In an interview with Strategy Informer, Cliffhanger’s Creative Director Jan Wagner has revealed that the turn-based multiplayer arena game Aerena: Clash of Champions was turned down by publishers who told the developers that they “only take pay-to-win games”.
”Another thing that were trying to do,” said Wagner, “which might be stupid from an economic perspective, is that we’re trying to make a ‘fair-to-play’ game – you can get anything in the game by just playing. Anything that you can unlock can be bought for hard currency or soft currency which you earn by playing.”
Wagner says that it should only take around a couple of hours or two to unlock your first two playable heroes through in-game currency, although the unlock times do start to get lengthier after that.
”So it’s really just about how much time players have. If you want, you can just play for free forever. We don’t believe in free-to-play games which try to milk their player base. Firstly, I have problems with their ethics, and also I don’t believe that model is going to last – it’s going to be a race to the bottom in terms of quality.”
Apparently that stance was not hugely popular with several publishers. ”We actually lost publishing contacts for making that decision. They flat out said, “we love the graphics, it’s a good concept, we think it’s got a long lifetime – great! But it’s not pay-to-win so we don’t like it. We’re not going to take it, we only take pay-to-win games.” There were some publishers who said that where we were left thinking, “well, that’s not what you say to the public.”
Currently available on Steam Early Access, Aerena will be fully released on May 7.
