We are so happy with the reception of the free version. The takeaway is that when we start marketing, have multiple ways to play, continuously update the game for free, the numbers reflect that in a positive way, to say the least.
Retention is well beyond our dreams. Monthly unique users went through the roof. Average revenue per paying user with the free version is $21.73. Actually, it rose by $2 between the first and second draft. I’ll take it.
Not to mention our single largest daily active users (DAU, unique) was 44,000 and our monthly active users (MAU, unique) went to 160,000. Quadrupled. That’s a lot of targets.
This isn’t just about more targets. These numbers allow us to do more. We’re still here and will be, but we want to do bigger things. For that we need the numbers and the roadmap explains how this works.
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2-Month Roadmap
We had the pleasure of being able to show you the 2-month roadmap of Eternal Crusade on Twitch Friday. We are finishing our current roadmap, around the balancing, optimizations, and the free version and time for the next 2 months to be unveiled.
We have prime focus, now it’s a themed campaign, with ingame activity, items and special offers with that theme.
As we time-box our teams, 25% is on new or new versions of existing systems which is following the prime focus. 25% is general improvements, optimizations and refactoring and the last 50% go into what is called “discovered” work and responding to change.
Being able to respond to change is essential for an online game as they are never finished. It’s responding to player feedback, fixing bugs that emerge, balancing based on recent data, hotfixes, or improving the quality of life. You might have seen the player voted top priorities we had, which is:
- REDUCE LAG.
- BETTER MELEE SYSTEM
- MORE AND BETTER GAME MODES
- BETTER PERFORMANCE
- BETTER CAMPAIGN
- MORE MODS AND WARGEAR
- ELDAR ROADKILL
- MORE CUSTOMIZATION
- LARGE, OPEN AND CHANGEABLE MAPS.
- NEW MAPS
You may be wondering why they are coloured. That’s because green is the focus, yellow is continuous and ties into other work, and red we are not doing during this period.
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The focus of our new work (25%)
New World Map. Starting with a significant visual update making it look far more like real territory, the new visual framework gets us ready for the new features. Some of those features should make it into this 2-month period.
Heroes and more visual customization. We have four heroes who were promised ages ago, and we’re happy to say that we are expecting all the pieces to fall in place during this 2-month period. Yes, that’s flaming guy and the other guys.
The Rogue Trader store and how it works, an initiative we called “git gud luk gud” separates what makes you look cool, from your tools of diplomacy on the battlefield. It’ll be a slow transition but we’re on it.
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Planned Improvements and engineering (25%)
Themed Campaign of Campaigns, with Campaigns. It will get a nice brutal name with explosions and flames in the logo. Totalhelldeath always had a favorite spot in my cold dark heart.
The themed campaign contains a series of in-game campaigns, special items, marketing campaigns and special offers, all fitting together. We’re also doing work on the campaign system itself.
Combat balance, melee vs. melee and ranged vs. melee. As we mentioned on twitch, the first will be to make the melee system robust and working as intended. It was ironic that during our first sessions of fixing melee bugs, being killed by melee in combat went down 10%.
Server and client optimizations. Besides the continuous work, Unreal Engine 4.15 update is a massive operation. We will go almost dark during that period, with updates probably limited to running campaigns and such. We’ll let you know when we take on that task.
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Discovered work (50%)
Just looking at the planned work, we expect a lot of discovered work to come from optimizations, combat balance, especially reworking melee. The bulk of which we discover through playtesting, player feedback, bug repots, constant profiling and monitoring of servers, network, and client performance.
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Founders, Early Access and launch customers
Part of all this being possible, surviving in the current atmosphere, having to cut a lot of things, was made possible by you, our supporters. None of us are happy yet, all of us see the potential.
We need numbers, sure, but first it’s those that brought us here. If you were a paying customer before the launch of the progression restricted free version, this is our thank you to you:
- 20,000 RTC ($20) that you get once when you log in after Content Update 1.3
- A Steam giftable Squadron Edition with 25,000 RTC ($20) as soon as it’s possible with Steam
- The Venerable Weapon set is no longer available, unique to you
- 4 x 4000 Faction RTC when you log in, as free launch weekend exposed some glass roofs
- The Imperium Edition changed to a DLC so you can buy it once despite owning the game, giving 50% off 4 DLCs and 25K RTC ($100 at $50)
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