Having a way to buy-in to any form of early-access for alpha/beta builds of a game after kickstarter funding is over, at the same price of the kickstarter, tends to end up looking greedy/entirely disingenuous no matter what way the developers responsible try and spin it.
No idea if you’d end up losing money in the long run due to bad publicity from people who are going to feel cheated/ripped off, (I know they don’t have to buy the game, but people are weird like that) whining about the glitches and the like in the alpha/beta due to it’s unfinished nature, but it might be worth considering.
I was pointing out the difference between Prison Architect and Planetary Annihilation.
I understood the reason for it being $90. Still I don’t believe it was a wise decision. People aren’t used to seeing games for $90 in the context of Steam.
It would be for most Kickstarted games if we were honest about the value for the final version of that software, which is practically zero. The work you put into software is valuable, but that doesn’t mean the software is, since it can be almost infinitely duplicated. But that is a different topic.
I:B would be an exception as people would be paying for official multiplayer server support in the way Guild Wars does it.
Servers will not be able to charge you for play time - unless they’re using a mod that costs $$ and you haven’t bought it yet but the server itself won’t be charging for that mod, it’ll be for sale on the I-Novae marketplace and you’ll only need to purchase it once.
How about passworded servers? That’s pretty much a standard.
Edit:
I’d love to see serious comp, maybe even pro comp in I:BS - If that works out it’ll be a massive boon for the game both in terms of player-base and longevity.
To facilitate serious comp the game must support spectating (a mirror of exactly what the player is seeing, not just a 3rd person camera)
It must have private servers (obviously)
And as much customisability as possible, eg Disallowing certain weapons/ships, Changing rate of resource point generation, Setting costs of ships etc.
Can you give us an idea of your feelings about this?
Yeah passworded servers are pretty standard and will be supported. We’re all about having, and supporting, serious competition between organized groups of players. A lot of it is dependent on the amount of money we raise in our Kickstarter but pretty much everything you listed is within the realm of what we ideally would like to include. Add to your list the ability to record and replay matches like you can with SC2.