Blade Symphony is going Free-To-Play

This is the official announcement; Blade Symphony is going Free-to-Play (F2P.) We just recently solved some major problems with developing this, so I figure it would be a good time as any to actually talk about it. What all of this means is that a game that is currently sold for $4.99 on Steam and Humble Bundle, will be reduced to $0, and we'll need to make money in other ways. Before I begin this diatribe of information for all of you, let me preface it with this, our goal is not money, it is players. I'll check back with you at the end, and see if that point sticks out enough.

When We Started

There has been some confusion about when development on the Free-To-Play effort started; some people think that we started as early as mid-2016, or earlier. That's wrong. We've been talking internally about Blade Symphony becoming a free-to-play game since as early as 2013. However, after implementing achievements in December of last year, we did not start development of Free-To-Play until March 11th, 2017., as illustrated by the number of changes per day from the middle of last year to the middle of this year:

Who's Working On It

I've detailed this in a Puny Human blog post , but we're not the 15 person team we used to be when developing this game. There's 6 of us working on some other games for another studio, full time, and only one person working on Blade Symphony Free-To-Play part time. I first engaged this developer in late November of 2016, and he's already done some amazing stuff. Let's get into it.

What's Changing

Engine Upgrade One of the first thing's that was done, was that we upgraded the engine version from the Portal 2 version of Source, to the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive version of Source. Doing this was a no-brainer, as it meant we wouldn't need to write code for things we wanted, like porting to other platforms, better optimized maps and lighting, etc. More Platforms Our goal for Blade Symphony Free to Play is to have more players, not make money. We've received quite a bit of feedback from people who would like to play Blade Symphony on their Mac or Linux computers, so we put in the time and effort to ensure it runs native on those platforms! Blade Symphony on Mac Blade Symphony on Linux More Languages We're positive there have been people who refunded Blade Symphony because it didn't support their language. Who wants to learn through a tutorial, when you can't read one of the three languages Blade Symphony supports. So in addition to English, Russian and Japanese, we're going to translate Blade Symphony into as many European, Western Asian and Eastern Asian languages as possible. We're crowd sourcing this effort, so if you'd like to help, stay tuned. Better Performance The engine upgrade allowed us to get some better frame rates on our maps (omitting duel_box.) This should also affect overall performance of the game, in menus and popups. Level over Rank Progression This was a contentious point for us. The system of giving people a global rank based on ELO, placing them into a ladder on global rank, and prescribing a league based on their ladder position will have to go away. This system is powered through this pretty expansive website that communicates with the game. While we love this website and how it can do that for the game, it's a pretty big dependency that is showing it's age. I detail more about that here. Replacing it, is something that 90% of