Last week we reported on Crescent Moon Games replacing a couple of their games with free-to-play versions instead while stating that the premium price model is dead. Needless to say that caused quite an issue with a lot of people, especially with those who currently own the two games that were replaced with free-to-play versions: Mines of Mars and Neon Shadow. Now Crescent Moon Games is apologizing for the replacement of the premium versions and they have come up with a better plan for future changes.
For those people who purchased the games when they were originally offered as a premium priced title, the move to free-to-play versions meant that they wouldn’t be seeing the ads that are now appearing in the free versions. Even though people who paid for those two games remain unaffected by the change, it still offended a lot of people.
After the recent fiasco of going free with premium titles Neon Shadow and Mines of Mars – we have decided that it would be better to just launch separate free versions that are ad supported on Android from now on. Even after adding precautions so that previous buyers wouldn’t be affected by the ‘going free’ we still offended a lot of people and would like to apologize for that. – Crescent Moon Games
The plan now is not to replace their premium priced games with free-to-play ad supported versions, but instead to offer both. This way gamers have a choice, either buy the game right away, or grab the free-to-play version with ads supporting it, and then removing the ads if you want to later on. This actually should have been the way to go in the first place as it is always incredibly risky to change a premium game to free.
The first game to fall into this new plan by Crescent Moon is their Exiles title, which is now available on Google Play as both a paid title for $6.99 and a free-to-play version with ads. Other games in the company’s catalog will be following suit soon. As for whether or not the premium price model is dead, there are plenty of people out there who still want to pay just once for a game.
Website Referenced: PocketGamer
