So, the folks from Three Rings, who we all know and love from Puzzle Pirates, have announced a new game, Bang! Howdy. Bang! Howdy is described as an "online tactical strategy game in a 3D Wild West setting," and it seems to capture Three Rings' love of lingo and cute drawings. Of note is the business model:
Bang! Howdy ™ will be downloadable for free over the Internet and free to play with no signup or recurring subscription fee. Players will pay for Big Shot units and customizations and will buy train tickets to new towns using our microcurrency system. Prices will be announced prior to official launch and we expect that they will be downright inexpensive.
No info on timing yet, of course.
(EDIT: We're slow, Alice mentioned this already)
Bang! Howdy! looks interesting.
For those that don't know, Three Rings has already been testing said business model within Puzzle Pirates (and they got the impetus to do such from a games network they partnered with, MiniClip, which runs the similarly "free" RuneScape). You are free to download Puzzle Pirates and "freely" (no monthly cost) play on Doubloon servers. To attain nicer items or higher status (Officer within a crew) you pay real money for ingame "Doubloons".
Posted by: WorldMaker | Aug 04, 2005 at 13:19
Dan's no dummy. He knows how well our model works. Runescape's business model is, with all due respect to their enormous success, not as good, and they would make more money using ours instead.
--matt
Posted by: Matt Mihaly | Aug 04, 2005 at 16:13
I am surprised that there are not more people talking about these types of games - unique and challenging games that are not just the re-molded 'better mousetrap' games that we deal with today. We need more game-innovation instead of rehashing and slightly improving on the concepts of today.
Posted by: Fridge | Aug 05, 2005 at 10:49
I think that puzzle pirates is a great game and cant wait until the new comes out.
Posted by: koolicks | Mar 06, 2006 at 16:06