10,000-hour indie RPG goes free-to-play as devs aren’t comfortable making “tens of thousands of dollars from people who don’t play the game”

Companies usually turn paid games into free-to-play releases to milk more money from their player base, à la Overwatch 2, but puzzling RPG Tactical Nexus has taken the opposite route – it’s going free-to-play because the developers don’t want people spending money. 

Tactical Nexus is a top-down, grid-based puzzler with RPG elements and progression, which came out in 2019 and has since purportedly become “one of the world’s top three indie games in terms of average playtime,” according to the Steam blurb. Team Tactical Nexus claims the game has about 10,000 hours worth of stuff to do, and the 100 or so user reviews back them up since plenty of them have well over 1,000 hours on record.

Team Tactical Nexus, in a recent blog post, announced that the game is actually ditching both its $20 price tag and its demo in favor of going free-to-play, or rather, free-to-keep. “This is due to the fact that the majority of players who bought the main package have only played the game for less than the demo, despite having a demo that allows them to play for dozens of hours,” the team writes before continuing to say they don’t want to “extort tens of thousands of dollars from people who don’t play the game.” Essentially, they can see from backend data that lots of people simply bought the game and didn’t really sink their teeth into it.

The studio has apparently made their intent clear “for several years now” that they’re not up keeping Tactical Nexus “to make a profit” and have never intended on doing so. The team even took things a step further to encourage people to request a Steam refund if they’re eligible, but otherwise, everyone who once bought the base game will receive the upcoming DLC for free. “The need to buy the DLC is only necessary after you have played the game for at least 100 hours…. Please play the game thoroughly before buying the DLC.” A welcome sight in a gaming landscape full of free-to-play games that are engineered to feel more like slot machines.

In the meantime, check out the best puzzle games to play right now.