Where we are now
2016 was an exciting year for us and for Faeria. We arrived in Steam’s Early Access two years ago this month. Then, in 2017, Faeria officially launched. After hitting the one million downloads mark we celebrated by releasing our first expansion: The Oversky.
While we are very proud of Faeria and the challenges that we have been able to overcome, we know there have been times where we have fallen short of our, and your, expectations. We've tried to do too many things at once, and we haven’t always been able to achieve exactly what we wanted, we feel that not only have we built an amazing game, but that we have a great community of players to share it with.
But what about 2018 and onwards, we hear you ask. What’s next? Well, it’s with great pleasure that we are renewing our commitment towards our original goal: to make Faeria a true classic of the genre, with a long and yak-filled future.
Where we’re going next
Let’s talk about Abrakam as a whole before we get to what’s next for Faeria. We have some important news. We are working on a brand new game that will be coming in the not too distant future. We’re not ready to talk about this game in detail yet, other than to say that we are incredibly excited by it! As well as working on this new game, we have been laying the foundations to be able to grow our team rapidly in 2018, and are now steaming forwards with recruitment.
After the release of Oversky, we weren’t entirely sure what path forward to take for Faeria. One thing was clear: It was important for us to adapt our plans to maintain the game’s financial viability ensuring not only that Faeria will live on for a long time, but to guarantee we will be able to continue creating new and exciting content much more frequently.
While making a second game has always been tempting to us, our focus has always primarily been on building and improving Faeria for the years to come. However we do often have discussions with other developers and publishers about possible collaborations. Over time we have grown close to one of these in particular - a publisher that we have a huge amount of respect for - that has since spawned this new opportunity. A “perfect storm” seemed to surface where we were needing some time to make plans on improving Faeria, and decided to move forward with the new project simultaneously.
The reason we haven’t shared this news until now is that it was important for us to come up with a concrete plan that we know we will stick to, and have complete confidence in. Especially since we can only share limited information about this new opportunity at this time.
Faeria’s future
Considering the above, it’s important for us to be clear about what our goals are for Faeria, and how these fit within our goals as a company, too. In a nutshell, we are committed to creating quality content while finding ways to grow and expand on the Faeria universe as a whole, however we need to ensure that we do this in a sustainable way that will allow us to keep supporting and growing Faeria for the foreseeable future.
Today we want to share key changes to our plans that will serve to give us a more solid foundation on which to continue building Faeria’s future together.
Becoming Buy-to-Play
First of all, Faeria will be transitioning into a buy-to-play game. While we love the concept of free-to-play, we haven’t been able to find the right balance to make it financially sustainable for Faeria, and making this change will allow us to focus our energy on creating regular high-quality content for the foreseeable future.
Don’t worry, if you’re an existing player we won’t be asking you to pay to continue playing, we will have a process in place for current and previous players to keep your accounts active with all your current progression, completely free of charge.
This also means the game’s economy will be completely revamped, as removing the requirements that come from being a F2P game will allow us to give all players smoother and quicker access to both new and existing content.
This DLC-based model will allow us to bring far more new content to the game, more frequently, as well as allowing us to allocate more resources on the marketing side to help grow our already-awesome community.
New Content
We have lots of plans already for what we want to introduce into the game in the near future, however we are not yet ready to go into the exact details quite yet. What we can reveal is that Faeria's next card expansion will come at the same time as the B2P relaunch, early this summer, and that from then on we will be releasing new content every single month.
The reason you'll have to wait a little bit longer is that we have a lot of development work on our plates to prepare the game for these major changes, especially since we want to take the opportunity to solidify the foundation to make it easier/faster for us to ship new content to you.
While moving to a DLC model implies a significant change to the way new cards will be acquired, we hope what we’ve explained above helps you understand why we think it’s a necessary step. We’re confident that the new content it enables us to produce will be well worth the change.
Focusing on PC - Mobile Versions Cancelled
In our effort to refocus our work on Faeria around our community of PC players, we have decided to cancel Faeria on iOS & Android and support for the current version will be removed within the next few months.
We understand this will be disappointing to some of you. Through our testing observations, gathered data, and extensive internal analysis we have determined that as it is, Faeria is not up to par for the modern mobile experience we want it to be without major overhauls to its iOS and Android versions.
Pulling our resources away from mobile development for Faeria as it exists, including the time it takes to merely maintain a working version, will give us more of the room we need to making the PC experience as amazing as possible.
That said, we aren’t closing the door on the possibility of building great mobile experiences based in the Faeria universe in the future as it would definitely fit within our broader goals!
We’ll be back with more news soon
This is a lot of information to share in one go already, so we won’t go into more detail right now, but rest assured we’re focussed on progressing as quickly as possible in all areas, and as mentioned we are continuing to grow our team rapidly - so don’t forget to check out our jobs page if you think you might be a good fit in any areas from game design to development!
We will continue to release more information on these changes over the coming weeks, and we also want to hear from you with any feedback or questions you might have.
Thanks for your support,
- The Abrakam Team
...And now for your regularly scheduled Faeria Friday content.
Season reset and March cardbacks
Edit: The season will be resetting at 12:00 (Noon) CEST* on Tuesday April 3rd due to Belgian holidays. FWC Points will still be calculated on Monday, April 2nd as previously announced.
- Note that timezones did shift an hour ahead last Sunday in Belgium, and CEST is the new standard we follow.
This season's reset will be the first to count for the new Season of Ruunin for FWC points.
Aurora Seasonal Cup
The $2500 Seasonal Cup takes place NEXT Saturday, April 7th - 16:00 CEST. The top 32 players in FWC points from January-March will compete live on FaeriaTV!. We'll be reminding everyone about this throughout next week as well.
Aurora Open #4 recap
And that is the final Championship League tournament in the Season of Aurora for 2018.
The next Championship League tournaments will be Ruunin Open #1 and #2, taking place on April 14th and 28th respectively. Registration will open next week.
Hex Templar Premier recap
Due to GDC craziness, we didn't get the recap of the first Hex Templar tournament up on Faeria Friday. Let's fix that now.
Note that these Steam prizes are provided by esteemed tournament organizer and community member werfs, and Abrakam is not associated with or responsible for these rewards.
Helpful Guides
- Aquablad's Become a God series - Ladder play
Decks of the Week
- Wowzers Value Town - by zaldinfox
- Green/Blue Rebirth Enchant - by ChinTheFox
- Iona, Hated by All - by ArdentEspio
Community events
- Hex Templar League Tournament II
- Saturday, March 31st
- FWC Point sanctioned for Season of Aurora
- T4FC tournament: Pauper Power #2
- Sunday, April 1st
- Must have 25+ players registered 20:00 CEST the day before the event
- FWC Point sanctioned for Season of Ruunin
- Tournament streams will have viewing prizes enabled - keep an eye out here.
