Update: we are delaying the new version a couple weeks for a bit more polish and bug fixes. We want your first impression of this new version to be as good as possible. ETA early December!
Big changes are coming to Creativerse!
The short version: next month, we're moving away from the free-to-play, Playful-hosted model to a pay-once, player-hosted version of Creativerse. This will allow us to give y'all a more customizable game that you have much more control over, and it will free up hosting costs that we can put toward future development. And if you've spent any money on the game, you will get this new version for free!
The long version: In the spring of 1862, a traveling theater troupe arrived on the outskirts of Cincinnati and...wait, that's maybe too long.
The less long version: More than 8 years ago, we debuted Creativerse as an early access game on Steam. Within a few months it had organically become a hit with YouTubers, getting featured by InTheLittleWood, Biffa, Slipg8r, Gronkh, and many others. It was the beginning of an amazing journey. Ever since, Creativerse has been a relatively successful game, maintaining a player base and a consistent monthly revenue most studios could only dream of.
Despite this, outside of one exception Creativerse has never been profitable. Its year over year costs always exceeded what it brought in. We spent years trying to solve this issue, and occasionally we'd see some promising spikes, but they never lasted.
That one exception? It was during the first 15 months of early access, when the game was not yet free to play. Going F2P was our plan from the get go—we were open about this and charged $20 upfront as a way to help fund the game during its first year or so. As it turned out, Creativerse's business model just worked better as a pay-once game.
Getting to the bottom of why F2P isn't a good fit for Creativerse is too complex for a "less long" version of the story. There are a lot of reasons. To keep it simple I'll focus on one: costs. They fall under 2 categories, development and live-ops. Development is the stuff you see in our patch notes—new features and content, bug fixes, improvements, fun stuff like that.
Live-ops is all the behind-the-scenes stuff we do to enable the game's built-in multiplayer. Our players have created hundreds of thousands of worlds over the years, and Playful hosts all of it. We pay to store that data, as well as run an API and server agents that spin up worlds when players join them, and a host of other services that do everything from logging errors to optimizing our server architecture. We also have to fix servers when they go down and keep up with changes to the way third-party services run things (something they're frequently doing). Also, because Creativerse is a free-to-play game, there’s even live-ops costs hidden in our development budget in the form of us spending time making content and features that keep monetization going, which eats into time we can spend on features that are equally cool but might have a less direct impact on paying the bills.
In other words, a big chunk of the game's budget goes toward live-ops. What if instead, we used that budget solely for development costs?
I want to take a moment to acknowledge that we haven't always been able to support Creativerse as much as we would have liked over the past few years. There have been times where y’all would be waiting for months or longer for an update. Our last update was over a year ago. I wish this weren't the case but riding out the pandemic and some big changes at the studio kept us from being able to focus on Creativerse the way we would have preferred.
This is why, starting last year, we began work on a new version of the game. And now, in 4 weeks, we will "re-release" Creativerse as a pay-once-play-forever game. It will run as a complete executable on your local PC, with the client, server, and data all in one package, and all the free-to-play elements removed (store, coins, etc). We will call it...
“Creativerse: The Definitive Edition”
Giving up the built-in multiplayer is a big sacrifice, but not having the costs and hassle of running it as a game-as-a-service will give us—and you—way more flexibility. Like, when the entire game runs on your machine and we don't have to worry about F2P? We can make nearly everything customizable. Want a world with infinite stamina, a 1 second timer on all processor materials, one-hit kills on all mobs, and holiday events turned on year-round? Done. Want under-the-hood options for managing a server, its players, and backups? You got it. In fact, if this pivot proves successful, we could add support for even wilder stuff like mods. Also, there will still be multiplayer and a list of public worlds to join in the game—it’ll just be up to players to set up and host.
The Definitive Edition launches on Nov 15, 2022. Here's what you need to know....
— It will retail for $24.99. HOWEVER, anyone who has spent any money on the game—whether DLC or coins or early access—will get it for free!
— If you haven't spent money on the game as of today, you have until the re-launch to purchase a now discounted Pro DLC that includes it (i.e. this is $10 cheaper than it will be after Nov 15).
— You will be able to download—or “migrate”—your own worlds from our servers for 90 days following the re-release. You can also whitelist any world you own so other players can migrate it.
— The new version will include:
- A TON of new customization options
- Tools for hosting your own multiplayer worlds
- New and improved player progression path, with streamlined unlocks, recipes, quests, and premium consumables like Qbits and Costumes added to core gameplay rewards
- More than 300 new blocks and items, new mob variants, a “mailbox” item for sending messages to other players in your world, improved admin tools for managing worlds, visual improvements, and more
We’ll be sharing more details over the next few weeks. In the meantime, please share your feedback with us here or on Discord!
—PlayfulDavid
UPDATE: here's the FAQ. If you have a question we missed, ask it in the forum post!
UPDATE #2: We won't be able to support Mac at launch. We're currently investigating the possibility of adding it back in a future update. Stay tuned!