"Straightforward Pricing": Spellbreak Devs Lay Out Core Principles Of Cash Shop

Everyone makes mistakes. When you're a free-to-play developer who makes mistakes with your cash shop, the best thing to do is pretend everything is fine and don't change a thing now that you've got people's money. Right?

If that's the case, then the developers at Proletariat, makers of Spellbreak, clearly don't know what they're doing. Last week, they apologized for an upcoming season pass that would cost real money and lock certain cosmetics behind a paywall. In the post, Spellbreak's store guru clarified that the pass would be available for purchase with in-game gold, as well as talking about how bundles work -- each item can be purchased individually and you can get a discount if you later purchase the bundle -- and what would and wouldn't be paid exclusives.

He stated that Spellbreak's core principles are to "Maintain the integrity of the core gameplay. Straightforward pricing. And open the core Spellbreak experience to as many players as possible." That also includes "no Loot Crates or random rewards from purchases" while promising to "continue to listen, to acknowledge when we’ve made mistakes, and to adhere to the principles we’ve laid out in this post."

It's worth noting, too, in one of the responses from another developer, that long messages like this one "take several days of work to put together. They require rounds of editing, wordsmithing, feedback about the contents, etc, and eventually approvals across multiple teams." You mean they didn't just have someone slap important news up on a forum or mention it in a podcast? That they actually thought messaging about money and the cash shop was something that required care and precision? If Proletariat keeps this approach up, it might wind up with a loyal and happy fan base and successful game. And who wants that?