While the free-to-play model might be making money hand over fist for powerhouses like League of Legends or Clash of Clans, it does not always work out for every game, and in some cases it can make things much, much worse. Norwegian developer Turbo Tape Games learned that lesson firsthand with Warhammer: Arcane Magic, but CEO Fredrik Sundt Breien says that his team has learned its lesson, and the studio will be changing the game based on player feedback.

“The press has been giving us some excellent reviews — such as an 8/10 and Silver Award from Pocket Gamer, 4/5 from Touch Arcade, and 7.9/10 from Trading Card Games,” Breien wrote in a blog post. “Also, players that talk to us in forums seem to really enjoy the game. However, we made one mistake — one horrible, devastating mistake. And that was to allow players to purchase Warpstone for Gold, which is available as an IAP.”

According to Breien, the game’s in-app payments fundamentally broke the balance of the game, and fans were not shy about letting the developers know it.

“We jumped in with both feet — initially engaging the community at Touch Arcade (a community we know to be highly constructive and genuinely interested in playing great games),” Breien said. “At Touch Arcade, we found ourselves confronted by accusations of deliberately having introduced a paywall not far into the game. The game was seen as fairly hard by some (which it is!) — but the fact that many found it so hard that they ran completely out of Warpstone, and thus needed to reach for their credit cards, came at us like lightning in a clear sky.”

“They were right . . . and we were wrong”

Breien explained that the decision to add Warpstone as a paid item was “a casual one,” and the team had not thought out the consequences of it in depth. The game had been balanced around players purchasing higher level spells with in-game gold, but they were instead purchasing Warpstones, which can be used to heal their characters. As they progressed through the game, the players who bought Warpstones instead of spells ran into increasingly difficult content without the means to overcome it. This resulted in even more Warpstones being needed to continue on, and the cycle continued.

“After analyzing the criticism, we realized they were right . . . and we were wrong,” Breien said.

Turbo Tape looked at all of the player feedback regarding the game’s in-app payments and made the decision to remove the ability to purchase Warpstones for real money, and they added a new mechanism for earning Warpstones through gameplay.

“Hopefully, these lessons can help other indie developers out there,” Breien said. “There are so many pitfalls to game development already that with limited resources, it’s next to impossible to see them all up front. This one came down hard and unexpectedly on us, for sure.”

Image courtesy of Turbo Tape Games