MercurySteam has announced that they are relaunching Raiders of the Broken Planet under its new name Spacelords. The relaunched new game will be a Free-to-Play title and is set to launch on August 23rd for PC, PS4 and Xbox One.
Raiders of the Broken Planet launched not that long ago, on September 22nd last year, and featured a unique purchase model. While offering every player a free prologue chapter, subsequent campaigns were split and individually offered for purchase. As an online third-person shooter/brawler hybrid with a deep lore, Raiders of the Broken Planet a lot of content but the split campaign model didn’t work out as the developer hoped.
Low player numbers led to the Spanish developer redesign aspects of Raiders of the Broken Planet and relaunch their self-published game as Spacelords, now a full Free-to-Play title. As Dualshockers reports, Game Director Enric Álvarez thinks this is the best way to get a bigger player base, alleviating one of the criticisms Raiders got. A critical point for an online game.
“When we launched Raiders September last year, we hoped its low price point of 9.99 per campaign- would open it up to a large number of users, but it didn’t work as we planned. Our vision is to see our game enjoyed by millions of users for years to come and putting all of the game’s rich content into their hands for free is the way to realize it. We’ve answered our community and hope this removal of any payment barriers will build our devoted community further”
Álvarez further explained that they were aiming for much more than just a renaming with Spacelords, and will explore more facets of the universe they created in Raiders of the Broken Planet, without rewriting the lore.
“We felt that ‘Raiders’ only focused on one specific side of the battle for the Broken Planet: The Raiders. But this is about the Aleph, a mythical substance from the Broken Planet, a substance everybody wants -the Raiders, the Antagonists, each of the invading human factions…- All of them know that whoever controls the Aleph, will dominate the universe as the ultimate Spacelord. So, the new brand is not going to change the game lore at all, quite the contrary. Spacelords comes to embrace all of them -Raiders and Antagonists- under one umbrella.”
In Spacelords, campaigns are no longer locked behind a paywall and players who previously bought campaigns will receive exclusive content but what this is going to be wasn’t detailed.
