Is a free multiplayer option a valid marketing strategy?

I’m making some sweeping changes to the core Mechanic of my game and I’m really liking the results.

I am currently making a physics heavy FPS Metroidvania-esq game and have a lot riding on the movement.

The end result is quickly turning into something not entirely unlike tribes.

I know that the tribes community is small but fierce and I’m starting to think that offering a free version of just the multiplayer may be a good marketing strategy.

I’m not looking to make a completely new project here, everything would be worked around what I’m already developing.

I can foresee this being a very Useful tool for prototyping and getting the name out there.

Especially if I reduce the entry point substantially.

But I can also see this being a tremendous waste of time if not potentially toxic to the games reputation since it would be very much for play testing.

I would also reserve certain features For paying customers.

Namely I would have private servers and make it so a pain customer could potentially bump a non-paying customer out of a match.

What are your thoughts on this?

I think bumping non-paying Customers could be potentially hazardous, We all know how entitled some players can be.

It is. On Steam, you gotta have a demo for instance. No demo, no road to success unless you have marketing prowess to back you up.

I’m in a similar boat, my new project almost demands a free version for devs to pick it up and come to like it since it’s effectively a new language and development environment all within Unity. As much as I need to generate revenue I don’t think it would be sustainable to only have a paid version, making it hard to educate anyone of its benefits and influence others to try it out too.

So I’m most likely going to make a huge part of it free and open source, perhaps leave some features for the paid version but rely on the GPL to encourage developers to pay in order to maintain control over their own project (the GPL is ‘infectious’ as they say, demanding any work based on it to be also GPL’ed).

What percentage of free players of a multiplayer game do you think would actually be interested in a paid singleplayer metroidvania? Because it’s fairly unreasonable to expect that the conversion rate for a small indie title is going to be enough to cover maintenance and updates between versions with the sales that would actually be granted from that.

If you want an entry point, you want a demo of the game people will expect to get, not a mode largely unrelated to it.

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