[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":13},["ShallowReactive",2],{"post:hello-world":3},{"index":4,"slug":5,"title":6,"date":7,"tag":8,"accent":9,"minutes":10,"excerpt":11,"body":12},"01","hello-world","Hello World","18 Jun 2026","Studio","text-bloo",4,"Tom Bloomer, our Founder, on why Frozenbloo Studios exists, what's wrong with the industry, and what we're trying to do instead.","Hello world.\n\nIt's the first thing you ever get a computer to say back to you: you write one line, you run it, and there it is on the screen, proof the machine heard you. I've typed it more times than I can count, so it felt like the right way to start the first proper post on here.\n\nI'm Tom, and I'm in the process of founding Frozenbloo Studios, a small software and games studio based up on the north coast of Northern Ireland. The company is in motion. The rest is being figured out as I go.\n\nI wasn't planning to write a big mission statement, because nobody reads those and half of them are nonsense or ai rubbish anyway, but I've been quietly wound up about the state of things for a while now, and it's worth saying plainly what I'm trying to do, because it sits underneath every decision I'm making.\n\nThe industry I have grown up to love has somehow talked itself into believing that more is the same thing as better. Every couple of years a new engine turns up, everyone piles onto it, and within a year every game looks identical and runs worse than the last lot did. The new Unreal is nearly here and I can already tell you how it goes: glossy lighting smeared over everything, a stutter every time you move your mouose, that wee hitch in the first hour while it re-builds its shaders, and the gentle hint that maybe you should go and buy yourself a newer graphics card. Games are shipping north of one hundred gigabytes now, and it isn't because there's one hundred gigabytes of actual game in there. It's that trimming and optimising anything takes effort, and nobody further up the chain ever really cares.\n\nThen there's the slop, for want of a kinder word. Storefronts are filling up with games where the art came out of a prompt, the writing came out of a prompt, the quests came out of a prompt, and honestly you can feel it the second you start playing. There's nobody home in it. I'm not going to sit here and tell you the tools are evil, it's just a prediction algorithm at the end of the day. What bothers me is people handing over the deciding, the taste, the reason a thing ended up the way it did, and then calling whatever falls out the other end a game. That part was always the actual job. It's the only bit worth paying anyone to do.\n\nAnd then the companies. They let tens of thousands of people go over the last two years, a fair number of them the names you'd find buried in the credits of games you love, then turned round and shipped the next title half finished at full price with the rest promised in a launch-day patch. Some of them will stand up and tell you they're doing it differently, doing it right, that this time the crunch was optional and the AI was used responsibly and the monetisation is actually quite fair if you think about it. And then the game comes out. Players quietly stopped being players somewhere along the line and became a figure on a dashboard. I think it's diabloical to put it lightly, and I'd bet a good few people inside those buildings think so too.\n\nAnd that's just the games industry. Normal software is the same story, maybe worse. Everything's a subscription now. Your photo editor phones home, your note taking app wants twelve quid a month, half your OS is a storefront sprinkled with ads and has a taskbar attached. Apps that used to just sit there and work now need an account, an internet connection, and your blessing to collect telemetry... and half of them are just a website in a box. Electron apps shipping a entire copy of Chrome just to render a settings page, wrappers on top of wrappers, three hundred megabytes to display some text and a toggle switch. It got normalised so gradually that people forgot it was ever any different.\n\nNone of this is me trying to take shots at anyone in particular. I just want to be honest, going in, about what I'm trying to build and why.\n\nI want to make things that run cold: quick on the machine you already own, easy on your battery, not squatting on half your drive making you decide what to delete to make room for the latest seasonal update. Servers that don't need a warehouse full of spinning fans just to keep the lights on and stop a \"thermal incident\". The industry treats power consumption as someone else's problem and data centre capacity as infinite, and neither of those things are true. There's enough being burned already. Design what software actually needs, cut everything else, then keep cutting until it nearly disappears.\n\nThe goals are straightforward, even if getting there won't be. Whatever we make should run on the hardware you already have. It won't nag you or quietly phone home. And when we say something is finished, it'll probably have been finished months earlier, and we'll have spent the time since refining it rather than rushing it out. I don't know exactly how long any of this will take, or what the first real project looks like yet. But the thinking is there, and it isn't going anywhere.\n\nSo, hello. Early days, but they're moving. It'll be slow, I'll probably make 101 mistakes along the way... but I'll always keep you posted.\n\nAll the best,\n\nTom Bloomer\n",1784045593851]