The system both of our games are built on; The foundation of features we simply just call "Divergence", is huge. It's huge, elaborate, and carries the potential of making truly groundbreaking MMORPGs.
Ever since January, we'd started getting more and more interest from other studios willing to hire us as consultants to basically "teach them how to do what we did". As you can imagine, we rebuffed the vast majority of these and resolved to continue our goals of using the franchise as the means of self-funding development.
Six-months later the writing was on the wall that while some players were racking up an obscene 800+ hours spent on our little Early-Access game, and while technically it was a commercial success and made back more than the cost of development, that amount was simply just under what we needed to expand the team to a usable size and finish the game.
So we launched Year Zero to a similar result; Success at paying itself off but very meager gains. We made progress, lots of it over the last ten months, but the truth is that continuing at the pace it's going would take years to get where we wanted to go, and simply isn't good enough.
The remedy is that we decided to indeed open the door to a few opportunities who've shown interest in trading our experience for critical resources that we can then turn around and use to fuel Divergence.
As a result, we also made the decision to go ahead and reduce the retail cost of both games by a whopping 30% across the board. The decision comes mostly as a result of the fact that, since these two games together already don't represent a substantial percentage of our income, why not go ahead and make the cost of entry more appealing to newcomers while both games are in Early Access.
Divergence brings a lot of crazy features to the scene. It's still one of if not the best resource harvesting and crafting MMOs that exists, but until it's combat in both PVP and PVE are implemented the way we originally intended them to be, we just don't want players thinking that we've deemed it "good enough".
So that's all of it. We're in the midst of some pretty big developments with regards to upcoming features and fixing bugs, so we hope this decision will make everyone feel better about coming onboard and helping us continue to design our MMO experience the way it should be.