Forge, Krater, and other games made by cunts

[Rev]

I posted in another thread about Krater's current Steam promotion.  It's an amazing 1% off, which is the sort of thing that seems like an error, but isn't.  It's because the company - Fatshark - agreed to give out a load of discount coupons for Krater that they've had to put some work into not honouring.  As you can't use coupons if there's an existing discount on Steam, this is their way of twattily going back on their offer.

And now Forge has become free-to-play with microtransactions.  About, what, six months after it launched properly and was being sold?  Anyone who bought it in that time - well fuck you, your purchase is now meaningless.  You can have some minor DLC, and pay another £12 for a starter pack.  Dark Vale, there.  Remember the names of Fatshark and Dark Vale.

Is this sort of thing the new normal?

[Famous Mortimer]

Games companies treating their customers like dirt? "New" certainly isn't the word I'd look for.

[Hollow]

They are twatty tactics...i've certainly never seen such overt skullduggery as the 'discount' one.

Cave went on a 'fleece the fans' drive last year on IOS...i nearly lost some respect for them but....nah it's Cave.

[Ignatius_S]

I posted in another thread about Krater's current Steam promotion.  It's an amazing 1% off, which is the sort of thing that seems like an error, but isn't.  It's because the company - Fatshark - agreed to give out a load of discount coupons for Krater that they've had to put some work into not honouring.  As you can't use coupons if there's an existing discount on Steam, this is their way of twattily going back on their offer....

The 1% discount was just for this weekend wasn't it? Prior to that, people had been using the discount coupons for about a month and coupons can be used again now.

Given that the discounts were quite large (up to 90%), if Fatshark were trying to get out of honouring coupons, wouldn't it had been better to offer a smaller discount (say 5-10%) for the entire life of the coupons, rather than having a 1% Steam discount for such a short period of time?

I believe the coupons were part of a Steam promotion for crafting Steam cards and Steam has to agree to any discount, so if there was something underhand going on, then doesn't some of the blame belong to Steam?

...And now Forge has become free-to-play with microtransactions.  About, what, six months after it launched properly and was being sold?  Anyone who bought it in that time - well fuck you, your purchase is now meaningless.  You can have some minor DLC, and pay another £12 for a starter pack.  Dark Vale, there.  Remember the names of Fatshark and Dark Vale....

People who bought the game will receive the £12 starter pack for free - they won't have to buy it. Also, wasn't that roughly the cost of the game to begin with?

Bottom line was Forge wasn't making money under its original business model – free-to-play is becoming an increasingly attractive one to follow, especially for this kind of game. More and more gamers are going for P2P games, shrinking the market base for games using the kind of business model that Forge was using. If the choice is to go bust or go F2P, then it's a no-brainer for the developers and for current players, at least they can decide to continue or not, rather than have no choice.

Forge wasn't exactly expensive to begin with ( and had been heavily discounted at times. Personally speaking, I would be looking how much I got for my money in the time I had been playing for and decide if I got value for money – haven't played Forge but I've played games where there has been a similar transition to another business model. Can't really see the fuss myself and from what I've seen, the vast majority of Forge players don't seem unhappy.