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

[Macdallan]

The store page mentions this is an auto battler. I don't think a lot of people are going to be willing to drop 50 CDN for an auto battler no matter how good it might be. I know I'm not.

[Close D-dog]

The price is indeed surprisingly high for an EA game, even if the demo was very fun and the game looks promising. Not sure what the Devs are thinking here, even for a release €40 is steep. A €25 price tag would be more sane to begin with, going up as the EA progresses. Songs of Conquest is fully released and is €35, not sure how this game justifies a higher price from the getgo.

[dr.teatime]

SOS is worth it. I was expecting the price to be much higher than it is. Wait for a Steam sale if you don't want to get it now.

[dr.teatime]

引用自 derExperte：

They can't price it much lower considering they had a Kickstarter with about those prices, wouldn't be fair towards the backers. Also we've seen a couple of EA games in that price range, EA doesn't mean cheap.

Also OP, this isn't a barebones early beta, the full release is supposed to be in about 4 to 5 month so the game has to be mostly done. But for some reason I suspect you don't actually care, did zero research and just started this thread to complain and to get some more clown awards which you seem to love. I mean according to the Steam forums literally every new game is too expensiive.

I concur. I've been watching this title and playing the demo for months. I've already gotten my moneys worth out of the demo. The folks fussing can wait for a sale. I want it now, and purchased right when it went available.

[zero13d]

This price point for early access and bare bones is kinda nuts

[RexJayden]

This would be an immediate purchase for me, but the price was too steep.

[Corvac]

for me its worth it. If i get my friends playing it i may start many rounds in future :D

[MeGa]

If im not wrong theres 5 different campaigns? unlockable or added in the future, idk, this is my own screenshot from the campaign map but I dont know for certain xD

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3261333188

[Halvarca]

Was excited for this game and decided not to buy because of the price. There's not enough content here in EA to justify it.

[Loomy]

I wanted to play this game, thought it be like $10, but yeah too high. Not only does that remove the amount of buyers but people will review the game more harshly after paying $40

[Handbanana]

Definitely not worth $40 in any way shape or form. That is going to make the vast majority of people skip right over it. Don't understand why these devs don't realize you sell it for half as much and you get twice as many sales.

Price it at $15-20 for EA release. Once its 1.0 you can think about bumping it up to $25-30 max. So out of touch lol.

[Tyrax]

引用自 MeGa：

If im not wrong theres 5 different campaigns? unlockable or added in the future, idk, this is my own screenshot from the campaign map but I dont know for certain xD

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3261333188

Could be it's 5 missions in one campaign?

[Holo]

引用自 Tyrax：

引用自 MeGa：

If im not wrong theres 5 different campaigns? unlockable or added in the future, idk, this is my own screenshot from the campaign map but I dont know for certain xD

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3261333188

Could be it's 5 missions in one campaign?

I played the demo, and yep it is. You progress the story with each mission, although the demo only lets you play the 1st level, which took me 2 hours to finish. It was fun.

[Pagrimuha]

I agree, the price is inappropriate for my region.

[LeftPaw]

This game looks like a fantastic dream come true when you watch the trailer, but when I played the demo it was a POS, a empty shell reliant on it's fancy graphic. It was uninstalled pretty sharpish. And now they wat £30 for it? Well I laughed.