It will be no secret to a lot of you when I say that I play a substantial amount of video games. When everyone else is drinking, going out, watching football, I’m with four other truly awesome guys playing what, until today, was our absolute favourite game: Heroes of Newerth. Born from the ashes of the Warcraft 3 custom map, Defence of the Ancients, HoN is an action-packed, highly strategic, and tactically intense battleground of five versus five. Whilst not the king of eSports it is by no means the littlest, with as many concurrent players around the world as the latest CoD game, and in this regard it has been, for the most-part, balanced at the competitive level. The developers have always said that balance for competition is what they strive for, and I completely agree; juggling numbers to help lower players face-off strategies they have no experience for is not a move to be made, but today… today something changed.

Today, this game went free-to-play.

Previously, HoN cost $30 for the lifetime of your account. This allowed for the company to pay for servers, bandwidth, hosting, staffing and other charges associated with running this kind of operation. In this model, S2 incurred upkeep costs that meant they had to maintain a level of new sales and outgoing players. Clearly they were not making enough money, as late last year they unveiled an in-game shop with vanity items, such as extra models for your character, at the cost of earnable in-game currency, or via your credit card. These had no real effect on the game’s balance, all skills were the same, the pool of choice was still equal for all, and we were relatively happy.

Now, for free players, the individual heroes are purchasable, and the $30 one-time price-point is gone. If none are purchased then each week a pool of 15 rotates. Not to mention that, on top of this, each new hero will now be part of a four-week ‘early-access’ period, whereby they can only be played at additional cost to the player.

So with this in mind my friend, Loz, who plays in our team and studies Computer Science, put together an article on how this changes the state of the game, and why, in effect, we’re leaving. It’s a great read and he’s allowed me to cross-post it below.

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