34
votes
10,000-hour indie RPG goes free-to-play as devs aren't comfortable making "tens of thousands of dollars from people who don't play the game"
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- Authors
- Kaan Serin
- Published
- Jul 18 2024
- Word count
- 380 words
Ok this confused me a little, but I had a look to understand it.
In the article (and the Steam post they quote from) they highlight how they don't want to feel like the devs are stealing people's money for buying the game and playing less of it than the demo (or the two hour refund period). So they made the game free so everyone could just play it.
I was confused because from the article it sounds like they have no intention of making money off the game and they just want to let people play for fun.
The base game seems to include minimum 100 hours of content (the store page quotes) which is a massive amount of content for free, I am very positive about that.
But they also have like $100 of DLC split into chapters where I guess the other 900 hours come from.
I don't really feel it his quite the same mark to say:
"oh yeah we're doing a nice thing for the community, by the way at some point you still have to buy 100 dollars of DLC for more content"....
Again, I don't disagree it's a good move, but I feel like the headline missed out the fact it's not ALL free, they are making a hefty bit of cash in DLC.
Yeah my bells started to ring when I opened the store page and saw all the DLCs
Call me cynical, but this looks more like a savvy business move than pure altruism. Making the base game free while offering DLCs could be brilliant for attracting players and boosting profits. It's potentially a smart strategy, and there's nothing wrong with that - I just don't buy the purely selfless angle they're presenting.
I take it as "we are giving you 100 hours of the game to make up your mind, not standard 2 hours that Steam provides". So the game us actually not free, as you pointed out, it is more like extended demo.
Also, you have miscalculated by one order there - that is if there really is 10 000 hours of content in the game.
It still seems like a good deal for consumers to be able to try the game like this. So if it makes sense from a business perspective too, that's great for them. Hope it turns out well and others start to copy this model. It's a shame demos are not too common anymore.
This is kind of one of those win-win scenarios though. They don't want to make money on players who bounce off the game but want to give people the opportunity to try it and decide if they want to then buy the (yeah, higher than average price) rest of the game. I, personally, don't have a problem shelling out $100 for a game I like, double so when there's thousands of hours of content, especially if they can get me hooked with some free starting content. I get, however, how it can also seem like the company is just doing some spearfishing for whales and trying to generate some additional goodwill and press off it. Maybe that's all it is, I guess I don't know their motivations.
It's pretty cool of the devs to take a stance like this, especially considering they're still giving people the option to refund the game.
The game is called Tactical Nexus, available here on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1141290/Tactical_Nexus/
The first two "chapters" are now free to play, but you will need to purchase the other five to play the complete game.