In December 2014 we added Variant (promo) cards to Sentinels of the Multiverse: The Video Game (a little before it was available on Steam). The update was met with a lot of excitement as the community raced to figure out the challenges and unlock the cards. While the experience was overwhelmingly positive, we did receive some dissenting feedback. Some players wanted to pay to unlock them, and some players felt the challenges were too difficult.
We released a survey to find out what you thought about the idea of us offering a paid option to unlock variants. Thank you to everyone who responded! The results were quite interesting because they did not reveal any kind of consensus. After our internal analysis and discussion, we’ve made a decision about our next steps, beginning with the release of Rook City and version 1.3 of the game.
Variant cards will always be unlockable via story challenges, and we will continue to add variants to the game with updates. The next new variants will be available in version 1.3 when Rook City is released. After the method for unlocking a given variant is discovered by the community, we will add that info to a page on our website, and this page will be linked to from within the game. Approximately 30 days after new variants are added to the game, we will post a unique password (cheat code) for each variant that can be entered into the game to unlock it without completing the story challenge. The above will also apply to the original set of 6 variant cards. The challenge info & passwords for those variants will be made available upon the release of version 1.3.
As you can see, there will not be an option to pay money to unlock variants. If you’d like some more information on how we arrived at this decision, read more on our blog!