First we want to thank our early supporters and community for Fera. We learned a lot from your valuable feedback (both good and bad) and we’re sorry we were not able to deliver a better Early Access experience.
We made a lot of mistakes with our development and launch of Fera: The Sundered Tribes. As our first 3D Open World multiplayer game, we definitely bit off more than we could chew and there’s no blame to be laid on anyone or anything except for ourselves.
Honest numbers for Fera
Here’s the honest math regarding the sales of Fera:
- Lifetime Net Revenue: $110k
- Massive Damage take home 20% (our investors are owed the rest): $22K
- This is all we’re expected to see from the first 2 months of sales.
- Due to the lackluster sales, we could not afford to keep our team of 26 people so unfortunately we had to lay off 60% of the studio.
- We’re doing our best to help them find contract work and other opportunities.
- Because our studio is entirely reliant on publisher funding, the majority of our team has to work on a new unannounced project (for which we have already secured funding)
- Despite the flaws we are still proud of what we tried to accomplish with Fera and we would love to find a way to keep working on it if possible.
Hail Mary plan for saving Fera
We’ve come up with a Hail Mary plan that might be able to allow us to generate enough revenue to be able to hire (or hire back) resources to keep improving and adding to Fera if it succeeds. Here’s our plan:
- As of Nov 27, Fera will be on sale for 70% off until Jan 3rd.
- We feel this price drop is necessary to make Fera in its early state a much more attractive and fair price.
- We will attempt to fix some of the major issues with the game before this sale goes live.
- After the Autumn and Winter sales, Fera will release to v1.0 with a new BASE price of $9.99
- As the current game has about 25-35hrs of gameplay, we hope this will attract new players while still giving good value for the $9
- If we find a new life after the price drop and we are able to make enough revenue to hire people to work on the game we will do so (and let you all know our plans if so)]
- We’ve talked to a bunch of our fellow developers and some publishers about our plan and most agree it’s worth a shot.
- We’re being 100% transparent about this because we feel it’s the best approach and everyone who thinks about buying Fera for $9 will know what to expect and go in with open eyes.
Thanks again to everyone who believed in Fera and in us, we’ll do our best to keep the project alive as soon as it makes the revenue needed to hire on devs to continue the development.
For those early buyers we are working to make exclusive Founders Only glider wings and a pet for your village as a thank you for supporting us at launch.
Next steps:
- Quality of Life patch and exclusive Founders Only items update
- Autumn sale starts Nov 27 and the discount will be 70% off
- Custom sale at 70% bridging the gap between Autumn and Winter sale
- Winter sale at 70% off
- Fera v1.0 launch on Jan 3rd (our one and only shot at Steam visibility) at $9.99 with a 10% discount.
