Happy beta launch week to Gloria Victis! No, really. The MMO has been in early access alpha since 2016, but it’s finally moving out of alpha and into beta, though apparently it’s staying in early access – but only for now.
“[T]he beta will last a few months and will prepare us to leave Early Access. Part of the team will work on bug fixes and new features, and we would like to address players’ demands, and feedback. The other part will focus on optimization, performance, and technical updates. Do not be scared – the game is and will remain fully playable during the process, which is best proven by the players with thousands of hours in-game! Gloria Victis is a project that should be understood as “Game as Service” – despite we already have a lot of features and systems, this is not an end. We will constantly update the game with the help of your feedback and introduce new systems and features like we did in alpha, as we will continue that in the beta state, and after the game release. We will not slow down and we will keep up the pace!”
Incidentally, Polish studio Black Eye Games notes that its funding has largely been through players. “We are the only MMORPG of such scale that achieved what we did with the great help of our community,” they declare. “We never had any investors and publishers and the original team worked for years without any budget. After the Steam release in 2016 – the only income that drives the project is from the game selling and ingame Supporter Shop.” Honestly, the entire piece is worth a read, as it really does sound like a little-studio-that-could story, and one of the rare successful indies in the genre. For example, the team reveals that its first office was literally a former beauty studio and that the headstart servers were essentially paid with the lead dev’s wedding chest.
