On price and plans!

[Migem79]

Hi, everyone. We’ve been following your feedback closely and wanted to address some of your concerns about the game.

We’ve seen three major issues in the discussions here so far:

- content being locked by progression in Skirmish and Multiplayer;
- battles not being skippable/able to be sped up;
- the price.

The first two are clearly easier to address than the last, so let’s swallow the frog and deal with the thorniest issue first.

Pricing

Money is never easy to discuss, and the economics of game development are complex. The bottom line is that our pricing is based on an honest assessment of the time, effort, and budget we’ve put into this game. We’ve been working on Songs of Silence for over five years from our office in Munich, with our senior staff focused on its development.

We’re an independent developer, but not necessarily an ‘indie’ as such - we’ve had a team of around 25 people working on this project full-time for almost 5 years, pouring everything into our art, mechanics, and lore. That is an expensive process - game development requires a lot of highly skilled and specialized people, so budgets for any project this complicated are always high. We feel that our price reflects this investment and commitment reasonably, and we hope you will agree once you understand the scope of the full game.

There’s also the fact that this is an Early Access title, and as such, we’re asking our customers to take a chance on an unfinished project. We’ve tried to reflect this in the current discount, and we will obviously participate in sales and promotions in the future. Still, again - our launch pricing is based on an in-depth analysis of what revenue we need to generate to get the game polished and released with all of your feedback from the demo and closed beta appropriately implemented.

We understand that buying the game at this point, even at a launch discount, means placing trust in us as developers to deliver a product that is ultimately worth the price. We are confident that we will do this - we’re proud of what we’ve achieved so far, and we have an excellent roadmap (check the latest Steam Updates) to complete our plans. We can only ask that you judge us based on the production values and passion we think are clear in what we’ve produced already. The current Early Access version already offers nearly 20 hours of gameplay; with incoming updates and 1.0 in the future.

We hope to increase that playtime significantly!


Unlocking Content

We get it - you buy a new game and want to get to the content immediately. Whilst progression-based content unlocks are pretty standard in gaming, it can be galling to see a large chunk of a game grayed out, especially when the process to access it is long. This was partly an issue of communication on our part - we didn’t explain how the content unlock prerequisites work.

However, we also recognize that the content gating was overly restrictive. We’re going to address this by making all factions playable in Skirmish and Multiplayer right from the start. We’re also going to make significant improvements to the UI and UX of these systems to make it clearer and easier to complete the quests needed to unlock the remaining content.

Speeding up and quitting battles

Although our combat system is pretty fast, we recognize that sometimes it’s frustrating to watch a specific loss play out at normal speed. We’ve already got a fix planned for this in the long run: we’re working on the ability to accelerate battles and conclude them more quickly. We’re working on this now and hope to have it working within the week.

We’re also going to offer a way to leave a battle when things are going badly so you don’t have to suffer the embarrassment of watching your troops be ground beneath the boots of your enemies. However, this will be included in the patch next week.

Patch Notes (ETA 6/7th June) :

- Ability added to exit/load game from within ongoing battles
- UI/UX improvements in the Encyclopedia
- Skirmish/Multiplayer content unlock: Two base heroes for each faction available from the start
- Game Unlocks: Four-minute turn Speed Chess fate unlocked from the start

[Abood]

Early Access Price

How much the early access price gonna be?

[giftigkeit]

I would like to know, too

[Blowfeld]

19.95 or 24.95

[Anthropia]

You can pre-order a PC Game Key through there backerkit for 37€, on kickstarter it was 35 and 30 for early bird. So i think it will not be less than 30/35 on steam early access release, it's estimation so i may be wrong (maybe these version will be considered "deluxe" one).

[GnomeSlayer]

Very excited for this game - I hope the price is fair. Thanks

Thank you

[Dr. Oetker]

3 hours and counting

[nervousdog]

+1

[Jun]

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand its not

[VonFIDDE]

Kinda high pricetag right? Like i get higher pricetag if it's from a known studio, with some good games previously.

[Kalarima]

40 bucks... yea... nope

[Fuzzy]

yeah that price is too high, guess it will be picked up during a sale

[abruzzi8383]

169,99 PLN in Poland? 152,99zł with 10% discount? High price. Waiting for some revievs and sale.

['Araturo]

I'm sorry buddy... It's 40 bucks for an early acces... These are the bad time we live in

[bshock]

Insane price for an EA game.

[Sentient Minion]

You stifle your own success with this high price.