Also feeling a little disheartened

This thread doesn't make sense. It's mainly straw man, personal attacks, and poorly scripted analogies without much constructive dialog. Please delete or lock.

I'd argue Spring RTS kinda fulfills that- though that is a community run project based solely on volunteer and mod work than a company

That said, whilst the Spring team have achieved some great things, there is no way they would ever have been able to come up with something as ambitious or complex as PA.

@thompsonshunter if you want a direct sequel to TA that doesn't cost anything, I seriously recommend checking out Spring. I think that might be more to your liking than PA.

Edit: Thinking of a 'F2P RTS' model, I think the solution would be to (kinda like PA) create a game with a decent single base faction that players can play skirmish or basic multi player in. Then make addition content add on (e.g. additional factions) as well as things like campaigns (maybe make a set of short campaigns of say 10 missions each, with each one requiring a modest purchase price). I think it's definitely possible to do, although it would be difficult to get the balance of giving enough to the free portion of the game to make it fun and worth playing, without making it too good that no one bothers buy the add ons.

I'm honestly suprised that people are actually *upset* about this expansion. I can understand the steam early access people who payed 90 USD to get in because the kickstarter people got it for free, but even then Uber had to draw a line somewhere. They obviously couldn't afford to give it away for free to everybody, or they probably would have.

Instead of complaining about why you think it should be free, just think "Is the expansion worth 13 USD?"

If you think it's not, fine, don't buy it and continue to play PA. This expansion does not take away anything from the base game, if anything, it provided the impetus to continue bug fixing that PA players all get for free.

If you think it is, buy it, and have fun. In the end, that's the only decision that matters to you, at the individual level.

Personally, I think it's a reasonably priced expansion. Expansion/DLCs are almost always priced about 1/4 to 1/3 the price of the game. They rarely contain that much added gameplay, but this one comes close I feel.

On both sides. This has become a very... Slow burning flamewar.

*sing*

Personally I've never had better value from a game, played over 500 hours and I'm still playing it. Compared to some 12 hour triple AAA games I find it hard to fault PA its money/time ratio.

edit:Actually I might have had as much value from Ravenshield. That games still rocks IMHO.

The saddest thing about this whole ordeal is that the ragers would be more with happy not getting any content at all and Uber letting PA die.

Spring is just free, not Free2Play, and also suffers from its open development: Everything is piecemeal and roughly designed, and the engine seems pretty shaky.

Age of Empires: Online tried to be Free2Play, with elements of Farmville, but it had some kind of pay2win PvP, and the PvE missions were atypically long and hardcore for the amount of grind that was needed. It was very much a typical RTS, emphasizing all the aspects of RTS that aren't really optimal for F2P (and there's a lot of them).

We need more F2P games funded solely by advertising, as it means you get an amazing product and only need to sit through some 10 second advert or close a little window when entering the game.

That's how all those silly mobile F2P games work anyway.

They're also silly. They attract as many eyes as possible while putting as little as possible into development. I can't imagine doing that successfully with an RTS.

Edit: More to the point, advertising is a slow form of revenue solely related to the quantity of your players, not the quality. Good for Minesweeper (or ripping off advertisers with hidden views), not so much for Starcraft.

Man I don't know what all this arguing is about. It's a good game, these aren't some pricks at EA, these guys are some simple indie developers that need to pay their employees to make more cool updates. If I have to pay 13 dollars just to experience this grand addition to an already spectacular game so be it. Great work Uber much appreciated!

+1 but what's funny is EA w/ PA's release would've stopped deving due to bad release and general unprofitably it but since its an indie studio people think that they might be able to get away with this because Uber showed support for it's community and even adding content that wasn't included in the KS (asteroids, they were just a concept, atleast to my understanding).

The cognitive dissonance of you white knights is just astounding.

Define cognitive dissonance in this situation, as you see it. And who ARE you referring to, anyway?

I believe he's referring to the people defending Uber.

The fact that hundreds of people see the truth over at the steam reviews (minus the free give away folks) defines exactly what I'm talking about. The fact that 1,200 people have signed the change.org petition also has pretty heavy meaning. If none of those opinions matter, nothing matters to the folks who can't see the forest from the trees. I am very upset that all annihilation style games like TA, SC and the like are going to be set back by the actions of this dev. This means new games are going to struggle even worse than the damage Gas did when they fell. Uber is next, and nothing is going to stop it.

You realize that this dev is full of people who worked on TA and SC and it actually hurts them to see all the rage pointed at them for the hard work they did in the last few month?

I am mean yeah stuff didn't work out perfectly, but still try to understand their situation as well when they realized they can't give away the addon for free to everyone. No money.

People often seem to forget a company kinda needs to make money, the world isn't lolipop land.

Oh by all means, it's not the guys working the nuts and bolts (even though it's no TA or SC), it's whoever seems to think they can run cash-grabs to stay ahead. They killed everything with Human Resources, it looks like. They spent countless months on that from what I've seen. They botched the roll out of PA. They released a game that still crashes. I've gotten one full game in PA done. I've had nothing but crashes on a computer that is the bees knees. I've thrown all type of benchmarks at this thing. No problems, whatsoever. Bad business decisions are bad business decisions. It's the consumers left with a broken market that have to pick up the pieces when these folks fold. That's the shame of this. I'm really not worried about the money I spent, even though, ya know, would have been nice.

PA isn't actually crashing for most people. I can play totally fine. If PA would not even work I wouldn't defend it.
Have you posted in the support forums? We're totally willing to try and help you with the crashes. uber is as well btw.