If somehow an Indiebox or other physical release does happen, please do post about here and on Kickstarter for us. Be pretty sweet to have the Collectors Edition come with a Best Face mask or similar. ^_^

EDIT: As a side note, are the masks called Best Faces (as in "put your best face forward") or Happy Faces (as in "put on a happy face")? Or something else entirely?

Just checked a couple of up coming retail games. PC £39.99 while consoles are £49.99 for the same game.

http://www.game.co.uk/en/games/f1-2017/?merchname=comingsoon-_-seemore-_-F12017

http://www.game.co.uk/en/games/ark-survival/ark-survival-evolved/?inStockOnly=false&merchname=comingsoon-_-seemore-_-arksurvivalevolved

http://www.game.co.uk/en/games/nba/nba-2k18?/merchname=comingsoon-_-seemore-_-NBA2K18

and so on

Will there be a demo of the game? Somehow I just can´t get the picture of the gameplay mechanics. Basically it is a stealth game where you have to act a certain way in order to not attract attention, right? But can this hold ones interest for more than a few hours? What keeps the player playing? Is there some kind of progress like character development? To be clear, I´m not talking about the intriguing world or the art concept that keeps the player exploring. I talk about stuff to do in the game. I always thought that keeping stealthy is a bit of a game braker, because it forces you to not do whatever you like. Can I collect weapons or something? Can I go on a rampage? Will I discover game changing items? After ten hours of gameplay what aspects of the game will I tell my friends of?

EDIT: I know, there is an story that keeps you going, but that does not count as gameplay mechanic :)

It's a survival game with crafting and sleep, thirst and hunger to manage. And a few interesting locations to explore. Where you have to dress and act properly to blend in. Other than that at this point, there is NOTHING to justify any kind of price point. In its current state it's not worth $10. But they'll tell you "We promise to add content to make it worth your while at $60!!!!11"

Crafting - that is something.
Dressing - is no fun when you can´t see your character. Or is there maybe a third person view? Can I collect the dresses?
eating/drinking - okay

Sorry for the late reply.

That free market is ruining the industry here, though, because only the deep-pocket guys can compete. You can't afford to have 9 out of 10 projects be a net loss (which is very close to actual statistics of major publisher releases!) unless you're EA or Ubisoft. Then you can afford to chuck out the filler for $5 while the blockbuster you had sets you up for the next few years.

It's supply and demand at play, sure, but what it means is that the market moves even more quickly to producing only streamlined, market-researched-to-death safe bets. You have your small indies that don't need or expect to make a living off of their work. But everything in-between, a market for games produced professionally by small independent teams, has been almost obliterated.

The movie industry has found some sort of a balance with a healthy independent segment. For some reason, games are failing at that. And I think the reason is that for movies, people are still willing to pay those $15 for a theatre ticket, or $40 for a high-quality home copy, while for games, everything beyond $10, for an unrestricted copy of something that is generally as expensive to produce as a film, is considered overpriced.

Several people working on a game for a few years without any guarantee of it ever paying off. Why is $50, or $70, or $90 too much for somebody's years of work, in something that you will hopefully want to play for hundreds of hours? Games just don't have a big enough market to make that work out at just a few dollars a pop.

On a more subjective note, I also think it had an effect on ravaging attention spans. There's not a big market for games with any complexity (steep learning curve, bigger payoff) anymore. There's such an abundance of dirt cheap games that anything that isn't perfectly streamlined and easy to beat, gets chucked away for the benefit of something simpler. That's how I see the current mainstream, at least. When I was a teen, getting a new game was quite an event, something you'd saved up for and that you'd make sure you got every last bit of value out of. It's a bit disheartening to see how games have become a cheap throwaway thing, that's my point.

It has nothing to do with "free markets". We are where we are because the monetary system in this world has facilitated consolidation to such an extreme degree that we now have an economic ecosystem dominated by a small number of gargantuan predators that have ravaged the diversity that once existed, leaving it an unsustainable wasteland. And I'm not just talking about the entertainment industry, you see it across the board. Extreme economic disequilibrium, brought about by a monetary system that profits from a contagion known as moral hazard.

If the "industry" is not able to fulfill the rules of the free market it should not even exist imo.

But if nearly nobody is willing to pay for a product it's not a product worth to even be produced. It may be an important product and it may have some creative ideas but if it can only be produced for a price people are not willing to pay at all - why even do it?

Sorry, but that simply is not true. People are very rarely willing to pay more than even $20 for a Blu-ray. Nobody I know would ever pay $40 if it was not even limited and also had some special goodies along with it. I am collecting DVDs and Blu-rays for several years so I am pretty sure about that. Also fewer people are going to cinema and the trend is to bring this to the home cinema because cinema tickets are considered to be overpriced as well.

I will never ever in my entire life pay $50 for ANY game. That is a promise. It is too much simply because it is too much. I could buy at least 5 games for this money just going to my next store. Only buying digital copies I could buy 7 or even more games for this. It simply is not possible to sell this. I as a buyer am not responsible to pay what they NEED I will always only pay what I WANT to pay and what a product is worth to me. Sounds selfish but that is the way the market works.

People don't have the same amount of time today they had then. So I completely understand this trend. As a teen all I had to do was going to school and then I had all the time in the world for games. I cannot afford this much time working full time in addition to my hobby.

I agree in one point though: it would be nice to let those special and creative games see the worldt but since they had to met the laws of the free market (which they obviously don't) they simply cannot survive.

I live in Switzerland, so that may distort views a bit. I don't think you can find any Blu-ray at $20 or less regular price here, except for budget releases of the biggest blockbusters. $30 to $40 is definitely common. And deluxe editions seem to be more norm than exception now. Also, cinema ticket sales don't seem to drop as fast anymore from what I've heard. People are again realising that there's many things only a theatre can offer.

But my point was, cinema has a well established independent, arthouse, whatever you want to call it market, which every major studio takes part in as well. Lower risk, still plenty chance of big rewards, with dedicated audiences that are even more willing to pay for cinema tickets and fancy physical releases than the general public. And, very importantly when comparing to games, going to watch or buy the Blu-ray of an indie movie doesn't generally cost less than the latest blockbuster.

For some reason, this middle segment between big-budget and shovelware, really struggles in the games market. If you read industry reports, the numbers show this. There used to be a mid-budget segment of the videogame market, but it's almost completely disappeared, there's very little in between the triple-digit-million titles that only the biggest publishers can play at, and the indies developed on a shoestring that almost certainly will make a loss.

Of course it is, and that is perfectly fine. To me, $100 is not too much for a game that I'm very excited about and that I'm 99% sure I'm still going to want to play many years from now. $50 seems perfectly fine to me for a regularly-sized games. I fall into the digital sales trap myself and purchase hundreds of games I'll never play, just because they're cheap. But it used to be that I could afford maybe one game a month, and those games did occupy me for a month. The value for money doesn't sound less reasonable now than it did then.

Almost no game I bought back in the big cardboard box days was less than $70. $80-$120 was just what a full-price game cost in those days. The budgets those games were developed with are laughable compared to the ones of today, yet they sell for so much cheaper. The market grew, but not by that much if you account for the amount of competition growing along with total revenue. It just won't work out for most.

That is very true, and also explains the developments in many other entertainment industries. Compare the options people have today to those 60 years ago. Entirely new forms of entertainment came into existence, and the variety, e.g. in movies or music, was never bigger. But people still have a limited budget and limited spare time. Of course not everyone is going to make the same amount anymore.

That would be very sad, wouldn't it?

I tried to put in words that there's an imbalance in the market, a huge difference between how much a game costs to produe and how little it costs in retail. That means you need to make really big sales numbers, putting big corporations with deep pockets at a huge advantage – and yet those big players are also generally not doing too well.

So for developers like the one here, there's the choice. Do we believe in (or delude ourselves into believing) that we can hit the jackpot and sell millions of copies of this, so that we can price the game "competitively"? Or do we set a price that is based on a more pessimistic model? Getting it wrong can mean the past few years of working on the project might have returned nothing. I'm sure people put a lot of thought in this. In many cases, I can see it making sense to go for a higher price, that is still fine with people who are really interested in the game, instead of betting on the Steam discount effect of millions of people buying the game without even really caring about it.

If we don't want to keep burning through studios and talent as we are today, budgets might have to drop considerably across the board. Some things you still kind of need to even stand a chance in the market today, like high-res models and textures, or professional voice acting, might not really be tenable for anyone but the biggest publishers. Modern games obviously just cost too much to produce.

well since you have partnered with Gearbox and Gearbox have partnered (or was partnered) with G2A seem obvious where to buy (if at all) the game key for this game, at G2A.

Maybe a fair price can be had there, because there ain't any on steam or gog anymore.

I suppose that is the answer, instead of not buying the game as it is too expensive, just support a fraud site, possibly lose your own credit card details, and then have your key revoked at some point in the future as that site is criminal its so bad. Sounds like a great alternative!

I like the setting a lot but they don't seem to know what to do with it, which is a shame.

Can you imagine Uwe Boll directing A Clockwork Orange? It'd be something like We Happy Few. o.O

They do but we'll have to wait until release for it.