Since the beginning, we’ve been hardcore in our stance of providing players with an old-school, PvE-based MMORPG that focused on all of the things that we ourselves missed from the golden era of the first generation of the genre. Over time, we’ve heard from more than our fair share of people that they just weren’t going to play our game if we didn’t include some form of PvP. We resisted. Persistently over the past few years.

That all changed after our last focus group when we looked at the numbers and saw just how many people there were out there who had mentioned they wanted a PvP game, in comparison to those who said they want purely PvE. After our last internal test, we had a team meeting with the entire Stormhaven Studios crew and debated the issue for nearly six hours, then followed up with three subsequent meetings.

At the end of the day, we just don’t think we can be profitable as a company if we stick to the PvE niche. In order to keep the lights on for the 15 – 20 employees we expect to have post-launch, we need to be able to hit a very specific set of minimum numbers, and the PvE community isn’t going to be able to provide that. So after much reflection, after multiple meetings, and after going with the numbers rather than going with our guts as we’ve been doing the past few years, it’s with a heavy heart that I must announce we have made the switch to become a full PvP game.

We’ll be doing full loot on death to enrich the PvP experience. We figured if we’re going to do it, we might as well go all or nothing. In fact, we already tested the PvP option during one of our earliest alpha test sessions.

Moving forward, we’ll be focusing more on bringing the PvP experience to the core of what we’re building. We’ll have to rethink some of our core mechanics as we focus on the numbers, and that’s going to take some time. As a result, we’ll be pushing back the launch date of our game until sometime 2025 or later.

In order to maximize our revenue, we’ll also be looking into adding some kind of a cash shop to the game. It’s just the way things are done these days, and unfortunately we don’t see us being able to generate enough revenue from merely having a monthly subscription. Far too many people have complained that they won’t play our game because it has a box fee AND a monthly subscription, and like many others who are faced with these sorts of realities in this business, we have to keep the lights on, and that means making sacrifices to our core business principles in order to hit the bottom line.

We appreciate your support over the last two years, and we look forward to continuing to build our game into something better with the help of you, our hardcore community.