Sword Coast Legends free to play for the weekend on Steam

[Corpsetaker]

The free weekend was a sort of a double-edged sword it looks like. Ownership of the game shot up 50% over this weekend. Actual players increased by 100%! Unfortunately, the new people largely disliked the game and so the rating has dropped from 57% to 51% in just three days.

Now, all that said? N-Space and SCL mostly benefited from this sale, I think. At this point the reputation of the game is somewhat sealed. If 57% wasn't going to scare you away then 51% probably isn't that much more of a disincentive. This is not to say that the people they picked up this weekend aren't picky. Obviously, a lot of them weren't perfectly happy with their purchase or the approval rating wouldn't have been dented so significantly. But the players you get three months into release for $20 probably have far more mitigated expectations.

Now the good news for SCL: This weekend the consecutive player count went up about 500%! The game hasn't had user numbers like that since the release date, but after that first weekend player participation steadily decayed. (Heck, it's almost a textbook example of mathematical model with exponential decay with sinusoidal dampening.) Of course, it's hard to argue with play for free, and only time will tell if these new players actually stick around. The next couple of weekends are holidays so it's probably going to take a month to determine how many of these players actually paid and will come back.

Likely, this sale and free-play promotion was a marketing push to maximize their participation rates for when Rage of Demons launches in the near future. The free players and the new players who haven't been scared off immediately are keeping the game interesting for those few die-hard fans that otherwise might haven no one else to play with and give up on the game. Thus the game stays alive long enough for the first expansion to launch. You can expect that SCL will go on sale or be bundled again when that DLC eventually drops, and the player numbers should spike again in a similar manner when that happens. The only uncertainty is how fast the player base will decay after that.

How does this benefit N-space or the game? Don't forget that you can get a refund as long as you stay under the time limit. You can buy the game, post your review and then get your money back.

I would say this has sealed their doom.

 

[Reinhart]

How does this benefit N-space or the game? Don't forget that you can get a refund as long as you stay under the time limit. You can buy the game, post your review and then get your money back.

I would say this has sealed their doom.

It doesn't necessarily benefit them, but at this point it can't really hurt them either. They participate in these free weekends in the belief that with no barrier to entrance, people curious about the game who haven't purchased it yet will try it. That certainly happened. Then the hope is those free players are willing to purchase the game for the reduced price of $20. The full impact of that has yet to be demonstrated. It looks like after the free weekend traffic has settled down, they picked up about 10,000 more customers. That's a 13% increase in volume. So that means they generated about $200,000 in sales last weekend. Steam takes about 30-40% of that, so that's about $130,000 in revenue. Not amazing, but enough to keep the lights on and prevent the paychecks from bouncing for another month.

But there's more going on here than selling a few more copies. Remember, Sword Coast Legends boasts a lot about its multiplayer mode. (That's how it got into this marketing nightmare in the first place, after all.) Online multiplayer games require a constant critical mass of players in order to maintain their value. That goes double for games that try to emphasize user generated content. If you can't reliably find a group to play with, and there aren't many interesting modules to download, then it doesn't matter how good your gameplay or tools really are. So SCL benefits from pretty much anything that eventually draws more people online and creating modules.

Since the free weekend their concurrent online player count has "soared" back to where it was near the end of October. Previously it had dipped to only about 300-400 people a day, now it's back up to about 1,000. Of course, it's going to drop off again eventually, but I think that N-Space is hoping to release the Rage of Demons DLC before that happens. That way it comes out while it's still a worthwhile product to the roughly 80,000 owners of the game. Of course, only about 20,000 of those owners still play regularly. I suspect that releasing the DLC may just be a matter of honoring a contractual obligation now.

 

[Jester David]

It doesn't necessarily benefit them, but at this point it can't really hurt them either. They participate in these free weekends in the belief that with no barrier to entrance, people curious about the game who haven't purchased it yet will try it. That certainly happened. Then the hope is those free players are willing to purchase the game for the reduced price of $20.

As mentioned, the people who try it free are people who might have paid but now won't. If the majority give a bad review or spread negative press, it doesn't help.
It's especially odd that they didn't wait until after their planned 3rd community pack, which is meant to "fix" the game and allow modding. That might have led to better reviews and word of mouth.

The full impact of that has yet to be demonstrated. It looks like after the free weekend traffic has settled down, they picked up about 10,000 more customers. That's a 13% increase in volume. So that means they generated about $200,000 in sales last weekend. Steam takes about 30-40% of that, so that's about $130,000 in revenue. Not amazing, but enough to keep the lights on and prevent the paychecks from bouncing for another month.

Right now there's a big drop in people with the game installed. It looks like they picked up <7000 sales, but a lot of those might be people who just haven't uninstalled the game yet or asked for their refund.
So probably under $90k revenue. Which is better than nothing, I suppose.

Since the free weekend their concurrent online player count has "soared" back to where it was near the end of October. Previously it had dipped to only about 300-400 people a day, now it's back up to about 1,000.

Not quite. It went back up to 3000 people online, when the peak at launch was closer to 4000. So even free they couldn't quite hit that initial number. Which is a poor sign...

Of course, it's going to drop off again eventually, but I think that N-Space is hoping to release the Rage of Demons DLC before that happens. That way it comes out while it's still a worthwhile product to the roughly 80,000 owners of the game. Of course, only about 20,000 of those owners still play regularly. I suspect that releasing the DLC may just be a matter of honoring a contractual obligation now.

At this point, they'd better hurt to get the Rage of Demons module out or they'll miss the window and WotC will be talking about the next storyline...

 

[Reinhart]

[MENTION=37579]Jester Canuck[/MENTION]: No disagreement from me. It sounds like we're pretty much on the same page here. I also wonder why they didn't bother waiting for their third community pack to finish, and find it disturbing that they haven't announced when the RoD DLC will be ready yet. This free weekend seems poorly timed if they can't immediately take advantage of it. And if they don't have their DLC lined up for the next few weeks it makes me wonder how desperate N-Space is and how much control Steam allows in deciding the schedule of their free weekends.