Hi everyone,
We've made a few changes to The Ship packages on the Steam store, which I've outlined below.
The single player game was previously sold as a separate package, as well as being included in the Complete Package. However, a number of users reported problems with the single player as a standalone game and as we were unable to resolve these issues, we've remove the option to buy the single player by itself.
Anyone who purchased the single player game without the multiplayer game, now should be able to claim the Complete Package for free (which should resolve issues playing the single player).
If you have any problems with this, the please leave a comment here.
Previously, if you purchased the Complete Package, you received additional gift copies to send to friends. While we understand that some people made full use of these, our stats show that most people didn't.
For this reason, we've removed the free copy promotion from the package - when you buy The Ship now, you'll only get 1 copy of the game.
To reflect these changes, we've permanently reduced the price of the Complete Package from $19.99 to $9.99.
UPDATED - 19/12/14
Hi everyone,
I've read through your comments and passed them onto the team. We appreciate your frustrations with this and will certainly try to give you more heads up if there are changes in the future.
Just to explain, our goal for 2015 is to do what we can to improve the experience players have with The Ship. There's a lot of things we can't do - see here for a background on our licencing constraints.
But one thing we can do is to try to increase the average number of people playing at any one time (and if you check Steam Charts, this has been improving lately). This improves the experience of the multiplayer game for everyone that's playing.
The main feedback we had from players was that the price was too high, so that's why we've dropped it by 50%. It wasn't an easy decision as this could siginificantly impact our revenue, but it was the right thing to do and we're confident that the price is a good one.
With regards the gift copies, our data shows that very few of them were redeemed. It wasn't having a significant impact on the number of people playing the game - in fact we believe that the higher priced "5 pack" was putting off more people playing than it was attracting new players.
We'll look at introducing an additional 3 or 5 pack for people who want that option. (Valve needs to set this up so it's unlikely to be before January).
Thanks,
- the Blazing Griffin team