Honey Rose: Underdog Extraordinaire is newly released Steam game that fuses fighting games and visual novels. It’s a game about choice, something that even extends to its pricing model.
The game is about Red, a university student who’s also an amateur fighter. You have to juggle both of her lives and all the complications that come with them. Here’s what it looks like:
So you’ve got life management in visual novel form along with fighting/beat-’em-up segments where you beat the crap out of people. Truly, this is the video game of our times.
Steam, believe it or not, doesn’t have an option for pay-what-you-want pricing, so Honey Rose’s developers got creative with that, too. It’s entirely free to download and play, but if you want, you can grab any one of eight DLCs, each of which add… nothing. Instead, they function as donation tiers. So you play, and then you pay. Or not.
“‘Pay-what-you-liked’ is a system designed after ‘pay-what-you-want,’ except you choose to support the game after having played it for yourself, and determined its personal value based on your own experience,” the developers wrote. “It is designed to offer each player the most choice possible in how, when and why when considering whether to support the game or not.”
No, it’s not a revolution, but it is a clever way of working a pay-what-you-want-style system into Steam’s confines. I’ve seen a handful of developers use DLC to get around Steam’s limits. It will be interesting to see how this attempt works out.
Comments
4 responses to “Fighting Game Has Useless DLC That Players Buy To Support Devs”
Is this actually allowed under Steam’s regulations? I love the idea of ‘pay what you think it’s worth’ but it seems like labelling that as DLC (downloadable content) when it’s really just a donation – with no content to download/access – would have to breach some of their rules (assuming they actually have any for that, it seems they don’t for much else).
I guess if it is against their rules, it’s a sign that Steam should allow for more variable pricing or even just some method of dev donations without simply linking to patreon or something in the game description.
Well, Steam certainly didn’t oppose it when I proposed it, and as far as I know, they reviewed the whole idea, game and process, so… that should hopefully mean it doesn’t break any rules 😀
If Valve looked at every game, then we would not end up with trash games, and only get solid ones (that company that cot taken off STEAM). More lilky, its all automated, and a program just scans it. I mean, where talking about a comapy that will let people use the tags for female main characters, but then say having a tag for male main characters is sexist… Anything is possible.
Far from the first time.
As noted in the article, Hadean Lands has a $34.99 USD DLC that’s just a downloadable certificate saying that you have supported the game.
Thea: The Awakening, has a $6.99 USD DLC “Coffee for Coding” that’s just some jpegs.
This isn’t even the first pure donation DLC (not even a jpeg). These have been available on, for example, ShareX since 3 Oct, 2015 and Borderless Gaming since 7 Aug, 2015.
Related to this, This War of Mine – War Child Charity DLC has three tiers of different pricing for the identical same bits of minor artwork.
Just gonna put this here… please show some support!
http://www.capcom-unity.com/street_fighter/go/thread/view/7411/30738629/i-bought-the-season-pass-and-didnt-get-the-colours-for-the-original-cast?pg=1