Hello everyone,

Two important events will take place within a couple of weeks:

- we will launch the Kickstarter campaign - you will all be able to play the current version of the game

This will be quite a big deal since the success of the crowd-funding campaign will dictate how the game should be further developed. We will be making sure a lot of people hear about Call of Combat, but you can also be of tremendous help by spreading the word to your families, friends and online communities. If you are a dictator, please let your people know about the game.

And yes, all of you will be able to download and play an early version of the game. In no way will it be the definitive version of the game, but it will show you where we are now. It will basically be an open alpha that will remain online for the duration of the Kickstarter campaign: roughly a month.

Provided things go well, we will want to offer two ways to play the game after that. There will be a free preview version of the game. And there will be a full version with similar price to other indie games. We will give you more details about that in a later post, but our general idea is not to cripple the free version too much while offering a full game that is worth its price. It has not been easy to figure out the best monetization solution, but we believe this one to be the most realistic for you and for us when it comes to our ultimate goal: bring the best game possible to you and in a durable way.

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This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at http://www.callofcombat.com/blog/crowd-funding-and-game-playing

Are the paying people allowed to play against the non paying people? What do you get if you pay? An extra soldier or 2?! Oh boy

Essentially, we would like everyone to be able to play together. We will give you more details about that later.

Sounds great to me, I got a few hundred Atleast wanting or soon will be wanting to play from another game I play

I'm Gnna be on spring break next 3 weeks to so callofcombat 16h a day haha

How are we incentivized to support the Kickstarter? Obviously all of us here want to see this game get off the ground, but what rewards are there for a random person browsing kickstarter?

I would easily throw 10 or 20 bucks at this game without any hesitation, maybe more if it came with a cool poster, or T-Shirt.
So happy to hear this Alpha finally opening up a little.
See you guys in there!

I have no problem paying a few bucks for this game but hopefully it doesn't end up like other games where the F2P maps/servers are packed full and P2P is close to empty. If you threw in some vehicles like Helicopters or maybe airstrikes and paratroopers for P2P (Just kidding). I think the game, once everything is perfected is definitely worth paying for. Now's the hard part of convincing the masses of that.

I think if you need people to eventually buy the game, you really have to discourage people from being satisfied with the free version. What about a free one week trial of the full game, and then either buy the game, or only be able to play in a no points, no weapons, limited maps room. Maybe let them have 10 or so games a month in a regular room, but no AG games allowed.

My thought is that if you let them stick around with the free room that kind of sucks, but let them have a few regular games a month, and even let them join an AG, that they are more likely to invest their interest, and eventually convert to the full version over time. Perhaps it would get more buyers than a "buy now or no more", but still get noncommittal gamers to eventually buy?

I'm super excited to play this game. It looks fantastic!

-Chuck

PS - I fully intend to buy this.

Could anything be learned from Riot's LoL pricing model?

In many ways the games are similar:

• They're both team based but with the ability for a single person to stand out
• Although CoC isn't a moba it does share the characteristic of having short matches that are replayable, quick and easy to join.
• Building from this having skins (either for the soldiers, weapons or both!) or a way to uniquely identify yourself becomes appealing which could be monetised but leaves the core game free, which will attract more new accounts vs a paid game.

This is just one alternative to having a free version of the game and a paid model. I think if a paid model is going to work it needs to be done correctly or it has the potential to sink the remake.

Thanks for the support, guys, it really means a lot to us.

I did not go in detail in the blog post, but last year, we gave a very hard and deep look at monetization models. The game seemed to be a good candidate for free-to-play. We've been analyzing World of Tanks, League of Legends, DotA2, Hawken, Tribes Ascend and many others. These games became viable after long and heavy development times. Going that route would have required a lot more resources than we can realistically spare at this time (we're mainly five people developing this, and not even really full time). We decided that a simple classic retail model would make more sense for us, but we still wanted to provide some free version (like a demo or a preview of the game) so that anyone can try it out and see if the game is worth it.

Very easy free version..no weapons..no eye sight..no AGs ...only a few maps.

Please don't make f2p too restricting, many people who played previous versions of CoC were teenagers still in school, without any cash to afford any games. If the game becomes p2p, I believe you will lose a large user group and the game will die too quickly.

Yeah exactly. I think I started playing first when I was around 14/15 and I would have passed on the game for sure if it had required payment to get to most of the features.

I think if they are going down the route of a free version and a paid version then they have to make people at least want to play the free one to have any chance of them buying the paid version.

totally agree if you already want do it like 5-10 $ perma acc.

As already suggested as to the differences:

Allow f2p players have a one week free trial, and then still be able to join the lobby.

I imagine that it's a one time fee and not subscription based?

Why not also have a referral incentive where if you invite two people who then go on to purchase it, you get the full game for free, or something along those lines.

Allow f2p players have a one week free trial, and then still be able to join the lobby.

^^This, Exactly this!!
And a one time Fee of like... $10 or $15 Bucks.

Hey If anyone remembers me. My old name was Chrisglimore1Lt and would think it be great to be pay to play but at same time what about those players who really like the game but can afford it after a trail period... times are hard (not saying me but some people i used to play with are like this) could there maybe be an option to buy other players an account? ( and keep the name changes to a pay to change with maybe 1 or 2 freebies)

I hope old KFG will a in a same state, like long time ago.

OK. Can you make the original open source then? If you are going to be charging people, you will have a hard time getting new folks on board. Get the code out on the first low-fi game so that we can get some clones out there circulating. Eventually, those players will want the prestige of playing the new version and will throw down the bucks for a perma acct and purchase whatever in-game content you sell. I'm not sure what the traffic is like on this website but it is probably relegated to a small core group. The reason I found the game is that I looked for something extremely specific, and there isn't even a game to play. If I had come around and there was something to play but I had to fall into one of those free-trials traps, I would have moved right along to a bigger developer. I understand you guys don't have a whole lot to work with, but let the community do absolutely all of your advertising. Let loose the code for the original so we can put it into the hands of someone who will clone it. For free.

Making the original game open source is not excluded, but that is not going to happen in the very short term. It would require quite some work to clean up the code and document it, and right now this simply is not an option.

You guys are throwing pretty good ideas around, some of them are actually part of our plan. We will tell you more about all that later. But first, know that the open alpha is coming pretty soon...