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Hey all - I’m guy_smiley. I run the store on Spellbreak. I set the store schedule, the prices, and figure out how every cosmetic is earned including chapter rewards. A few things have come up lately and I’d like to take some time to talk about our general philosophy around purchases in Spellbreak.
Before we dive in, as we’ve mentioned a few times, Jade Spiral is a Prologue chapter reward. It wasn’t meant to show up in the store; if you purchased it by mistake, please contact our support team for a refund at https://support.proletariat.com/hc/en-us/requests/new. This was a manual error on my part that we’ll be checking for in the future.
First off, let me reiterate that Spellbreak is a free to play game. We want to share Spellbreak with as many players as possible and going free to play makes that possible. At the same time, game development isn’t free and we still need to make money to continue supporting Spellbreak. Even so, we’re operating Spellbreak for the long term and over the long term your trust is the most important thing to us—far more important than the sale of any one item or short term profits.
Trust starts with gameplay. We haven’t sold anything that affects gameplay and have no plans to do so. You can’t pay for power in Spellbreak, period. To fund development, we’re focused on selling cosmetic items.
Trust means straightforward pricing. We have no Loot Crates or random rewards from purchases in Spellbreak and have no plans to add them. If an item says it costs 1000 gold, it costs 1000 gold. While it’s fun to open random packs, they can be frustrating and borderline predatory and we’re happy to see the industry move beyond them.
Straightforward pricing extends to things like bundles too. We’re not going to make you buy a bunch of stuff you don’t want to just so you can get the one item that you do. Our bundles all have standalone purchase options for every item in the bundle so you can always go for exactly what you want. Moreover, we won’t punish you for standalone purchases. So if you want to buy the rest of the bundle later, you get the same bundle discount percent applied to completing the collection. We plan on offering more bundles starting in our next major release.
It was with straightforward pricing in mind that we recently added the first elemental outfits into the store. Today they are simply rare outfits themed around our elements for 1200 gold each and that’s how we expect the vast majority of players to see them. We will never sell the higher level versions independently; we agree with you and have always thought that approach would be terrible. The ability to upgrade cosmetics will be an additional reward in future chapters, on top of what we start offering in Chapter 1. We imagined this is a pleasant surprise for anyone who buys the elemental outfits as rares before then.
We didn’t talk about our future plans because the upgrade system is a little further out than other stuff we’ve talked about. We wanted to keep things straightforward and simple for you and also because, well, things change. Game development is complex, which is why many game devs don’t talk about their future plans. We often find that features are more complicated than we initially scope them out to be and take longer to build or that our priorities change due to new ideas or feedback. This happens to every game developer, but it still sucks to fail to deliver things you hinted at, let alone promised.
Even so, many of you were/are upset about the prospect of needing a future (paid) Chapter Pass to upgrade these premium elemental outfits, which brings us to our next pillar:
We want to earn your trust by ensuring that everyone has access to the core Spellbreak experience. While Spellbreak is free to play, every player should feel like they’re able to play the full version of the game. In other words, we want everyone to participate in not just the chapter system, but the premium Chapter Pass system and we’re taking several measures to make that happen.
We made the Prologue free so every player could start exploring more of the Hollow Lands while earning gold and cosmetic rewards. We’re planning to make the Chapter Pass cost 1000 gold in Chapter 1 and you can earn thousands of gold just by playing the game. We’ll also be bundling the Chapter Pass for free into our $24.99 and $99.99 gold purchases.
This also means creating very few limited-access cosmetics, so you don’t feel as though large swaths of the cosmetic catalog are wholly unattainable. For many of the promotions you’ve seen so far like Gloom, Nightshade, Sundown, Lavender, and Anorak, you’ll see these available through other means outside the store before too long. Gloom’s earlier appearances in the store was mainly an attempt to ensure those items were still available to newer players who may have missed it.
There are some limits, of course. The cosmetic items contained in a founder pack are exclusive to those packs and will never be earned any other way. We’ll also be releasing a pair of outfits in 2.0 that are exclusive to our $24.99 and $99.99 Chapter 1 gold packs. (These chapter packs come with the typical 2,800 and 13,500 gold for those purchase values, as well as Chapter Passes that help you earn Chapter Reputation 50% or 100% faster. We’ve added these reputation gain bonuses instead of the level head start you might expect for $25 - we believe our bonuses are more player friendly and more value for your money).
So those are the core principles. Maintain the integrity of the core gameplay. Straightforward pricing. And open the core Spellbreak experience to as many players as possible.
We’re excited to show you more about the upcoming Chapter 1 release! It’s going to bring you well over a dozen radically new outfits and the pace of item releases in the store will increase as well.
We’re going to make mistakes along the way: it’s hard to balance what you get for big or small purchases, let alone how those rewards compare to what you get for your time. If something doesn’t sit right with you, we want to know—and we want to thank you for taking the time to let us know. For our part, we’ll continue to listen, to acknowledge when we’ve made mistakes, and to adhere to the principles we’ve laid out in this post.
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