Hey folks,
Over the last few months, we have been researching the various ways that we can ensure Spirit Crossing will have enough ongoing revenue to be a healthy and stable game for years to come. We’ve shared previously that we’re planning to charge $29.99 for Spirit Crossing in the USA (we’ll use Steam’s standard recommendations for pricing the game in other currencies/countries.) We also previously highlighted a variety of optional in-game purchases that we were evaluating.
What it costs to operate Spirit Crossing, and why we need ongoing revenue
In that same previous blog post, we also shared that we’ve been spending approximately $30,000 per month just on server/hosting fees for this game during the alpha and beta. I noticed that after we published that blog post, there was some confusion in our community. Some people seemed to think that our burn rate for Spirit Crossing is currently $30,000 per month. So to be clear, that’s just what it costs us to keep the Spirit Crossing servers running during our playtests.
In addition, there are dozens of employees and contractors working on Spirit Crossing, and their compensation is by far our studio’s largest expense. Since leaving Netflix, everyone at Spry Fox has taken a significant pay cut, and Danc and I (the co-founders) pay ourselves $20,000 per year. We’ve made those choices because we care about each other, and we want to continue working together on Spirit Crossing for many years to come. This game needs a sustainable, ongoing source of revenue if we are going to do that.
Our current monetization plan
Based on your feedback on our original blog post, and on research we’ve done since publishing that, we now believe that a wholly optional monthly subscription is the best way for us to cover our costs without filling the game with individual microtransactions (the kind that make other games less fun to play.)
Players who buy Spirit Crossing on Steam would get one month of the subscription included with their purchase, while Android and iOS players would automatically get the game subscription benefits on an ongoing basis via their regular Netflix subscription.
To be clear: once your included subscription time ends, you would NOT need to pay more in order to still enjoy Spirit Crossing. However, we hope that players who love Spirit Crossing and who want to support our team (and feel that they can afford to do so) will choose to subscribe.
Here are some features we are considering including in the subscription. Nothing here is set in stone – we’re looking for your feedback on all of this:
- Cosmetics & decor
- Additional Outfit “Presets”. A new feature that would enable you to save and quickly put on entire outfits, vs assembling them one article of clothing at a time every time you want to dress up. We would give all players a small number of these slots for free in perpetuity; you get a few extra as a subscriber.
- Customize your fluffalo’s appearance. We’d give you a handful of options for customizing the way your fluffalo looks when you ride in a fluffalo train. This would be purely visual, it would have no impact on gameplay.
- Higher Decor limits for your home. Honestly, this is something we’d rather just do for everyone if it didn’t have consequences, but the number of decor items that need to be saved and loaded each time you enter a location has a big impact on our server costs. We just can’t afford to raise the limits without risking the financial viability of this game. But we can at least offer folks the opportunity to subscribe and get themselves a higher limit that way.
- Shop features, weekly bonuses & other benefits
- Extra Shop Slots available in the Dye, Decor, and Clothing village shops. To be clear, the shops would still sell the exact same content to everyone. Subscribers would just see more at the same time.
- Access to an exclusive “resource exchange NPC”. This NPC would enable you to use your Beacon Sparks to purchase limited quantities of Coins, Resources, NPC and Scenario currencies, and/or Gifts.
- A small amount of bonus Waystation health when contributing Beacon Energy to your Waystation.
- Higher NPC Gifting Cap. You can give a few more gifts to NPCs each week.
- Extra weekly Errands. Self explanatory.
- A small weekly Beacon Spark gift for subscribers.
We believe that your effort and engagement in Spirit Crossing should be the main factor driving your progression and resources, not your subscription status. So, all of the ideas listed in the second category (“shop features & other benefits”) should make you feel like you’re getting help achieving your goals, but should NOT feel like the difference between being able to ever achieve those goals or not. We expect these ideas to be more controversial, and we have not decided whether any of them will be included in our subscription or not, but we do worry that if NONE of them are included, there probably won’t be enough subscribers to keep this game alive and thriving. We need your feedback on this.
Feedback process
If there’s a subscription benefit that you think is great, please tell us. If there’s one that really bothers you, please tell us. If you have ideas for other subscription benefits (not listed here) that we could offer, please tell us that, too! We have a survey here.
And in the spirit of honesty, transparency, and constructive conversation, here’s a couple things I ask everyone to take to heart before giving feedback:
People tend to assume that other people will pay for things that aren’t genuinely desirable, simply to support a game. You might be one of the rare people who would do this, and if so, that’s truly wonderful. ♡ But, I’ve been making online games for almost 20 years, and I can tell you with certainty that this sort of thing simply doesn’t happen often enough to keep an MMO alive.
In other words, if something isn’t genuinely desirable, not enough people will pay for it. So the fine line we need to carefully walk is making this subscription inherently desirable enough that people will legitimately decide to pay for it because they want it, and not just because they feel like making a donation to our studio. And at the same time, the benefits of the subscription can’t be so enormous that players who cannot afford it end up feeling like they can’t enjoy the game.
TLDR: we need your help figuring out how to land in the right place here. It will ultimately be to everyone’s benefit that the subscription generates enough revenue that we can continue to afford making awesome updates to this game for years to come.
Other details
We’ve tried to anticipate all the questions you might have, which aren’t already addressed above:
- How much will the subscription cost? We haven’t determined the price yet. Our goal is to identify the lowest price that gives us a realistic path to covering the ongoing costs of servers, support, and continued development. As soon as we think we’ve figured this out, we’ll come back to you with an update.
- Can the subscription be canceled immediately and easily? We have no choice but to rely on the platforms for this, so the answer is: it’ll be as easy as Steam makes it. We promise we won’t do anything to needlessly make it harder than Steam (or any other future platform) already does!
- What happens when a subscription lapses? You will stop receiving the ongoing benefits of the subscription. In the case of a benefit like a customized fluffalo mount, your fluffalo will default back to the basic mount that everyone currently has in the playtest.
- What happens to decor placed above the non-subscription limit? The way we’ll probably handle this is that all your already-placed decor items will stay in place, but you will be unable to place new items until you have removed items to get to below the new cap. (This requires further technical investigation on our part; we’re not sure about it yet.)
- What happens to the extra outfit presets? They would be hidden (not deleted, but essentially inaccessible. They would reappear if you re-subscribe.)
- Are Netflix benefits available only while playing the Netflix mobile version, or can you sign into Netflix from the Steam version of the game? Right now there’s no way to activate your Netflix subscription via the Steam version of the game. We’d like to make that possible in the future, but that will require coordination with Netflix and some technical work, so we can’t currently estimate if or when this will happen.
- Will a player’s rate of progression (through storylines, etc) be impacted by having a subscription? We believe the other subscription benefits we’ve proposed can provide enough value that we should not need to restrict storylines, regions, NPCs, or core game systems to subscribers. Under our current plan, those parts of Spirit Crossing would be fully accessible to all players, whether or not they subscribe. Some of the benefits we’re considering would modestly improve resource flexibility for subscribers, so an optimization-focused player might progress a little more efficiently than a non-subscriber, but that’s it. We want your feedback on whether those particular benefits feel helpful and fair.
- Could someone repeatedly re-subscribe and unsubscribe with ease, as their personal finances permit, without harming their account? That’s the goal, yes.
If you’ve read this whole long blog post and reached this paragraph, thank you. ♡ We really appreciate your taking the time to process all this, and would love for you to give us your feedback. We’ve created a thread in our Discord for folks to comment on monetization issues, there’s a survey here that you can fill out, and I will personally be hosting an AMA in r/SpiritCrossing to discuss this topic on Thursday, August 6th at 11am PST!
Thank you.
