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The No-Frauds Club - Meta


This page describes the plans and stances of The No-Frauds Club as it pertains to business, development, and other meta topics surrounding the creation of our video games.

Suffice it to say, we do things a little differently around here.

Pricing

Drafted on 5 August 2021
Last updated on 27 October 2021

We at the No-Frauds Club hold the broader landscape of the gaming industry in contempt of predatory practices with regards to pricing and delivering content that is worth its market value.

This is a deep conviction, and our goals regarding pricing can be summed up like so: we wish to set an example of responsible and sustainable pricing that other developers can follow. The text below documents our plans to achieve this goal without compromise.

Distribution


The No-Frauds Club is not an independent development studio. The term "independent" (usually "indie") has been butchered to the point where it is no longer a useful descriptor. If we take "indie" to refer to developers that are without a publisher, any development studio using Steam, Epic Games, or any other central publisher has stepped outside of that umbrella term. The No-Frauds Club has plans to list its products on several internet marketplaces, and thus does not qualify as independent, despite being made up of a single-digit team with zero investment.

Assuming it poses no significant technical hurdles for us and zero friction for end users, we will also distribute our products via our own website. This option will exist for customers who wish to support us wholesale without any central publisher collecting their own cut. This does not mean we do not value the services of central publishers - presenting products to prospective customers is exceptionally time-consuming and would require us to engage in unsavory marketing work.

Any discussion regarding an alternative to third-party storefronts may also be academic if there is no sensible implementation that scales with expansion packs and general updates, but we suspect that this would be handled through a first-party launcher that would include integration for popular central publishers when needed. The bottom line: no matter what implementation we settle on, it will not require customers to jump through more hoops to purchase, manage, or download expansion packs for our products, regardless of their choice of storefront.

Retail


Currently, the No-Frauds Club has one central product planned, with several games stemming from that single product. Xibalba is this central product, and will retail at $30 USD.

When you purchase Xibalba, you receive the following (when the respective titles are released):
  • A perpetual license to the singleplayer content of all Xibalba titles, - no strings attached
  • A perpetual license to hosting private multiplayer lobbies over LAN, emulated LAN, or the internet, - no strings attached
  • A limited license to the multiplayer playlists of all Xibalba titles, - to be temporarily suspended if you are found guilty of griefing, or permanently revoked if you are found guilty of cheating/hacking
  • And a non-commercial license to the source code of all Xibalba titles.

Xibalba titles are planned to be as follows:
  • Cosmonarchy, a large-scale real-time-strategy game,
  • Dreamhold, an isometric action game,
  • And an untitled first-person shooter game.

More specifically, Cosmonarchy is planned to have the following content on its initial launch:
  • Individual missions that take an average of at least 30 minutes to complete,
  • A singleplayer tutorial campaign of 5 missions,
  • 6 singleplayer campaigns of at least 8 missions each,
  • 6 unique regencies with an average of 100 units and 40 structures,
  • At least 10 unique cooperative scenarios, - low-end estimates
  • At least 20 unique skirmish maps, - low-end estimates
  • Matchmaking-enabled multiplayer playlists for ranked, unranked, and cooperative play,
  • Lobbies for custom games,
  • And a fully-fledged map editor for custom content creation.

On the other hand, Dreamhold is planned to have the following content on its initial launch:
  • At least two handcrafted operas with estimated completion times of 10 hours each,
  • Procedural generation for replayable operas,
  • At least one hundred unique items of each item class (weapons, armors, augments, etc),
  • All regencies released in Cosmonarchy present as allies and enemies,
  • Matchmaking-enabled cooperative playlists,
  • Lobbies for custom games,
  • And a fully-fledged map editor for custom content creation.

We also believe in the concept of trialing products that you may have an interest in purchasing, so a demo that includes the tutorial campaign, a few missions of the first proper campaign, a few cooperative and skirmish maps, and limited multiplayer support (crossplay with retail clients, no ranked play) will be available. Customers who purchase the full product after playing the demo will be able to inherit their singleplayer progress from the demo, allowing for a seamless transition between demo and retail.

Not-Fraud Accounts and DRM


Users interested in Xibalba titles can register a Not-Fraud account through our website or desktop client. While signed in, users can make product purchases and browse user-created content. While specifically signed in to the desktop client (a lightweight and performant program built in the Antikythera engine), users can download free demos and owned products, launch installed titles, and participate in multiplayer games with other Not-Frauds.

Product purchases and various metrics (match history, playtime, rank, and so on) are tied to your Not-Fraud account. However, Xibalba titles will never include always-online DRM, meaning you will never be required to sign in to play singleplayer content (besides when you initially purchase or download a product). Multiplayer content will require an active sign-in, as a vector for enforcing fair-play guidelines (doling out punishments for griefing and hacking).

Anti-piracy measures always harm the end-user experience of paying customers in a vain attempt to stave off the inevitable, and as such, The No-Frauds Club will not implement any such measures. We understand and accept that LAN emulation will still allow pirates to play with one another, and hope that the experience they have playing our titles will eventually convince them to purchase the product to support further development.

Expansion packs


Developers at The No-Frauds Club plan to maintain support for their products for the foreseeable future. In addition to patching bugs and exploits, this would entail regular content updates that add a minimum of ten hours of singleplayer content, to say nothing of the sizable multiplayer content that would be included with each expansion pack. For these content updates, we would initially charge an upfront cost of 5.00 USD. When the next expansion pack is ready for deployment - or after an absolute maximum time period of six months, if we have not shipped a new expansion pack by then - the previous expansion pack would become free and automatically integrate with the installations of all players.

We at the No-Frauds Club respect the hardware of our customers, and as such, our launcher will never install content that you do not own without your express order to do so. In keeping with our belief in the concept of trialing products, any player that has purchased an expansion pack will be able to host a custom lobby for their friends or even complete newcomers to try out new multiplayer content. If one or all of a premium expansion pack's regencies are enabled in ranked play, the affected regencies will be free for all players to access, though this phenomenon will be rare to allow us to balance new regencies alongside old ones.

Expansion packs will always contain the following content:
  • 2 new regencies for all games, - to a presumed cap of 20 regencies
  • 2 new campaigns for Cosmonarchy, - 1 per new regency
  • 1 new hand-crafted opera for Dreamhold,
  • And 1 new campaign for the untitled FPS.

Expansion packs also have a strong likelihood of containing some or all of the following content:
  • New standalone singleplayer and co-op scenarios for Cosmonarchy,
  • New multiplayer maps for Cosmonarchy and the untitled FPS,
  • New arcade modes for all games,
  • Additional operas for Dreamhold,
  • And additional story content for the untitled FPS.

Please note! If an expansion pack is released before the release of a Xibalba game, it will naturally not include content for that unreleased title. The No-Frauds Club developers may also, at some very distant point in the future, consider a title's content library to be robust enough so as to no longer warrant further development. We will spend our time producing other content for other titles in such a case.

Microtransactions and other DLC


The No-Frauds Club will never, under any circumstances, offer microtransactions. Even cosmetic-only microtransactions erode consumer trust, reduce visual clarity, and put behind a paywall the player's ability to express their personality. You will not see microtransactions in any of our products.

Likewise, the No-Frauds Club has no interest in having more than 1 paid expansion pack at any given time. We know how off-putting it is to see a store page with loads of premium downloadable content, and we also do not believe that this model is necessary in the slightest for sustainable development cycles. As a result, we will never have more than a single expansion pack for sale alongside the retail game, and we will never charge for smaller updates that only include scenarios, maps, game modes, and similar content.

Other plans


In addition to the above, Pr0nogo - the director and founder of the No-Frauds Club - will make the studio's earnings public every year. The financial report with this data will also include a detailed look at how revenue was spent, including a breakdown of how much went to tournament prize pools, content contests, developer salaries, and first-party content development. Along with an internal commitment to spend our revenue wisely, this transparency will allow our customers to come to their own conclusions about how their purchasing decisions translated to the content they have received.

If it becomes clear that we do not require a significant spike in revenue to continue development over a year's time, the next expansion pack will be free. If we don't need the money, we won't take it. We are here to make games full-time, and if that is achievable without charging our customers for additional content, we will take that opportunity to release expansion packs free of charge.