PC (reviewed), Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch MonsterVine […]
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In the early days of the computing era, when IBM’s PC reigned supreme, collaboration was difficult. Ross Anthony Willis/Fairfax Media/Getty Images
Stanford Research Institute engineer Douglas Engelbart is 
Ray Ozzie [left] was primarily responsible for the development of Lotus Notes, the first popular groupware solution.
Left: Ann E. Yow-Dyson/Getty Images; Right: James Keyser/Getty Images
Microsoft’s first foray into collaboration software was its 1992 release of Windows for Workgroups. Despite great efforts to promote the release, the software was not a commercial success. 
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