Launching the game buy-once at $1.19 instead of using ads and microtransactions

Pricing information

You may have noticed that the game switched over from free-to-play to a regular game while still in its prerelease state. The price is set to $1.19 for the first week after launch, and $1.99 after that.

My plan originally was to release the game free-to-play with microtransactions.

But making the microtransactions appealing would have required slowing the game's progression down, making it less fun for anyone not willing to shell out a few bucks. If you've played the Kongregate version, you know that while Creature Card Idle has some idling involved (it's right there in the name!), it tends to progress at a much faster rate than most idler games. You could unlock three expansions in a week if you strategized well. But the flipside of that is that there's no reason to pay for the microtransactions that are so commonly used in these types of games to speed up progress. The "speed boost" is already built into the design for free.

So adding microtransactions would have made the game much less fun to play, except for those who were willing to shell out $10+ worth of cash to bring the game back up to its normal progression rate.

There were also a number of technical issues to sort through if I wanted to get microtransactions to work in the first place. That would have taken away another week of development that could have been used for other improvements and new content.

Ads were another option, but they're annoying. Nobody wants a 30 second ad every time they start up the game.

Adding paid DLC expansions-- along with keeping the existing expansions for free-- was another idea that was floated, but wasn't a popular one in the Discord when I asked.

All in all, I honestly think I'll make a tiny fraction of the money this way compared to if I'd released it free-to-play with microtransactions. But hopefully the quality and originality of the game, coupled with the low price, generates enough word-of-mouth sales to make up some of the difference.

Cloud saves, achievements, Windows & Linux support

You might ask "why wouldn't I just play on Kongregate?"

For the dollar-or-two the game costs, you're essentially getting the permanent removal of all ads, the addition of cloud saves so you can play on multiple computers more easily, and Steam achievements. All of the achievements match the ones in-game. You can import your Kongregate save if you'd rather play here; this will also instantly unlock all of the achievements you've already earned in-game on Kongregate for Steam.

Additionally, you're more directly supporting the game, because Kongregate ad revenue doesn't add up to anywhere near as much as paying two bucks here does. I'd like to keep adding new expansions to the game for months to come, and I have plans for a big CCI spinoff game I'd like to do at some point in the near future. Your support helps make all of that happen.

Lastly: I was able to add native Linux support over the weekend, so that's confirmed to be in the game. The Mac version didn't pan out, because getting that to work is much more complicated than it should be. If a lot of people want a Mac version, I'll take another look at it in the future, but for now Windows & Linux are the two platforms the game will release with.