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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Reinhart" data-source="post: 6786712" data-attributes="member: 13080">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.</blockquote>

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