We are going Free-to-Play
We have decided as a dev team that is in our best interest, as a small independent game, to go Free-to-play as soon as possible to give our multiplayer title the best chance at reaching more players.
Why F2P?
We worked on Hanako, with everything we have, during our free time for 14 years and our launch, quite frankly has been a tremendous disappointment because we think we made a near-AAA quality multiplayer game, but never had the exposure, support or budget (Hanako was made with $0) to adequately get eyes on it. So we want to remove the barrier to entry and let as many people as could put their eyes on it, to play and hopefully get enough influx of new players to fill up servers, even scale them up and turn our focus to providing more content, new classes, maps, modes, etc.
Despite being a team of 4 people, doing this after work, we have built our item store up to about 75 items (when we ship the F2P patch) and believe there's enough there to make this shift.
What if I bought the game already?
We will be offering in-game items in our Discord by showing us proof-of-purchase (steam key or receipt email/screenshot showing your Steam ID) via a DLC key or some other means. We're still working out the specifics on this and are happy to offer something like that, especially as a thank you for supporting us and continuing to want to play and have access to the game.
Free-to-Play Patch Preview
We'll be releasing our first major patch with this change on December 10th. This will feature over 24 new items in our item store, addressing of the top feedback items from launch feedback gathering, refund notes, forum posts, testing, etc. and other fixes we've run into.
- Improved hit impact/feedback: New "ripout" system for melee classes, to have successful hits "stick" and "Rip out" of enemies for more visceral feel. Also our new ability/combo hit system that includes combo counter numbers, additional particle FX and presentation.
- Two new full item sets: Unicorn set & Kintsukuroi set added for purchase in the item store. These bundles include: Skins for all classes & weapons, helmet, hat, mask & hair (Unicorn set only for Hair). Items can be individually purchased as well.
- Improvements to hit detection/consistency of hits.
- Fixes for various server crashes and issues.
- Localization updates, fixes to variety of missing text/strings in non-English langauges.
[What happens after F2P Patch?
We will be keeping a close eye on how player numbers change and our development roadmap and we will become public testing of our Samurai Royale (battle royale) mode and iterating towards a new BR map/mode patch release and adding more item sets. Should the game earn a self-sustaining playerbase we will move into retention mechanics like daily/weekly/monthly challenges, achievement-based item unlocks (some exist in-game already) and expanding giving you guys more reasons to keep coming back.
We'd like to thank all of you for your support, especially those that participated in Early Access testing. We know it's been a slow burn, and we see everyone's reviews/comments/feedback about the player base, we hate it as much as you do and this is why we're doing what we're doing.
-Hanako Dev Team