MercurySteam, the developer of Raiders of the Broken Planet, has recently announced that it’s online shooter/brawler will be relaunching as Spacelords. What’s more, despite having to purchase campaigns for Raiders, the developer has also decided that those campaigns will be completely free when Spacelords officially releases on the 23rd of August.
However, the team at MercurySteam are keen to confirm that on the same day as Spacelord’s release, what was to be Raider’s fourth campaign Council Apocalypse will also be included and of course, it’ll be completely free. Yet it is important to know that Spacelords, while having content similar to that of Raiders, is a completely new sci-fi adventure, and that those who played before will be rewarded with content that won’t be available to anyone else.
According to Dualshockers, the reason behind MercurySteam’s decision to scrap Raiders and relaunch as Spacelords is due to the community. Game director Enric Álvarez accompanied the announcement with a statement explaining why these changes were happening. He said:
“When we launched Raiders in September last year, we hoped its low price point of 9.99 per campaign- would open it up to a large number of users, but it didn’t work as we planned. Our vision is to see our game enjoyed by millions of users for years to come and putting all of the game’s rich content into their hands for free is the way to realize it. We’ve answered our community and hope this removal of any payment barriers will build our devoted community further.”
So it seems like The Culling 2 isn’t the only game that faced struggles with its audience. However, unlike The Culling 2, Raiders at least had a healthy community that went over 250 players. Regardless, it looks as though fans will be in for some new content soon. We just hope that the new content and the free-to-play system will keep players interested for some time to come.
