I've decided to make Drunken Wrestlers 2 a paid game. I do not take this decision lightly. In fact, this is the hardest decision I've had to make in my entire life. However, I see no other way forward. Here are the three main factors that have contributed to this decision:

1. Drunken Wrestlers 2 has suffered the same fate as Spacewar

Recently, pirates started abusing Drunken Wrestlers 2 to emulate online features in pirated games, similar to how Spacewar is used:

https://youtu.be/Xg7_dD3-QTc
(Skip to 7:44 for the relevant part)

Drunken Wrestlers 2 is free and utilizes pretty much every online feature available on Steam, so it's perfect for online feature emulation in pirated Steam games. I would probably be unaware of this if the Steam Workshop wasn't being flooded with items intended for other games.
Hundreds of files are uploaded to the Drunken Wrestlers 2 workshop every day, and at this point, almost 80% of all content there consists of unrelated items, such as card decks for the game Pic-Me!

I've hidden more than 3000 of these items, but they keep coming, drowning the legitimate Drunken Wrestlers 2 mods. Take a look:

https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/browse/?appid=667530&requiredflags%5B%5D=incompatible

2. Drunken Wrestlers 2 has poor online servers because it's free

If you played this game in 2022, you'll remember how smooth the online servers felt compared to now. Today, disruptive lag spikes and ping issues are commonplace, and the competitive scene has almost dwindled. Many things in the world changed in 2022, including my financial situation. My savings were gone, and I was forced to downgrade the online servers to the most affordable ones I could find.

Drunken Wrestlers 2 was earning $0.023 per install, and there was nothing I could do to make it more profitable without turning it into a microtransaction-ridden hellscape completely. I really didn't want to make Drunken Wrestlers 2 paid, so I've spent two years making two other games in hopes of selling enough copies to fund good servers for Drunken Wrestlers 2. One flopped, but the other is a moderate success. However, it has operational costs as well, so things still don't add up to cover the cost of good servers for Drunken Wrestlers 2.

3. Free games are an easy target for bad actors

Free games, especially those with online multiplayer, are easy targets for those looking to ruin everyone's fun, be it by hacking the game or by spamming obscenities in chat. There is nothing stopping them from spoofing their ID and making a new Steam account after they get banned. Over the years, I've seen instances of people making hundreds of Steam accounts in an endless cat-and-mouse game. When a game is free, it's impossible to keep offenders banned without employing invasive and privacy-violating techniques.

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Making the game paid would solve all of these issues:

• Pirates will no longer be able to flood Steam Workshop.
  
• I would be able to afford good online servers.
  
• It would be much easier to deter bad actors.
  

Of course, there are also downsides to this decision. The main downside is that the game will become less accessible, which may lead to fewer people playing it, making it harder to find online matches. However, I've looked at other games that have transitioned from free to paid, and the player count drop-off is much less pronounced than I anticipated.

• The player count drop-off was actually unnoticeable in the majority of cases that I looked at.
  
• The fact that the game was downloaded more than 6 million times across all platforms should also help retain some player base.
  
• It is very likely that I will publish a free demo with playable online multiplayer (with limited features of course, to avoid issues 1 & 3).
  
• The game will remain free on Android.
  

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• The game will cost $3.99 in the United States, with fair regional pricing across the globe.
  
• If you already have the game in your Steam library, you will keep it (and all your items) even after it becomes paid.
  
• The change will take place in at least a week from now, possibly more (I'm aiming for February 15-17th).
  

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A Word About Lack of Updates

As mentioned previously, in 2022, I pivoted to making new games. Aside from the reasons mentioned above, this was also motivated by the fact that I was drowning in spaghetti code. Given that Drunken Wrestlers 2 is my first serious project and that I was learning as I went, it accumulated incredible amounts of technical debt over the 8 years I worked on it. Without throwing big parts of it away and starting from scratch, there was no longer any way to make progress. Starting from scratch would take another few years, and I cannot afford to invest that much time into a project without having some kind of passive income to sustain myself. The only reason I was able to develop Drunken Wrestlers 2 in the first place was because Drunken Wrestlers 1 was an infinite money glitch for a while.

If there is demand, making Drunken Wrestlers 2 paid will allow me to take the time to rebuild it from scratch using all the knowledge and experience I've gained during my 12 years of making games. Imagine a game like Drunken Wrestlers 2, but

• Without all the jank
  
• With cohesive UI and art direction
  
• More reliable netcode (it's possible to implement rollback netcode if physics engine is deterministic)
  
• More extensive modding support
  
• The ability to create movesets
  

- Oleg