We hope to change the game from free to play to $6. The current pricing of the game is free to play with a DLC0 character pack that costs $6. After the price change we will merge the currently free main game with the content of the DLC0, to become the main game with a price tag of $6, and remove DLC0.
Owners of DLC0 will still be able to have access to the game, while players who are free to play will still retain their game data, should said players decided to purchase the game to continue playing. The details are still kind of blurry ,we still need to ask the guys working at Steam and Valve to see how to deal with the problem.
Owners of DLC1 and 1 only, seems to be having some problems here as we have no idea how to deal with it for now, maybe a refund? We the Devs suggests that if you have only purchased DLC 1 and not 0, please hold onto the wallet for now, it WILL be very troublesome
Sincere apology to the free to play players.
Main reason for the change :
The game was originally set to sell at $6 since there are sufficient content, but before the whole game went live, we were considering the following:
1: to draw in more players AND
2: the game wasn’t really that polished at the moment, so we made the game free and let every players be a tester of sorts, making the price 0 + 6
However, we had some troubles, such as :
1:A common misunderstanding with all those free to play mobile games – where the devs force the players to use microtransactions to win the game by either coding seriously difficult AI or a bad matchmaking system where new players were matched up against the vets. With DLC0 having so many characters and the base game having a “slightly lesser roster”, the player base would call the DLCs paid to win. It will cause unhappiness to both the player base and the Devs alike.
2:A free to play game would somehow hype up the players, only to drop it in their face in a wave of disappointment. A lot of free to play mobile games have a tendency to allow even the free to play players to grind the units they want, eventually ,while those players who would resorts to microtransactions would just use their money to speed things up. That is something we won’t do. Either by the rules set by fellow Touhou games, or our own will, we simply just support a player base that has paid-to-win and “loot boxes”
3:Due to the fact that this is a temporary decision to split the main game and DLC0, the free base game is still sort of playable, but with a seriously lack of characters and tactics, and making ranked match somehow restricted and become boring after a while. Not a completed game by any means.
If the player base think and treat the game like a free game and only plays it for free, they will not have a good experience with it. We are the ones that made the game free to play, but the players could not experience the game fully ,that was the mistake on our parts, we hope you could understand us and accept the apology.
4: The current base game’s playable characters are way to less, and are not really that suited for the single player game mode that will be released later, which, could give the false impression of forcing the player base to purchase the DLC0 to actually enjoy the game, which is kind of dumb….
We are contacting Steam to carry out the changes ,due to the slow traffic speed between the mails, the actual time for the change is not confirmed yet, but we will get it done ASAP