Early Access Cost solution -Island only Free Trial.

[3lfk1ng]

While attempting to recruit new players to this title from within my guild and on Reddit I've noticed an extremely consistent theme -most everyone is NOT willing to pay $40 for a title in Early Access. Now, this isn't a jab at the decision to charge $40 but instead, I believe that it's an issue with how the gaming industry has conditioned players to expect a certain price point during the development phase.

$20 sure. $40 once it releases ..."sure ...if it's good".
but $40 in Early Access? "that's too steep!".

Now, I'm not here to request a price drop as I think $40 is completely justified (I'm 170 hours in and loving it!).
I was willing to invest during the IndieGoGo campaign because I simply don't want to see another 10 years worth of WoW clones and figured that if I want to see a change in the industry, I need to support the products I believe in.

However, not everyone shares that point of view.
I think a surefire way to help win over that fence-sitting playerbase would be to allow players to download and play the game for FREE on the starting island only ...for as much time as they need. They can go anywhere, do anything, complete quests, group up, learn the game's systems, do the dungeon, and when they finally attempt to leave the island, they get prompted to buy a copy of the game via the upcoming revamped Gorgon Shop (and who knows, maybe that's already on the way).

My point is, while a lot of players had years to try the game for free, a vast majority of them have only ever discovered the game once it was added to Steam at a pricepoint many are not willing to pay (to be fair, the MMO landscape has turned MMORPG players into skeptics).

I truly believe in this title and I want to see it succeed.
I want to do my part to help the devs generate enough income from sales to build a team that can sustain this product for many years and expansions to come.

Thank you for reading.

Note: We can also help to win over players by writing positive reviews on Steam. If we can bring it up to a 90%, it will start to sell without question and the game will sell itself.

[Mikhaila]

While i can see the point, i don't think it's a good idea right now. The game needs more optimization, and when they finish that up I think it would be a better time to have a free to play weekend or something. Right now, the experience someone gets on an island filled with new people trying something out for free might not be the best way to show off the game.

There is also something to be said for being invested in a game. If you are playing for free, you really don't care. You try it out and at some point log off. Maybe you liked it or maybe you didn't. PG takes a bit more work than some games. An example from last night "Fuck that, I'm bad at puzzles. How do I get off the island? Screw it I'm swimming". I think an hour later he was having fun, but not at first :) Someone who makes the decision to buy the game has put a bit into the decision, watched a video, read about it, and ultimately spent some money. They'll do a bit more work to make sure they like the game and justify that decision. And be more likely to really like the game because of that.

[3lfk1ng]

I humbly agree with all of your points, all very valid.

[Citan]

We do plan to have a free trial. But there's a lot of questions to answer first. Some thoughts:


Mikhaila's points about paying=investment are really important. The game requires you to pay attention, at least for the first few hours. And maybe that's a hard sell in a demo.
We're still heavily improving the game in terms of performance, graphics, balance, content... and we'll keep improving in leaps and bounds for a long while, before we eventually settle down into more careful tweaking and tuning. So does it make sense to wait on the demo until things settle out more? Maybe... but maybe a demo is necessary sooner, to help keep server population at a lively size. It's a little too soon to tell there.
We'll need to restrict them to a special chat room ("Demo" room) so that some asshole can't just make infinite Steam accounts and keep spamming everyone with vitriol. (Which happened a few times during alpha, but I'd like to avoid a return in beta.) But locking everything down to a single chat room will take a lot of client-side code, and it may not be a good enough solution. Do we need to separate "DemoChat" from "DemoHelp"? Do we need a "DemoLocal"? I dunno.
Gold-farming (!!) could be possible with trial accounts unless we carefully restrict every method that trial acocunts could use to transfer their items/gold
Assuming we've reached our target audience with this demo, I'm not 100% sure the island is enough content to let them make an informed decision. Maybe we need to give them access to a bit more. For instance, if they have access to the island and the island's dungeon, maybe there's a secret way to teleport to one other dungeon. Say the Serbule Crypt. Or that might be overkill...
The island is also the newbie experience for non-demo players. Will having an indeterminate number of demo-players muck up the experience too much? I'm not too worried about loot items, because we already have "instanced loot" on the island -- there are certain mushrooms, spoons, bottles, etc. that are always there for every player, just to make sure there's enough to go around. But are there enough monsters? In short, do we need a separate island for demoers? Maybe make the existing island bigger, something like that? Not sure.


Anyway, the demo version is definitely something we're thinking about. And we'll definitely have a demo -- the only real question is when, and in what form.

If you'd asked me a few weeks ago, I would have said that getting the demo out was a top priority, but now I'm not as sure. It may make more sense to first focus on the existing players for a while, working on performance, graphics, and content first. But I may change my mind again next week.

[Crissa]

Honestly, it's the starter cave that sold me on the game. That I could pick up stuff and learn it, right there. That there were hidden things. That some things needed to be written down. That there was a hangout system. That there was gathering.

Almost everything that made me say, 'yes, I want to back this game' was in that cave. And more and better on the island now.

But I really buy into demos. I play lots of demos. I really hate the number of games I bought and then didn't like.

[Quanzhigao]

I have not been able to get a single person into the game since the alpha client ended. Short of buying the game for everyone I know that I'd like to play with there isn't really any conversation that doesn't go "you should come play PG with me - lol i would but its 40 dollars"


Can disable trading any make dropped items destroyed for trial accounts.