Kingdom and the release strategy

[Fry McFly]

It was a nice gesture that because I had already bought Kingdom, I got Kingdom: New Lands as a gift. But in my humble opinion it would have made more sense if they had made New Lands a paid game for everyone and integrated all the ideas and expansions into this game. Be it free or paid DLC.
But this way the developers / the publisher have caused unnecessary confusion. For example, it has happened to me several times that I started New Land but actually wanted to play Two Crowns.

Or to put it another way: Why the hell are there 3 Kingdom games?

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

[Fulano]

It's a common tactic used by indie developers. They make the first game, release it, then work on a new, better version and release it to get more revenue, etc.

I would like to see New Lands incorporated into the updated Two Crowns though. I like New Land's more random setup, making it more rogue like and causing me to have to adapt strategies. So far in the vanilla Two Crowns I just do the same thing each run. I haven't tried the DLCs yet though.

[Sapador]

I'd love to see that style included in Two Crowns. And to add more details to what you said:

First, the original creator of the game Kingdom, Thomas, never thought about releasing it on Steam. That idea came after, probably when Gordon joined the team. As they had no experience at publishing their own games at that time, they made a pilot test, which is Kingdom (said Classic). This is why less than 1 year later they released Kingdom: New Lands, that is basically Kingdom: Classic with unlocking features (mounts, hermits, islands).

The release of Two Crowns was a bit more complicated, as I have recounted it last year:

"Kingdom: Two Crowns" idea came to public at the Game Developers Conference on February 2017, as an expansion of Kingdom: New Lands towards cooperative multiplayer for two players to be released by the end of that year. This is what was clearly shown on the announcement trailer[gv1.gry-online.pl]

Six months later Raw Fury understood that making New Lands multiplayer would require rewriting the entire code and that they couldn't do it without charging for it. They decided to make a new game out of that idea. But to "justify" the new game they had to add a lot of new content (listed here[kingdomthegame.fandom.com])

The problem is that if they were sincere at that point—saying: "Hello Kingdom lovers! New Lands will never get co-op as we had promised! To have co-op we have to make a new game, and you'd have to pay for it!"—they'd have received such a hate from the community, that they would stop selling New Lands copies, and would never have the funds necessary to make Two Crowns.

The "Two Crowns" idea died on August 2017, when Raw Fury decided to make their "definitive" version of the Kingdom series, that should be called "Kingdom". Period. Exactly what EA did with SimCity. They made SimCity, SimCity 2000, SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4. When they decided to make their ultimate version for the series, they launched SimCity. What was called by the community "SimCity 2013" or "SimCity 5" to avoid confusion with the first 1989 version, but the official name is SimCity.

So what is "Kingdom Two Crowns" in reality? "Kingdom: Two Crowns" (with colons) was a 2017 Raw Fury idea of making New Lands a multiplayer game, and it died that same year. And this why Raw Fury removed that 2017 announcement trailer from their channel. And what do we play here? We essencialy play Kingdom, the "ultimate" version of the series that includes co-op, new biomes, new units, new mechanics, new tech level, new greed, new subjects, new currency, fire, ciclying seasons, different campaigns, challenges isllands and much more, being co-op just ONE of its additions.

👆 This is the part I wrote last year, tweaked a bit to fit the context of your question. And all of this is my own point of view as an ordinary player, and devs have never endorsed (nor critized) it, at least until now.

TL;DR: Market decisions, that make possible for an indy group of developers to release their own game, and to grow as a company with the opportunity to keep (doing what they like) releasing good games, but hopefully now with less financial risks involved. And as they're still a small team, and not an international group of investors, less financial risks directly means more mental and physical health for each one of them.

[Fulano]

Cool to know the full story!