Hey. Sten here. This is the post I have wanted to write for two months.
Hire releases on Steam on September 1. Eleven days from now. And it is free.
The two months part was not by choice. A lot of what this game does is experimental, and Steam had questions about most of it. Getting the green light meant compromising on some things to fit their rules. Not ideal. But that is the life, and we are through.
I want to be clear about the free part, because "free" on Steam usually comes with a catch. Here it means the game. All of it. You take contracts, you hire actual people who argue with you about pay, you send them down into places with bad names, some of them come back. The talking, the bestiary, the world that prints itself from one number. Free, no trial, no locked content, no energy bar. Those of you playing the demo know it stops at the end of year one. The release build just keeps going. Year two, year ten, your guild rises or goes broke on its own time, nothing cuts you off.
So what pays for the servers. Pictures. You can have your heroes and their gear painted, and the paintings follow your world, its cultures, their looks. That costs credits, credits cost real money, and you start with a few free ones. Nothing that makes your guild stronger is for sale.
Until the first we are playing the release build all day and fixing what we find. If you have been reading these posts and waiting, this is the moment: wishlist the game. It is one click and it helps this small team more than the click deserves.
See you on the first.
Sten.