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Gods & Minions is a browser based strategy RPG taking place in a dark fantasy world. The game is currently in development and will be self-published by 1manstudio. Gameplay is typical for both browser games and strategy titles: You build and upgrade your own fortress and summon Minions aligned to various elements (the base game will contain 3-5 elements, expanded to 7 while the game is updated). Minions can be upgraded and assembled to form Armies in order to attack your opponents. By raiding your opponents Fortress, you gain valuable resources in order to increase your own power. Gameplay is asynchronous, so you can play at anytime - even if there is no other player online. Gods & Minions is suited for both casual and core players: You will be able to make progress in just 5 minutes of play, but on the other hand there is enough depth to play the game for hours.

Post news Report RSS It's all about the money...NOT

Monetisation is a exasperating topic regarding all kinds of games and toys. Especially MMOs, online and mobile games suffer from the following dilemma: First developers invest great amounts of money, time and manpower into a project. Second, the costs for developing, updating and maintaining such a project must be covered. On the other hand, todays market is full to the brim with games and publishers are struggling to attract enough customers for their games.

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OR: Why Gods & Minions will be FREE - FOREVER

Monetisation is a exasperating topic regarding all kinds of games and toys. Especially MMOs, online and mobile games suffer from the following dilemma: First developers invest great amounts of money, time and manpower into a project. Second, the costs for developing, updating and maintaining such a project must be covered. On the other hand, todays market is full to the brim with games and publishers are struggling to attract enough customers for their games. This leads to a weird situation: More and more games are offered for "free" and try to make money in another way. This somewhat simple solution seems to be a relief, but creates even more pitfalls.

Gods & Minions is first and foremost a hobby project. I am working on the project in my sparetime and finance all artworks plus the server out of my own pocket. Me and my team are well aware that we cannot compete with the big-pocket AAA studios out there - but this is not a real problem to us, as we just don't want to compete in that very aspect. We have thought a lot about the monetisation aspect of Gods & Minions and came to the conclusion that the classic "paid-product" model is not adequate for a project like this. This is why we agreed on a "code of conduct" that defines Gods & Minions as a free game, without any strings attached. It might sound ridiculous but Facebook and Twitter (for example) started exactly the same way.

  • Gods & Minions will be FREE - FOREVER
  • The will be no one-time fee (the game must not be "bought")
  • There won't be a subscription fee to the game
  • The game will not be free-to-play (it won't be "pay to win")

Why this? You might ask. It is important to understand that most Indie games are struggling attracting enough players in order to play their games. This sounds so weird: A free game featuring high-quality art and tons of content is not able to attract enough players? Yes, thats both a sad fact and how reality is nowadays. So, the answer is: Gods & Minions will be free BECAUSE we are a small and unknown development studio. We remove the hurdle to pay money in order to enjoy our product completely.

The premium shop, without real money involved
The screenshot above shows the ingame shop, with no real money involved

As we don't want to alienate our few first players with layer-ads and premium shops, we have decided for a strategy of free growth instead. A strategy that will offer the game without any cost, until we reach a critical mass of players. And even after that, there won't be a hard paywall.On the other hand, we have to reserve some options for the future - as sooner or later the invested time and money must be compensated. Especially if we manage to attract enough players to build a solid player base. There is no definite solution to this problem yet but most probably will be a clever combination of advertising and creative premium content (that does not interfere with game balance).

  • We will add advertising to the game once we hit a critical mass of players (if ever)
  • There will be non-gameplay related premium (paid) options later (most notably: disabling the ads or more detailed logs and statistics, as well as being able to choose unique pictures for your avatar or custom guild badges).
  • There might be crowd-funding of some sort that will grant our backers in-game currency. As those crowd-funding efforts are directly tied to the games development and we control their frequency, this is no direct pay-to-win. In the first place, you don't pay money to make your account better, you pay to support the game itself.

Gods & Minions is a longterm effort, it was created over a course of several years and it won't be re-finfanced over-night. It's a sad fact, that games require money in order to be appealing but that does not mean that we created Gods & Minions because of that money. It's a project created by players for players, with our players in mind. Thats the primary goal, to create something that is both free and longlasting fun. But as cool as games are, that necessary evil that money is - must addressed in one or another way.

Thanks for being with us
-Tobias (Gods & Minions project lead)

Godsandminions.com
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