Hi everyone,
Two weeks ago, PES launched here on Steam for free with pay-as-you-go credits for creating dreams and talking to NPCs. The reaction from players was that the label ‘free-to-play’ felt misleading, which was absolutely not what we intended, so we took the game down to rethink.
Before we relaunch, we wanted to describe how PES works behind the scenes.
When you tell PES your dream, a combination of GenAI and programmatic processes create some new content from scratch, and some new content from in-game modules. The new GenAI content includes dialog, murals, text-to-speech, and processes to interpret your dream. The procedural modules create terrain, buildings, weather and avatars.
For some of this, we use 3rd-parties like OpenAI and AWS, meaning there’s a direct cost to create a dream. Each piece of dialog, each mural, each time an NPC speaks – these all cost money for every dream.
This means games like PES are hard to launch with a simple price point that says: “Here’s our game, it’s $4.99, go for it!” Because after loads of dreaming, PES would be charged more than $4.99 by OpenAI and AWS, it would send us bankrupt, and no more PES. Hopefully not what anyone wants!
So we have to find a balance to keep PES up and running.
What we’ve done is make two key pricing changes. First, we’ve reviewed all player data so far to lower the cost of dreams, from around $1/dream to $0.35/dream. Second – to be upfront about the cost of dream creation – we’ve changed PES from ‘Free’ to ‘Paid’. Going forward, it will cost $4.99 and will come with 1500 credits, or up to 15 dreams, with further credits available on a revised PAYG basis.
If you’ve already played PES, you can keep it for free and purchase more credits at the lower price point if you’d like. Importantly, it’s still free to revisit dreams – your own and other players’.
PES will relaunch soon with this new approach to pricing. We wanted to explain our thinking behind it – hence this long (sorry) post about it. If you have any questions, you can contact us here or on our Discord.