Hey, Sten here. I have real news this week, the biggest one since we opened this page.
Hire will be free. Not a sale. Not free for a weekend. The whole game, free, for always. You download it, you run your mercenary guild, you never pay a thing if you do not want to. That is the whole announcement.
Let me explain it in plain words, because "free" always makes people look for the trick.
When Hire releases, you get the complete game. The portraits and crests come from our hand made gallery, thousands of pieces we curated one by one. Conversations with your sellswords work out of the box, including a mode that runs fully on your computer with no internet at all. Nothing in the game is locked behind a wall.
So how do we eat? There are optional extras. If you want the game to paint a fresh portrait for one specific hero of yours, painted live for your save and nobody else's, that costs a small amount of credits. Same for fancy scene pictures and for a premium conversation mode where the characters get noticeably smarter. You buy credits with real money. No surprise charges, no subscriptions, no daily reward calendars begging you to log in. If that stuff is not for you, you skip it and the game is exactly the game.
Which brings the second news. The demo is going away, because it makes no sense now. A demo is a taste of a game you might buy. Not the case anymore. For those who wishlisted expecting a normal paid release, I hope this lands as good news.
The boring part: we are doing the paperwork with Steam for the free release right now, and review takes what it takes. I will not promise a date this Friday. I will promise that the moment there is a date, you will read it here first.
That is the week. Tell a friend the game is free, it is now literally the cheapest recommendation you can make.
Sten.