Devs have you thought about pricing and keeping game alive

[MuzzUK 2]

I'm a massive WW1 geek and looking forward to playing this! Hoping to finally have a complete WW1 PC experience I can rope my friends and discord into.

BFone is nice but not quite historically accurate enough and slowly losing player base and Verdun is fun to a point but becomes a heavy sniper war on some maps and lacks depth as there aren't a lot of explosion, gas attacks, arty or large scale engagements as player numbers are limited. 

Verdun has suffered due to pricing and being very linear and BFones superseeded by newer games. How are you devs going to price the game and keep the player base engaged? Have you thought about a free2play model thats limited to get people through the door and then allow them to play before buying the game. I think a lot of games like this would benefit from giving the players a taster. It's hard to commited £20-£30 to a game in a market so full. You're competing in a market that's full of massive shooters... Battlefield, Call of Duty, and many other WW2 games. This game needs something to pull in some of those punters and many people don't know much about the WW1 era.

I am loving the screenshots and the visual look really authentic and atmospheric.  

America joined the war in 1917 which makes their story more limited than say a game about England, France and Germany. Really looking forward to seeing how you approach this whilst keeping things realistic and accurate. 

Edited July 7, 2020 by MuzzUK

[Dubs 7]

Hey mate, welcome!

Beyond the Wire will require payment to access the game, no price point has been made public yet, as that is still TBD and more information on pricing will come closer to early access release.

There is always the potential for Steam free weekends, which could be a possibility RSI might consider sometime post early access release, guess we'll have to wait and see.

In saying this, wave 2 of alpha playtesting is coming up sometime this month, so keep an eye out on here and in discord, for the announcement. 

[Goose 2]

I agree with the author. It would be smart to price the game at a sensible level to ensure the game launches at inception with a decent-size playerbase. 

[MuzzUK 2]

On 7/10/2020 at 6:23 AM, Dubs said:

Hey mate, welcome!

Beyond the Wire will require payment to access the game, no price point has been made public yet, as that is still TBD and more information on pricing will come closer to early access release.

There is always the potential for Steam free weekends, which could be a possibility RSI might consider sometime post early access release, guess we'll have to wait and see.

In saying this, wave 2 of alpha playtesting is coming up sometime this month, so keep an eye out on here and in discord, for the announcement. 

Good to know I'll defo pick up the next play test as I'm stuck on having to play BFone at the moment for my WW1 fix. Having played a lot of Steam shooters over the years including Verdun and Tannenberg these games seem to launch and those first few weeks really dictate where the game is going in terms of player base.

Verdun came out and struggled the player base peaked around 500 daily after 2 years and during a sale, which is when I bought it but because there were never any others sales and price point it was quite expensive early on. There was no free to play or tier system to entice players so I suspect a lot of the player base stuck to BFone or stayed on WW2 shooters. Verdun now struggles now attracting around 100 per day meaning it's hard to find games in the morning.  This means new players are put up against vets and get minced. You don't want to pay £20-£30 for a game thats declining to have your ass kicked by the remaining hardcore player base.

I actually think community size and server population dictates these games futures early on rather than game quality, you can have a game that isn't quite polished/finished but still playable and if players join busy games they'll stay committed. It's disheartening to only see 7-8 active games in BFone now for example. 

 

I think pricing and release impact heavily affect this especially with a WW1 genre game that's very niche. Verdun was very clean and almost bug free on launch but the advertising and price point killed the game pretty quickly. Savage Resurrection another example of a popular franchise priced badly, when it came out the game was amazing, stable and very good but the £30/£40 price tag in its first year killed the franchise. You are now lucky to find anything other than bot matches. 

With so many shooters, battle royales and other titles coming out daily on Steam you choice of games in each price range is massive.

 

I know people aren't keen on free to play because of cheaters for example but think the free to play market or at least giving players a trial say 10 hours is a good way to go for new games to fill those servers. I played a lot Dirty Bomb which is one of the most underrated shooters ever. It isn't a WW1 or WW2 based shooter but is a free to play it kept a strong 3000-4000 daily player base for almost 2 years, that game only declined because of poor dev choices and stupidly expensive micro transactions. I know a play tester for Splash Damage who says internal fights over pricing and marketing killed Dirty Bomb, the game is no longer updated now. I really think for a smaller studio/developer that isn't like an EA a free to play model or free to play trial is a great idea. Red Orchestra 2 was a great war shooter and had a long run lots of sales and free weekends. Dirty Bomb launched with almost 7,000 daily players to and kept that number up for many many years.

You guys should look pricing this game short term to get players in... maybe a free to play 10 hours or a tier system like free players and paid players having access to certain game modes or maps. I would really love a historically accurate WW1 shooter to survive and keep a strong community. There's so much competition with WW2 shooters and other games on Steam. I love BFone but it's only 50% authentic. 

 

At the end of the day I'm just a player and a fan I'm not the dude who needs to make money on this game

Wishing you guys best of luck!

[invisible.nin 6]

On 7/21/2020 at 8:40 AM, MuzzUK said:

[...]At the end of the day I'm just a player and a fan I'm not the dude who needs to make money on this game

Wishing you guys best of luck!

Hello!
Thanks a lot for your feedback. However, usually with projects already within the process of making they already do have marketing, sales and everything around the commercial part of the game already sorted out and are unlikely to change the payment model. AFAIK this is already set in stone for the near future after release. Over the years I rarely saw studios change their plan from buy-to-own to free-to-play, especially with small indie studios.

[NoisyCosmos 3]

I'd say the pricing will be something like PS and Squad on release.  

Edited September 23, 2020 by NoisyCosmos