Faeria Friday: Forward to the Future

Announcements
#1

Today we have a large amount of very important news to share. Normal Faeria Friday content will follow.

Where we are now

2016 was an exciting year for us and for Faeria. We arrived in Steam’s Early Access two years ago this month. Then, in 2017, Faeria officially launched. After hitting the one million downloads mark we celebrated by releasing our first expansion: The Oversky.

While we are very proud of Faeria and the challenges that we have been able to overcome, we know there have been times where we have fallen short of our, and your, expectations. We’ve tried to do too many things at once, and we haven’t always been able to achieve exactly what we wanted, we feel that not only have we built an amazing game, but that we have a great community of players to share it with.

But what about 2018 and onwards, we hear you ask. What’s next? Well, it’s with great pleasure that we are renewing our commitment towards our original goal: to make Faeria a true classic of the genre, with a long and yak-filled future.

Where we’re going next

Let’s talk about Abrakam as a whole before we get to what’s next for Faeria. We have some important news. We are working on a brand new game that will be coming in the not too distant future. We’re not ready to talk about this game in detail yet, other than to say that we are incredibly excited by it! As well as working on this new game, we have been laying the foundations to be able to grow our team rapidly in 2018, and are now steaming forwards with recruitment.

After the release of Oversky, we weren’t entirely sure what path forward to take for Faeria. One thing was clear: It was important for us to adapt our plans to maintain the game’s financial viability ensuring not only that Faeria will live on for a long time, but to guarantee we will be able to continue creating new and exciting content much more frequently.

While making a second game has always been tempting to us, our focus has always primarily been on building and improving Faeria for the years to come. However we do often have discussions with other developers and publishers about possible collaborations. Over time we have grown close to one of these in particular - a publisher that we have a huge amount of respect for - that has since spawned this new opportunity. A “perfect storm” seemed to surface where we were needing some time to make plans on improving Faeria, and decided to move forward with the new project simultaneously.

The reason we haven’t shared this news until now is that it was important for us to come up with a concrete plan that we know we will stick to, and have complete confidence in. Especially since we can only share limited information about this new opportunity at this time.

Faeria’s future

Considering the above, it’s important for us to be clear about what our goals are for Faeria, and how these fit within our goals as a company, too. In a nutshell, we are committed to creating quality content while finding ways to grow and expand on the Faeria universe as a whole, however we need to ensure that we do this in a sustainable way that will allow us to keep supporting and growing Faeria for the foreseeable future.

Today we want to share key changes to our plans that will serve to give us a more solid foundation on which to continue building Faeria’s future together.

Becoming Buy-to-Play

First of all, Faeria will be transitioning into a buy-to-play game. While we love the concept of free-to-play, we haven’t been able to find the right balance to make it financially sustainable for Faeria, and making this change will allow us to focus our energy on creating regular high-quality content for the foreseeable future.

Don’t worry, if you’re an existing player we won’t be asking you to pay to continue playing, we will have a process in place for current and previous players to keep your accounts active with all your current progression, completely free of charge.

This also means the game’s economy will be completely revamped, as removing the requirements that come from being a F2P game will allow us to give all players smoother and quicker access to both new and existing content.

This DLC-based model will allow us to bring far more new content to the game, more frequently, as well as allowing us to allocate more resources on the marketing side to help grow our already-awesome community.

New Content

We have lots of plans already for what we want to introduce into the game in the near future, however we are not yet ready to go into the exact details quite yet. What we can reveal is that Faeria’s next card expansion will come at the same time as the B2P relaunch, early this summer, and that from then on we will be releasing new content every single month.

The reason you’ll have to wait a little bit longer is that we have a lot of development work on our plates to prepare the game for these major changes, especially since we want to take the opportunity to solidify the foundation to make it easier/faster for us to ship new content to you.

While moving to a DLC model implies a significant change to the way new cards will be acquired, we hope what we’ve explained above helps you understand why we think it’s a necessary step. We’re confident that the new content it enables us to produce will be well worth the change.

Focusing on PC - Mobile Versions Cancelled

In our effort to refocus our work on Faeria around our community of PC players, we have decided to cancel Faeria on iOS & Android and support for the current version will be removed within the next few months.

We understand this will be disappointing to some of you. Through our testing observations, gathered data, and extensive internal analysis we have determined that as it is, Faeria is not up to par for the modern mobile experience we want it to be without major overhauls to its iOS and Android versions.

Pulling our resources away from mobile development for Faeria as it exists, including the time it takes to merely maintain a working version, will give us more of the room we need to making the PC experience as amazing as possible.

That said, we aren’t closing the door on the possibility of building great mobile experiences based in the Faeria universe in the future as it would definitely fit within our broader goals!

We’ll be back with more news soon

This is a lot of information to share in one go already, so we won’t go into more detail right now, but rest assured we’re focussed on progressing as quickly as possible in all areas, and as mentioned we are continuing to grow our team rapidly - so don’t forget to check out our jobs page if you think you might be a good fit in any areas from game design to development!

We will continue to release more information on these changes over the coming weeks, and we also want to hear from you with any feedback or questions you might have.

Thanks for your support,

  • The Abrakam Team

…And now for your regularly scheduled Faeria Friday content.

Season reset and March cardbacks

Edit: The season will be resetting at 12:00 (Noon) CEST* on Tuesday April 3rd due to Belgian holidays. FWC Points will still be calculated on Monday, April 2nd as previously announced.

  • Note that timezones did shift an hour ahead last Sunday in Belgium, and CEST is the new standard we follow.

This season’s reset will be the first to count for the new Season of Ruunin for FWC points.

##Aurora Seasonal Cup

The $2500 Seasonal Cup takes place NEXT Saturday, April 7th - 16:00 CEST. The top 32 players in FWC points from January-March will compete live on FaeriaTV!. We’ll be reminding everyone about this throughout next week as well.

Aurora Open #4 recap

And that is the final Championship League tournament in the Season of Aurora for 2018.

The next Championship League tournaments will be Ruunin Open #1 and #2, taking place on April 14th and 28th respectively. Registration will open next week.

Hex Templar Premier recap

Due to GDC craziness, we didn’t get the recap of the first Hex Templar tournament up on Faeria Friday. Let’s fix that now.

Note that these Steam prizes are provided by esteemed tournament organizer and community member werfs, and Abrakam is not associated with or responsible for these rewards.

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1 Like
#2

I have been playing Faeria for a year now, and it’s reassuring to hear that players like myself will be able to play for free.

What would happen to the cash shop and the items currently in it? Will the cash shop close, and if not, will at least some of the items in it get cheaper? What will happen to gems and gold as cash shop currencies?

Also, will those people who come to the game after the B2P conversion get a free trial, and if yes, up to what level?

#3

(/rant)
This legitimately looks like “We think faeria is dying and we’re not smart enough to figure out how to get player retention up. Our ad campaigns worked but the players all stopped after a month so we’re gonna milk this dry and try again with a new game”.

Faeria is going from the least p2w card game(all card games let you buy packs so…) to the most p2w card game in one fell swoop.
Normally I’d say “You only need 30 cards to compete” but you’re gonna need 3 from that expansion and 10 from that expansion and 5 from that one and so on…
(/rant-over)

I don’t mind supporting the devs, I’ve gotten a lot of enjoyment out of Faeria over the past two years, however with this new B2P/DLC model it seems like it’s moving into an almost subscription based model.

The main reason I quit Hearthstone was because I knew I wasn’t going to be able to keep up with the new expansions without paying money, now Faeria is going to be the same, except it’s not even going to pretend that you don’t need to spend money to be competitive in the future.

But I guess for now I’ll parrot the communities catchphrase, “We’ll see” and hope that they manage to find a dues ex machina to pull them out of this corner they’ve backed Faeria into.

1 Like
#4

I honestly don’t mind spending money on this game. It’s one of the only F2P games that I have spent money on. It would be a bummer if I had to buy the card packs every month in order to keep up, seeing as how I don’t have the full sets yet, but the game is fun regardless. I hope you will maintain in-game gold for those of us that love the grind.
The thing that bums me out is the abandoning of the mobile versions. I just got faeria on mobile, and it has been my main platform several weeks now. It’s a little buggy, but not unplayable or unenjoyable, and I was loving being able to whip out my phone and work on my progress anytime, anywhere. I understand the reasoning behind it. It’s perfectly acceptable to want to grow as a company and to want to reallocate resources and man power towards more productive fields. But I’m still sad about it.

#5

There will be a dues ex machina in two days - called “April Fools.” :slight_smile:

#6

Aaah here is the new who will “alleviate all the concern we have about faeria’s future” said last post.

And that Right!!!

I don’t stress anymore for Faeria because the game is simply dead now :slight_smile:

Of course i’m very sad and a little bit angry (really don’t care about a new game and you break my trust in your compagny here, i won’t engage myself in another Abrackam adventure).

To be honnest i don’t regret to spend money on Faeria because i have a blast with this wonderfull game.
But no IOS support mean there is no future for Faeria.

And please don’t talk about what you are planning for because i already hear it so many time when dev just want us to support the game and spend money before his dead.
Sure we will have some small feature time to time but it’s last movement before trepassing.

Just to know (sure it no decide now) B2P mean we will lost all our gold or gems ?
Cause i have 170k gold actually. Sound very unfair.

To end with my long cry i want to thanks all the faeria community who is the best by far i ever meet on videogame <3

Bye bye, see you on other Ccg or game !

1 Like
#7

This is an April Fool’s joke, but you might as well go to Duelyst anyway; it is similar to Faeria but actually gets expansions.

1 Like
#8

I really hope this is an april joke but i don’t think it is.

And if it was it’s really stupid cause i think a lot of players have uninstall the game (like myself on my mobile) so after you have to try to bring them back with hard communication.

No don’t have too much hope, it’s probably not a joke.

Faeria is Dead.

#9

I know, it is stupid either way, but… WHY???

#10

I don’t want to like that post, but I have to. It’s a good post, and it’s sad to see Faeria go this way.

However, we don’t know what the DLC might be. It might be that the card expansions might be available for gold still (what else are we supposed to do with it) but the DLC paid content are singleplayer campaigns and other stuff you don’t actually need but are just fun additions.

But yeah, “wait and see” seems to be the obvious comment to make here.

#11

second the vote for single player campaigns. Lore (even if slightly cheesy) makes a big difference, brings avatars to life. I want to see the story of Sharra. I want to meet deathspark. Would help.

As for iOS, as an owner of a new iPad (partly because Faeria wouldn’t run on my 2nd gen iPad!) it’s a disappointment. I’ll be curious how PC vs tablet numbers change the next few years for ccg type games. I think it’s a great fit & form factor for turn based strategy. (and I’m curious how much of the decision might be addressed by Unity—smallish devs can’t be expected to have experts for each endpoint). In the mean time, there’s always remote screen, folks

#12

Amen to that: Abrakam talks about ROI and more financial mumbo jumbo but the cold hard fact is, p2p on a desktop is a financial model that worked 20 years ago. Faeria simply shut off any chance of making money when it took down the iOS client. Now they are trying to syphon some change by keeping it p2p for a few months with content that requires no development work (how they are going to do that is the only thing that makes me curious), which is, basically, insulting our intelligence. I deeply regret abandoning HS for Faeria (after over a year, I have no chance to catch up with the expansions) and am seriously wondering what to play next on my phone, for god’s sake