Purlox wrote:Could you please explain how this shop seemed reasonable and unobtrusive? I'm genuinely curious..
Sure. Our reasoning with it was basically that we
A) Didn't want to sell power ups, or even utility items, as we felt they risk distorting the ingame economy too much.
and
B) Wanted a flexible regime under which people have a fair amount of options in terms of how they want to pay for the game, without cluttering the store too much with too many offers.
- Verifying the Account was intended to emulate a simple one-time payment for the game, if you play it casually. Perhaps the hours aren't enough to actually be that, but that was the intention.
- Supporting the Patch was intended as a mix between donations and cosmetic items, i.e. token hats bought for the very concrete reason of supporting our latest game development, and getting something minor in return.
- Subscription was intended to be precisely that. Paying a low price continuously for full access to the game, with the option of giving us more if you feel like it. (And I'd also like to point out that a subscription for a year puts the price at $6/mo. Not ten, not fifteen. Six.).
- Buying Game time was intended as a way to perhaps give game time to others who can't or don't want to pay, or whatever, and basically then paying slightly more for what is effectively a subscription once added to your account, but with more flexibility in terms of who actually gets it.
Perhaps the numbers should be tweaked, perhaps the store layout can be improved, but the basic schema seemed and seems entirely fair to me, for which reason neither of us figured beforehand that it would be so much of an issue that it would completely overshadow the fact that we've spent two years working on the game, and that said game now looks, sounds, and feels beautiful.
We figured that the game itself would be the big thing here, and that's also where we've spent most of our energies.
