TaleSpire Dev Log 429 - Costs and Currencies
Hi folks, in this post, we’re gonna talk about various money matters, but let’s not bury the lede; we’ll start with seat pricing.
For the purpose of this post, we will use the USD prices as an example. The prices will then be regionalized for each country. This does NOT mean that the USD prices are just converted to local currency. See further down for info on what is actually done.
Seats
The current cost of the full game is $25 USD.
We will be putting a build of TaleSpire on Steam called “TaleSpire - Guest Edition,” which will be free to download. For the purpose of this post, we will call the people using the guest edition “guests.”
For a guest to be able to enter a campaign, a seat must be available. The guest occupies the seat while they are playing, and they release it when they exit or return to the main menu.
Seats can be purchased by any person who owns the full game. Your seats are moved to whichever campaign you most recently played (or are playing), so there is very little to manage. Seats remain usable even if the owner is offline, so the adventure can continue even if someone can’t make a session. [0]
Seats will be sold in packs.
A one seat pack is $15 USD
A pack of four seats is $50 USD. Which is $12.50 USD per seat, or half the price of a full copy.
The guest edition has all the same tools as the full version, except the ability to create campaigns. Your guests can build and even GM if you want them to!
The real power of seats is that they are reusable across many campaigns, so once you have seats, they can be used for as many campaigns with guests as you like.
For you professional GMs out there, that means you only need as many seats as there are players in a single campaign. Your seats automatically move with you between campaigns so your customers never need to buy TaleSpire themselves.
Regional Pricing
Steam actually explains regional pricing pretty well, so I’m gonna quote from their documentation:
It’s tempting to treat pricing as a simple problem of foreign exchange rates and tie each currency’s price equivalency to the exchange rate. But that kind of strategy vastly oversimplifies the disparate economic circumstances from one territory to another.
…
Rather than just pegging prices to foreign exchange rates, our process for price suggestions goes deeper into the nuts and bolts of what players pay for the goods and services in their lives. This includes metrics like purchasing-power parity and consumer price indexes, which help compare prices and costs more broadly across a bunch of different economic sectors.
The TLDR of the above is that the price of a burger in country A, converted to the currency of country B wouldn’t neccessarily be a sensible price for a burger there, as the value of things depends on a lot more than that.
When we put out the Early Access, we set the US price and then used Steam’s regional pricing suggestions to set the prices for the rest of us.
It’s been some years now and so at some point we probably should normalize the prices again to make sure they make sense for different regions. We’ve not got a plan for this yet though. We’ll post more as soon as do so that everyone is in the loop.
Argentina and Turkey
Steam’s regional pricing has not been all sunshine and roses, though. Last November, Steam put out “New USD Pricing For Argentina and Turkey beginning November 20th”, which switched those countries to using USD citing “Exchange rate volatility” as the reason.
Understandably, this made the game impractically expensive for some folks. We quickly updated the prices to a recommended lower rate as suggested by Steam. However, we had hoped there would be more that we could do, but we haven’t found a way.
We’ll keep an eye on things and post again if we hear of any developments.
And that’s all for today
Every day we are testing and bug fixing the seats system. Progress is good and we’re just eager to hit that point where it feels stable enough to ship to all of you.
More news on that coming soon!
Have a lovely week folks.
Disclaimer: This DevLog is from the perspective of one developer. So it doesn’t reflect everything going on with the team
[0] This post explains a little more of how seats behave.
strangerling
Userstrangerling
User ·That's completely unreasonable. Not only the price itself, but also the fact that GMs already spend so much time, effort, and often money as is to run the game. And suggesting GMs ask their players to send them reimbursement is not a solution, as it requires use of outside services.
Guests should, at a minimum, be able to use their guest copy of the game to purchase their own seats.
I've run and played in multiple campaigns simultaneously, and I've needed to open a campaign to check something or edit a map I was asked to as a player when the GM might have opened a different campaign, project, or even test campaign used to build prototypes in more recently. As this is described, it sounds like that won't be possible. That's especially applicable to professional DMs.
I do agree with the decision to make seats cross-campaign, because online games fall apart more often than they last (in my experience as a player). And I understand that finding ways to generate continued income for an application like this is critical, and seats are a smart way to do this, but $15 a pop or $50 at once, that only the GM can buy, is asking way too much.
Luis
Luis
·As for GMs having to pay for everything: we're not forcing anyone to use the seat method and even if you want to, it doesn't have to be the GM who buys the seats.
The base game can still be bought and this will work for playing together just as before. We also think the costs of playing should be more evenly distributed among the group which is why we went with the "old" model in the first place, but seats are an answer to many GMs asking us to allow them to pay for everything.
Ultimately, all seats do are add an additional (and cheaper, albeit with the "only assigned to one campaign" caveat) way of purchasing the game with the access staying with the purchaser - this will be more convenient for some, but others may prefer the "old" method of buying the full game, and that's fine.
I hope this clears things up and thank you for the feedback :)
Takeshita_Sakakaki
UserTakeshita_Sakakaki
User ·Creadth
UserCreadth
User ·ZapatoElf
UserZapatoElf
User ·As for now, it makes a lot more sense to buy the complete game than the seats, which is what I think you're trying to do with this tactic.
Either way, I really hope things get cleared out and you really take the feedback the community is offering into consideration.
Thank you for reading.
Takeshita_Sakakaki
UserTakeshita_Sakakaki
User ·as a DM, the seat setup makes way more sense. I can drop $50 to ensure that basically every campaign I ever run I can play on Talespire and none of my players have to ever spend anything, regardless of how many campaigns I am running at once or future ones I start. Additionally, I bring those seats with me to anyone else's campaign I play in. The value of this as a DM is very good.
uxigadur
Useruxigadur
User ·lemurian_settler
lemurian_settler
·TheReaktion
UserTheReaktion
User ·Luis
Luis
·criticalmatch
Usercriticalmatch
User ·