We talked about money. Let's keep the honesty going: competition, and release dates.
When you're building games, you do market research. You compare, gather data, make informed decisions. We do all of it, seriously. But there's a version of this that genuinely annoys us: profit-based research that comes back "don't make this, there are already good games like it, make something else instead, there's a gap." That's not content-based research, it's treating games like slots in a market instead of things worth making. And it gets the logic backwards. A game shouldn't be made because there are none of its kind. It should be made because there are many.
Borrow from film for a second: if someone wants to make a film about love, and there are already four films about love, is there no room for a fifth? Of course there is. Every good one earns its place by what it is, not by whether the shelf had an empty spot.
So no, we won't decide what to make by running from competition. For our tennis project specifically: there are already three or four wonderful tennis games on Steam, and we don't compare ourselves to them. Not because we think we're above them, but because that's simply not how we choose what to build. We build what we've wanted for twenty years. The shelf can hold us all.
And honestly, we love our competition. We were inspired by these games. We're still playing them, still learning from them, and a lot of them come from studios just like ours: two, three, four people pushing with everything they have. Those aren't rivals. Those are the neighbors on the same street.
So when do we release? We release when we feel comfortable putting the game in front of you. That's the whole formula, influenced by nobody except us, because as you know, there isn't a publisher's quarter to hit. No dates in this post. Just a compass: we make what we love, we respect everyone building alongside us, and we ship when it's right.