Care for a little free-to-play sandbox gaming? How about one where you are a robot in an open world? If you’ve been curious about the game Open Perpetuum but didn’t want to buy in, you’ll now no longer have to do so as the devs have announced (in a rather brusque manner) that the game will be free-to-play and is asking for people to “stop pestering [them] about it.” That’s it. That’s the announcement.
The game’s official dev blog offers a bit more than the Steam announcement in terms of context, which effectively boils down to that it was simply time to make it happen, though the post still keeps some of its passive-aggressive tone in terms of disbelief that the paywall was a limiting factor in the game’s population growth.
“After we’ve recouped some of the costs of the initial server shutdown, it no longer seemed fair to ask money for a multiplayer game that’s essentially entirely operated by the community itself – while we could justify it by still occasionally patching the game when really major bugs appeared, this has become so uncommon that the justification has become thinner and thinner.
“Going free has been something that you’ve been asking for a while – understandably – and one of the main arguments was that it’s the only thing that’s standing in the way of a large player population. If this is really the case, then challenge accepted – impress me.”
For a bit of context, Open Perpetuum is the player-operated version of the original sandbox MMO Perpetuum, which was shut down by developer Avatar Creations in 2018 but kept alive by the Open Perpetuum Project — a project that, we should point out, was permitted by the original devs. The game has been operating for a fair while now and even recently celebrated its third anniversary.
