Mirage: Arcane Warfare Is Free To Download Today (UPDATE: Goes From Under 10 To 10s of Thousands of Players)

Six months ago, Torn Banner Studios made medieval hack-and-slasher Chivalry free for a day -- download it in that window and you keep it forever. Now, the developer is doing the same with its wizardly combat title, Mirage: Arcane Warfare.

Starting at 10 a.m. Pacific time and for a full 24 hours thereafter, you can download Mirage for free HERE on Steam and own the full game forever. If you miss out on that window, don't despair; Torn Banner will permanently reduce the price of Mirage to $9.99. A Special Edition, which includes a free copy of Chivalry, will remain a further $9.99 upgrade.

Why is Torn Banner doing this? According to the Steam post announcing the deal, the intent is to get more players into the game to support the existing players who took a chance on the game when it launched in May. "Mirage launch sales were poor. That sucked, and we know it." According to SteamSpy, has about 84,000 owners, which doesn't seem too bad. Then you look at concurrent players on SteamCharts, and it's rarely in the double digits. So yeah, maybe drawing in more players -- any way you can get them -- is a good idea.

UPDATE: Just a few hours after being available for free, Mirage has exploded, going from single-digit concurrent online players to over 40,000 concurrent players. As of this writing, 1:30 PDT/4:30 EDT, it's officially listed on Steam as the 18th most populated game, with 25,615 players.