Spry Fox Making Happiness

Note: This is part two! See here if you’d like to read the first part, which more generally goes over the process of balancing an in-game economy in a multiplayer live-service game pre and post-Netflix spinout! Goodness.

So.. who’s that sweet little pachyderm in the corner? Ah yes, the economic survival of our studio! An elephant named Monetization. 🐘

Spin-out is a big change 🌀

We need to adjust to our new reality of being independent from Netflix. While we’re very excited about being on Steam and enabling non-members of Netflix to play Spirit Crossing, one of the biggest advantages of Netflix was not needing to worry about how we were going to make money. 

Also, to be completely honest: Spry Fox has always struggled with monetization. We just aren’t focused on money. 😅 This has had real consequences for some of our games in the past. For example, the first Alphabear game was extremely popular, but it generated very little revenue. Despite having over ten million players, we couldn’t afford to keep working on that game, even though we really wanted to.

So we decided to make the sequel, Alphabear 2, hoping that we could rebuild the game in a form that would make it more financially successful. And once again, we failed to generate enough revenue to support that game’s ongoing development for more than a few months, even though yet again millions of people played and enjoyed it. Monetization is hard, y’all.

Let’s take a moment to appreciate snails, who don’t even know what a bill payment is.

Even when we’re trying our best to do this whole business thing, and even when we’re learning from our past mistakes, our natural tendency here at Spry Fox is to under-monetize our games, because our hearts simply aren’t in it. We’re here to make joy, not money. But this time, if we fail to make money – at least, enough to pay our own salaries and server costs – Spirit Crossing will not survive as an MMO. (Even now, with a relatively small Alpha playtest population, we spend $30k per month on build servers, game server hosting costs, and things of that nature.) Unlike a single player game, which can at least continue to exist online even if it doesn’t make much money, Spirit Crossing will cease to exist without real ongoing income. 

We have spent over five years of our lives making this game. We care about it more than anything we’ve ever made before. We desperately want for Spirit Crossing to be successful, so we can use it to continue making the world a less lonely place for many years to come.

We all desire to live in such a way that would make Rudi the bear proud of us.

What are our values, and how does that impact our approach in the future?

We’re still thinking through our monetization approach and want to invite you into that conversation. Let’s start with some insight into our core studio values and needs:

Staying true to the game

This is ultimately a game about community and collaboration. We believe that we should avoid any sort of monetization that would make people feel like they cannot collaborate with their friends and waystation members. Making friends and enjoying time with them must always come first.

Centering respect 

We don’t want Spirit Crossing to be a game that takes over your life, much less one that encourages you to spend beyond your means. It is important to us to never lean on highly predatory approaches to monetization.

Keeping it fair

Spirit Crossing really isn’t a game that you can “win”, and there’s not much competition in it, but to the small extent that there is, players should never feel like spending money increases their odds of success. So for example, you shouldn’t be more likely to win a fishing tournament because you spent money on a fishing rod, or more likely to win a race because you spent money on a speed boost. We’re going to strictly avoid things like that.

I don’t even think the lunkers would be chill with that. Also, they’re made of paper. Everyone is okay!!

So what are we going to do?

Right now, we’re imagining a two-tiered approach to generating revenue from Spirit Crossing (outside of the Netflix versions of the game, where the player’s Netflix subscription pays for their use of the game.)

Upfront price

On platforms like Steam, we are currently thinking that we’d like to charge $29.99 for the game, probably with a launch discount of 20% to reward the people who have been following the game and are eager to jump in from day 1. This guarantees that we start out with at least some income per player, and takes pressure off of other ways of monetising the game so that we can focus on the core game experience before launch. It also makes it harder for people to flood the game with bots, or to perpetuate toxic activities by creating many accounts, both of which can be major issues for free-to-play multiplayer games.

Optional in-game purchases

We’re still thinking this through and haven’t made any decisions. Here are some of the things we’re currently considering selling in the game. All would be completely optional. As we said before, if you’ve paid upfront for Spirit Crossing, you should be able to feel satisfied continuing to play it for years without paying more. On the flipside, you should hopefully feel that the optional things we’re selling have value to you, and feel good about spending money on them (otherwise, nobody will buy them, and they will be pointless!)

Note: it is unlikely that we will do all of these things, even if we receive positive feedback on all of them from our community – at least, not anytime soon. All of these features require a lot of work to implement in a good, fun and fair way. We want to focus on the optional in-game purchases that are most appealing to our players. 

“Prestige Status”

• You can earn ‘Prestige Levels’ by regularly logging in and playing the game. Prestige Levels give you access to certain in-game perks.
• The more Prestige Levels you’ve earned by playing Spirit Crossing, the more powerful your “Prestige Status” becomes when it is activated. And you activate Prestige Status (for a given period of time, like a day, or a week) using Beacon Sparks.
  • You can earn enough Beacon Sparks to activate your Prestige Status by playing the game, you do not have to pay for it! But you may ultimately want to save more of your Sparks for more cosmetic items in game, in which case, paying for Sparks to activate your Prestige Status might feel right for you.
• While “Prestige Status” is active, you could enjoy convenience features & boosts
  • Examples of “convenience features” are things like “being able to summon Maya to your location anytime” or “being able to force a refresh of a shop’s daily inventory on demand.” 
  • Examples of boosts are things like “Beacon Energy offerings are worth slightly more (+10-20%)” Or “a small chance of earning extra resources when harvesting.”
    • Boosts could automatically benefit other nearby players who don’t have Prestige Status activated for themselves. One more reason to hang out with friends!

Monthly currency pack: 

• A simple bundle of currencies that you can buy. You can only purchase this once per month, so it doesn’t become an endless temptation or massively warp the economy.
  • Could include beacon sparks, coins, and/or certain harvestable resources

Individual, permanent items, for example:

• Playable songs or emotes that are only available for cash or beacon sparks. 
• Unique outfits or hairstyles.
• Future purely cosmetic features, like a pet who follows you around the world

Additionally, things that players would enjoy, but which incur additional ongoing server costs for Spry Fox and need to be paid for somehow:

• A monthly fee you can pay to extend your Waystation island, enabling an increase in the amount of decoration / building you can do.
• The ability to own more than one home.

(Remember, these are all considerations and not set in stone! We’re going to provide a couple different avenues to share your thoughts below.)

Ah, a sky whale! He must have known we needed one last way to break up a bunch of text.

Kicking it off – what do YOU think?

We’ll have a thread in our Discord to kick off the conversation – ask your questions, share your insights, express your hopes and dreams. We also have a form available for those who have thoughts they’d like to share in a more structured, private space.

We’re looking forward to hearing your thoughts and talking to you more about this!

See you in the Crosslands,
Spry Fox